‘Company’ is the perfect short story collection for spooky season

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the A BA Journals Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by Shannon Sanders, author of the Collected Works Company. It’s a short story collection. I’m so excited to talk about it with you today. Shannon, could you tell the listeners who you are and both your legal background and then your experience as a writer?

Shannon Sanders:

Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Lee. My name is Shannon Sanders and I am a local resident of the Washington DC area where I grew up. I am by day an attorney. I’m licensed in Maryland and I work for a financial regulator. And then I am also, I guess sort of by night, but also by other times as well a fiction writer. This is my debut, my literary debut, and it is a collection of 13 linked short stories. It came out in October, 2023, so it’s my first book. It’s short stories, but they read sort of like a novel and I am really excited about it and proud and happy to be able to connect with readers.

Lee Rawles:

Well, as I told you before we started recording, I picked up this book of short stories and I said, great, these can be little snacks. I will read this over the course of several days, just one at a time. And I started and I just couldn’t stop. They are absolutely short stories, but like you said, they’re interconnected and they almost all have to do with a family. The Collins family, and this is a complex family, like all families are complex and I love that in the various stories you are seeing different people’s perspectives on history. It really made me think of witnesses. These people may have gone through the same events that impacted their family, but everyone did it from a different perspective. And with the style of writing you did, facts are being kind of sprinkled ins that illuminate someone else’s story. And I just want to ask you about the process of doing that and doing these reveals and getting into the heads of these various people.

Shannon Sanders:

Oh yeah, that’s a really interesting insight to mention the way that they are suggestive of witnesses. That’s one of the things that I find really interesting and really inspiring in fiction is the subjectiveness of truth. I think that you have some disciplines math and science where truth is really clear or it can be really clear. And then you’ve got these other areas of life, human psychology and family relationships where there isn’t any particular truth that you can pinpoint because truth is so subjective. So I was really inspired by the idea of writing about the same events, the same sequences of events and the same kind of family lore, but exploring it from different points of view. I come from a family that is sort of multi-generational in the way that we’re set up. I’ve got a wonderful grandmother who’s sort of the matriarch who lives in the area and then my mother and her sister and I’ve got cousins and we always have different takes on the same things going on in the world around us. And it’s really interesting to me to get to explore that. And so I love short stories as a form as well, and I thought this was a really fun way to have chances to bite at the Apple multiple times. I wanted to, in some cases even explore the same party from the points of view of different guests who were there. And I found that it was really rewarding and fun and it gave me a lot of momentum in the writing to come at it that way.

Lee Rawles:

I just came back from a wonderful family wedding, but it was another reminder of when you get all the generations together, it can be even depending on when you were born, what you were around for. Were you 13 when this big family event happened or were you a baby or were you in your thirties? So it really struck home with me and I very much enjoyed it. I was wondering when it comes to the short story form, you are the first person that we’ve had on the show who has really written in this form or that we’re talking about the writing in this form. And did the writing that you have had to do as a lawyer help you when it comes to short story format? I mean, I’m thinking about how when someone is composing a brief, instead of having a limitless number of pages, you have to get across information succinctly and in a limited number of words, do you think that there is any sort of parallel there?

Shannon Sanders:

Oh yeah, absolutely. And it’s interesting because I’ve done a number of podcasts where usually the fact that I have a day job in law, that’s not one of the first things that I’m usually asked about. Usually people want to know about the fiction writing and then they’re like, oh, I see also that you’re a lawyer. That’s interesting. How does that work? So it’s really interesting to be thinking about this from the opposite standpoint and to think about how my legal journey has sort of shaped the way that I approach writing fiction. I definitely think that having training as a legal writer is a really big advantage when it comes to crafting fiction. They’re very separate things too. And of course writing a short story is an art form and in many cases writing a legal brief is a lot more technical. But what you just mentioned is very top of mind for me that you have to be succinct, you have to be clear.

You have to make sure that even in a case where there is fact that might be ambiguous or fact patterns that one could spin in different ways that you are being persuasive as is your duty in writing a legal brief or any piece of legal writing. And I think that the same is true with a short story. You have to kind of reach around in all directions and acknowledge the fact pattern from every side, but then also take the perspective that you have chosen for the story and make sure that you are doing a really good job of giving the reader an experience that is clear, if at least that’s your goal. Because I know that there are short stories where part of the fun is that they’re not so clear, but my style as a short story writer I think is very much about clarity of expression and making sure that if I’ve got an idea that I’m trying to communicate to the reader that I give them the words that are going to get them as close as possible to what I am seeing while still leaving open room for their interpretation.

