In this episode of The Jane Healey Happy Hour, Jane Healey talks with USA Today bestselling author Meg Shaffer about The Book Witch, a love letter to reading built around witches who can step inside books, repair damaged stories, and track down fictional characters who escape their pages. Shaffer shares how Alice in Wonderland, Nancy Drew, Pride and Prejudice, and other classics found their way into the novel, as well as the fascinating history she uncovered behind the original Nancy Drew books. She also talks about creating the rules of book magic, writing a complicated twist-filled story, and why learning to delete and rewrite remains some of the best advice she has received.

In this episode of The Jane Healey Happy Hour, Jane Healey talks with author Lori Gold about Kiss, Marry, Kill, a book club novel about three best friends who wake up in an alternate universe where the choices they made during a party game have become reality. Gold discusses how the pandemic helped shape the novel’s questions about choice, regret, and whether the grass really is greener, along with the research she did into quantum mechanics and multiverse theory to ground the speculative premise. She also shares her approach to developing characters, plotting a complicated three-POV story, and treating publishing as both a creative pursuit and a business.

In this episode of The Jane Healey Happy Hour, Jane Healey talks with #1 New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Lim about Fishbone Cinderella, her adult debut inspired by her grandmother’s experiences in wartime China and postwar Hong Kong. Lim shares how a Chinese Cinderella tale—with magical fish bones instead of a fairy godmother—helped shape this mother-daughter story and its elements of magical realism. She also discusses the surprising history of soy milk in occupied Hong Kong, weaving family history into fiction, and why this deeply personal novel took more than a decade to write.