And I think that the years of writing in law school and then in my career after that definitely have been really helpful. And I also like to tell people that even though of course having a completely different professional career, having a day job that is not necessarily one that allows me a lot of free time to do things like write fiction, even having those things be true, I think that anything you can do to kind of strengthen the muscles and the connection between your brain and your fingertips when it comes to writing words, I think that that’s always helpful. So all of the reading that I had to do in law school, all of the writing that I had to do in law school, all of the reading and writing that I’ve had to do since, I just think that those have been really helpful in helping me get my brain talking to my fingers, I guess.

Lee Rawles:

I love that. I have noticed in my own writing that because I, in my professional life write for lawyers, you have to be so very exact, particularly as I’m dealing with very fact-based things, you need to be so precise. But I can see how that might actually be, as you said, extremely helpful when it comes to fiction that you have an amorphous thing that happens, emotion of the character’s feeling event that happened and you have to narrow in and be so precise. I love that you say that that’s a muscle that needs to be developed. And let’s talk about, I mean, you have a day job, family, et cetera. What is your writing practice or does it depend from day to day, how do you set aside time for the writing?

Shannon Sanders:

Oh, this is always the big question. It does. It varies from day to day and it also varies from month to month and year to year and kind of the era that I’m in. It varies a lot based on what’s going on in my life. When I was in law school, and I guess I should mention, I went to Georgetown and I was in DC around a lot of other law students, a lot of other young lawyers and just kind of in the legal community and very busy, didn’t have a lot of time for fun things, didn’t have a lot of time to do much other than try to get through school and network. I wasn’t doing very much reading or writing that was fun at all. And then later as I started to settle into a career, I had in some ways more time, but mostly less energy I would say.

I was just really focused on what was going on in my professional life. And then there was this period when I was settled into my job and I didn’t have kids yet and I had enough mental energy and enough time available that I was able to finally kind of sink my teeth into something new. And so I just started to take writing classes and at that time I could spend as much of my free time as I wanted to really working on short stories. And so I did that for a few years and it was a lot of fun and a lot of the short stories ended up in this book. And then I had kids, and so I have now a 6-year-old and then also 3-year-old twins. And I just absolutely don’t have anywhere near the kind of time that I want for really anything other than taking care of them, making sure that my work life is in balance.

And so this is kind of a roundabout way to answer your question, which is to say that if in a given week I can stay awake long enough to write 500 or maybe a thousand words at night after they go to bed, that is a great week. If I can do that even a few times with this book in particular company, most of it was written before I had the twins. So I had one toddler and I wrote most of it under conditions that were a lot easier than the ones that I’m dealing with now. But now what I try to do is I try to seize those nighttimes. I try to occasionally if I can get away for a couple of hours on a weekend to get some momentum made in something new that I’m working on, that is really great. But then I also try to really embrace if there are fallow periods in my regular life, I guess if the kids are kind of humming along at school and my day job is going pretty well, things are stable and I can take that time to really chip away at something and make some big strides in a new writing project, I will always try to do that because I know that there will come days when I have much less time, much less energy, and I can not do very much more than just either revise what I’ve already written or perhaps try to eek out a couple of sentences here and there.

So my writing practice is not a very routinized one right now. It’s kind of catch as catch can is the short answer.

Lee Rawles:

Makes a lot of sense. Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be speaking with Shannon Sanders about her book company. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Shannon Sanders, author of the book company. So we’ve talked about writing process, we’ve talked about short story form. Let’s talk about the Collins family because they are the people who inhabit this book. Almost all the stories relate to the Collins family, and I would just like to give listeners a little peek into who they are, starting with the matriarch and patriarch.

Shannon Sanders:

Sure. So this cast of characters, it starts with the matriarch and patriarch like you said, and they are not actually seen directly in any of the stories, but they’re referenced often. That’s not true actually. There is a story where the grandmother plays a pretty big role.

Lee Rawles:

I loved that moment.

Shannon Sanders:

Their names are Opal and Centennial Collins and they’re entrepreneurs who ran a jazz club in Atlantic City in the segregated 1960s and seventies. They have four daughters, Cassandra, Lela, Felice, and Suzette. And those four daughters, as of the time of most of the stories have, they’re sort of in middle age and then they have children who are all coming of age or they’re young adults. And so Cassandra has a son and daughter. Lela has two sons and two daughters. Suzette has two daughters, and then Faye lives in the family home in Atlantic City where all of the kids were raised.

Lee Rawles:

Part of the fun of reading the stories one after the other is it’s not always clear, wait, is this one of the short stories that relates back to the family and then discovering, oh wait, yes, absolutely. And you included a family tree at the front of this book. Thank you so much. I dogeared the page and I referred back to it and I found it. So moving, taking a look at the generations of this family Opal and her husband had come up from the south and it’s mostly taking place in the DMV when I know that authors get asked this all the time, and you don’t steal people from real life and put them in the book, but in here did feel real to me, particularly if they got a viewpoint of their own. I was like, oh yes, I have known these people. I get who this is. When you are building these personas for these family members, are you just thieving from everywhere? Are you making it all up in your head the question you always get asked?

Shannon Sanders:

Yeah, of course. I think the answer will vary from writer to writer, but for all of us it’s going to have to be a combination of both. We can invent to some degree and we all do that, but we also are very inspired by people around us and you find the richness in a character and the reality by drawing from things that you have experienced and from people that you know very well. And so in this book, there are, I would say three characters who are pretty closely pattern matched to real people in my life. There is one character who’s based pretty solidly on my mom, one who is based pretty closely on my dad and then one who’s based pretty closely on my husband. They all occur in different stories. They’re not those people in actuality, but they do. If I wanted to try to figure out what might this character say, I would try to hear it in the voice of one of those people in my life.

But then the rest is invention for sure. And I think that writers, one thing that makes us fun to be around but also that people find scary to be around is that we’re very committed and we are always trying to, we really want to know what people are thinking and we want to try to gather data about what the people around us are all about. And so on the subway, any conversation that we overhear is going to help feed the building of a character that we might want to write later. Same thing with reading. I think a lot of writers are extremely voracious readers for the most part. And the more you can do to kind of probe what people are about, what makes them tick and how their thought processes work, the more success I think you’ll have at building a character who feels real to a reader of your own. And yeah, it’s always a funny thing. I think that every writer has the experience of having at least one person in their life sort of accuse them like you wrote about me, what is this in my life? That’s my mom. Even though there actually is a character in the book who’s based on my mom, and she knows that she still thinks that anyone in the book who has a mom, that mom is her,

Lee Rawles:

Or even worse, people may assume that it’s her even when it wasn’t supposed to be. Exactly.

Shannon Sanders:

Yeah. Yes, exactly. But that’s the major joy of fiction is that you are not, if I wanted to write about my mom, I could write a memoir, but it’s so much fun to invent and to put together composites and try to take on the challenge of making something feel real that completely invented instead.

Lee Rawles:

So this book first came out last October, and listeners, you will be hearing this in October of 2024. It does feel really appropriate because the characters in this book, the Collins Family, in reading it, I was like, these are people who are haunted sometimes, literally there is a strain of spookiness through many of these stories. And I ended up wanting to hear a lot about your take on the supernatural and the way supernatural beliefs manifest themselves in families with the believers, the non-believers. I just would love to get into this since it is again, spooky season.

Shannon Sanders:

Oh yeah. I was so thrilled that the book came out in October, part of which was strategic on the part of the publisher because of the fact that there are some slipstream elements in the book. But I am a big spooky person while not necessarily a believer in most supernatural things, I definitely enjoy being thrilled by that kind of stuff. I love horror movies. I was big into the X-Files growing up, and I really like being able to, I think we’re in a moment in literature where there are not such stringent rules about what you can and can’t put into a story. So even though most of the stories in this book are very literal and they kind of imitate real life in most ways, there are a couple of stories where there is a supernatural element that just kind of sneaks up on you. And I was so ecstatic that nobody told me that I couldn’t do that.

Lee Rawles:

A book doesn’t have to be entirely a genre, magical realism or something of that nature.

Shannon Sanders:

Exactly. And there are many writers who are doing that brilliantly, pretty consistently across everything that they write. So Carmen Maria Machado, for example, she writes magical realism really beautifully. And I knew that I wasn’t going to imitate that because most of what I wanted to plumb in the book had to do with real interpersonal relationships. But I do love ghosts. I think that ghosts play a really big role in most multi-generational families. You hear people telling stories to their grandchildren and they might slip into the present tense when talking about someone who’s been gone for a long time because part of what this book deals with, and part of what’s true in families in general is that the legacies of ancestors play out again and again. We do things that are haunted by our parents, their expectations, the examples that they’ve set for us or by wisdom that they have passed down from people that we never even maybe got a chance to meet.

And so there is a story in the book that it’s actually the title story company and it deals very much with ghosts. I liked to just sort of nod at the idea that there’s not a clear delineation between what’s real quote and what isn’t, because if it’s real to the person experiencing it, then it’s real, and the impact it has is real. And yeah, I really loved that writing this book. Let me play with that as much as I wanted to. And I know we’ll probably talk about my next efforts at some point, but I went into even more. I kind of dove into that even more in my next work. And yeah, I just love what’s possible with fiction and that you can have slipstream stories interspersed with ones that are just completely conventional real life stories.

Lee Rawles:

And in addition to the ghosts, I don’t want to say too much about it because the reveal was very chilling to me, and I don’t want to rob that from any listeners. There is a witch in this book and it’s terrifying.

Shannon Sanders:

Spoiler alert.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, spoiler alert. But I’m also easily scared, so other listeners may do just fine with that.

Shannon Sanders:

No, that’s exciting to hear. I’m always glad when people, I wrote that story right around the Halloween season. The one I think that you’re talking about is called Moat, and I wrote it in October as the weather started getting cold, and I was just kind of thinking about how much I love being scared and how much I love when that feeling kind of creeps up gradually, and it’s just sort of like a mood that develops, and I wanted to see if I could make that happen. Yeah.

Lee Rawles:

And to me it absolutely did. It was the slow dawning rather than the immediate jump scare, something of that nature.

Shannon Sanders:

Thank you.

Lee Rawles:

So another theme I felt that the short stories had were about the way that we build our families characters throughout this book, there are biological parental relationships, there are issues with infertility, there are fostering adoption. This isn’t necessarily the strong focus of a lot of these stories, but it’s happening in the background. And I thought it was an interesting theme throughout the book. And again, the title company made me think of that as people are trying to construct their families and figure out who even through marriage we’re going to align ourselves with. And would love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. Not necessarily whether you’re drawing that from your own experience, but it was a theme that really struck me in company this ways that we build our family and the longing for family.

Shannon Sanders:

Yeah, this has always been something that’s been a real interest to me. So early in my career, actually, I guess I was still in law school at the time, but I did a couple of externships. One was at the Children’s Law Center in DC and I got to work with attorneys who were doing some guardian ad litem work, which was really interesting and also in many ways very emotional and challenging. And then I also did some interning at the family court near Georgetown, and I just learned and saw so much about all of those different issues and about how even though when you’re a kid growing up, your friends, they have families. The families might not all look the same, but the feeling of being part of a family is simple in many ways. You go someplace and it’s a home, the people there love each other and take care of each other.

But then in seeing that guardian ad litem work, and then also in being in the family court system, just looking around to see what sorts of issues were brought in and what kinds of paperwork I had to help with. So many things actually go into maintaining the stability of a family and into figuring out what is going to happen in the future of a family. I learned also, of course in law school as we all did very much about marriage, the origins of marriage itself and about property transfer and how marriage impacts it and vice versa. And I’ve always been really interested in how there are really these two different sides to family life. One being that part which is very simple, and then the other part being that which is very technical and very sort of goals oriented and setting all of that aside.

Also, when I started to write most of these stories, I was in the process of getting married, and then we had our first child, and I was thinking a lot about just how much life changes when you have a child and about all of the decisions that go into whether even to do that. So the story we already talked about a little bit moat was written at a time when I had a son who he was a toddler. Everything about my life was different from a couple of years earlier. And I came at that story from the standpoint of what if I had decided not to have a child and was in otherwise a very similar situation, but had this huge different thing going on, and we didn’t deal with infertility, but I of course know people who have, I know a lot of the struggles that people in my peer group have dealt with, and so I wanted to explore that as well. There are so many things that go into the building of a family, and it’s never as straightforward as what the family portrait looks like. And that’s kind of the idea behind the book itself as well is that you can have this group of people who have these very lovely bonds and they look lovely together and maybe the portrait comes out great, but what it takes to get to that point and also what it takes to maintain it is often very difficult.

Lee Rawles:

There is another story in this collection told from the point of view of a woman who I think that she is working for a law firm, but she is simultaneously preparing for a home visit because she and her husband are in the process of adoption and having to battle it out with the HOA because the building was going to repair the elevators and it’s all gone wrong. And just the amount of anxiety and tension you’re able to build in these very kind of bureaucratic things and showing this is how an actual human being is trying to deal with it. And a little bit of a spoiler alert, one thing she does to try and deal with it is make an impulse purchase of some home goods just to make the apartment look extra nice. And yeah, I am sorry to the listeners who have not yet read these, I am encouraging people to read them as the interviewer. I would just love to dive into each of these little vignettes with Shannon, but I know that that would not necessarily be doing a service to you, but it really felt real where you’re trying to make this momentous life change and so much bureaucracy is just getting in the way.

Shannon Sanders:

Yeah. Well, I can tell you what is real from that story. When my son, my first son was nine months old, we lived in a condo. We were on the fifth floor and we had to replace the elevator in the building. And I was actually on the board at that condo and had to be part of the decision making about when to do it and how to do it and all that stuff. And we ended up having the elevator out of service for several months while we had a nine month old. And I guess by the end of it, he was like a year old or something like that. But we had his stroller, we had his bag, we had his clothes, we had him, we had to lug all these things up and down the stairs for months. And I just kept thinking about how I wanted to write a story that was about what if I were in a situation even worse than this one where I had totally no control whatsoever over how the outcome shaped up.

And I am not sure exactly, I can’t remember at this point what pushed me to think about this social worst worker aspect of it, but I think it’s because I was still in that mindset of thinking about everything that goes into deciding, especially as a woman, whether or not to have children and all of these kind of unseen processes that women go through in trying to get ready for that or in trying to make it happen. And most of those stories, I know that there are a lot of articles and features written about the things that women go through and trying to build their families and decide how they’re going to do that, but I’m not sure that they ever necessarily get to the really human aspect of it at the level of, oh my gosh, how am I going to balance all of these things in my hands?

I walk up to the top floor of this building and make it look like I’m doing it effortlessly or gracefully. And I was really interested in that because I do think that often women are expected to juggle a lot of things and not just to do it successfully, but also to spare other people of the burden of having to think about how hard it is. And I really wanted to get that story out and I wanted it to be very concrete and for the details to be really relatable. So in the story, there are several sequences of Liv, the main character, having to just kind of grapple with how to get up and down the stairs, which is something that I was doing at the time with an infant and then a toddler, and it was really not easy, and I had to do it without cursing and stuff out loud all the time. Yeah.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll still be with Shannon Sanders, author of company. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. So Shannon, we’ve been talking about company, these short stories. Have you thought about doing a longer form writing project where these all were very, these felt very connected, very cohesive as a collection, but where you are writing more of a novel form.

Shannon Sanders:

And I think that this is probably a common experience for every short story writer as well. Throughout the process, I did get to workshop a lot of these stories and have people read them as the book was taking shape. And people always want to know, are you working on a novel? When are you going to write a novel? And there’s a little bit of stubbornness that comes up because I really love short stories and I really want them to always get their moment in the sun too. I want people to give them a chance. And I think that often people think that they are not going to like short stories, they are not as immersive, but I love novels as well, and I always knew that I wanted to try to write a novel once I got through this book. And so in fact, yes, I do have a novel in progress.

I hopefully will be able to have more information about what will become of it at some point in the near future. But I can say that the novel is written, it actually follows Aubrey one of the characters in the short story collection company, and it follows her through an experience of inheriting a part interest in a piece of family property. And so this is where a little bit of my legal training kind of also peaks out because there is so much that, again, same thing as with building a family. So much goes into disposing of property through legal channels, and Aubrey is kind of in company in the short story collection. She’s a little bit of just a mess. She’s not really doesn’t have it together, but she’s young in the novel that I have just finished writing. She is older and she inherits this property but doesn’t really know how to handle it. And the family has worked very hard through the generations to keep the interests together and to not have pieces of it chipped off through different legal shenanigans like adverse possession.

Lee Rawles:

Well, this is fascinating to me, especially as a black family in America, we see case after case of the families attempting to hand down property in ways to keep it together. And then like you said, the little legal ways that their rights can be chipped away or someone thinks that they’ve filed whatever paperwork they need to, and someone comes in and says, ah, so I love that you’re really giving that a closer treatment.

Shannon Sanders:

Oh, yeah, 100%. That is, it’s something that is really, of course, it’s really tragic when that happens, especially when there is any, if there’s institutional racism or even just implied racism involved. And in my own family, which kind of inspired this novel, my grandmother and her sisters, all of them still living in their nineties, they have a piece of family property where many of those things were threatened to happen, I guess I should say. And they have succeeded in holding onto it for over a century as a family. And so in Tennessee, and that’s a real inspiration to me. And it was also just very much a, it’s really eyeopening what is possible through legal channels, what the law will allow and what it prohibits, but what it allows, whether it’s tacitly or on purpose or both, I guess. And so yeah, I spent several years working on that. Like I mentioned before. Now with the kids and stuff, it’s a lot harder to immerse myself in a writing process or a regular one at least. And so it took quite a lot longer than I thought it would take to finish it, but I’m excited about it and I hope that I will find a home for it at some point soon.

Lee Rawles:

Now, when you talk to other lawyers about your writing, and that could be people who you meet in your firm or anywhere, I find as legal journalists, a lot of lawyers will immediately start saying, oh, actually I have an idea. I’ve been, some are even saying, well, I’m on my third manuscript. I really love to write. How do you do it, et cetera. If you had just some advice to give to any lawyers in the audience who say things like that, what would that be?

Shannon Sanders:

Oh, yeah. Well, okay. And so I work for a financial regulator, and so I have been really lucky in that everybody there has been really supportive of the fact that I have this weird side gig going on. They read it for their book club, and they’ve all been really kind about following what’s going on with the book and stuff. And when people say something like that, to me, it really falls into two categories. There so many people who say, I’ve got an idea for a book. I’ve always thought I could be a writer, and I’ve always thought about writing this book. I think that that’s wonderful. I think that having an idea is fun and it’s really makes life interesting when people say, I’ve started writing or I am writing it and I’ve been working on it for a little while and I’m excited about it.

That is kind of a different thing that is actual movement. And my advice for anybody who is interested in writing would be to get from the first group into the second group, so they call it, but in chair, basically put your butt in the chair, and if you have an idea, start writing it. And it’s weird. It feels really weird to just be sitting alone in a room with nobody there. Nobody asks you to write this thing, so you’re just doing it because you want to. Nobody’s waiting to see it. And you have to just kind of get past the weirdness and the imposter syndrome of that and try really hard to get something onto paper because you will feel great when you get to go back and see that you have written it.

Lee Rawles:

And the submission system is a little different if you’re trying to shop a novel versus short stories when someone has a short story that they want to shop to various literary magazines or any other outlet. Any advice for that.

Shannon Sanders:

Very similar advice, which is get over fear that you have about showing your work and start sending out things. So you’re right about that. Short story submissions are very much about try to keep your finger on the pulse of what magazines and journals exist. Find the ones that you think speak to your style or your interests and start sending your work out with short stories. You can do that very much on your own. You don’t need to have an agent or any sort of third party blessing you to do it, although it’s great if you can get people to read your work and help you with anything that you need to work on first. But yeah, find the appropriate homes for your work and start taking chances. Send things out. When it comes to a novel, obviously it’s a little bit different because in many cases, it’s easier to do things when you do have an agent, and that takes a whole other set of things to do. But I do think that the first step of just getting a piece into great shape and sending it to a journal that you respect, and then also being okay with rejection, getting comfortable with it, because that is a huge part of the process for any writer. I think that that’s the way to go, is to try to just push yourself to take that first step, send something out.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Shannon, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If people want to hear more from you, is there a website or social media account that we can direct them to?

Shannon Sanders:

Yes, I would love to connect with anybody who wants to get in touch. You can find me at my website, Shannon Sanders rights.com s on Twitter. I am Sanders writes, S-H-A-N-D-E-R-S-W-R-I-T-E-S. And then on Instagram, I’m not there as much. I post mostly pictures of things that I’m knitting, but sometimes book stuff as well. My handle is I exaggerate.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you again to Shannon for joining us and happy Halloween. To all the listeners, thank you for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you have a suggestion for a book you’d like us to read and discuss with their author, you can always reach us at books at ABA Journal dot com. And don’t forget to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast listening service.