Pen Pals

Kelton checks in from a van (long story) after a productive weekend spent away in a luxurious hotel thanks to the generous owner. Krisserin shares what she’s changing in her querying. Then Kelton sits down with AJ Ayers, CFP and CEO and co-founder of Brooklyn FI, author of the Substack Money Changes Everything, and author of the upcoming Creative Money from Penguin Random House. AJ walks us throug...

Krisserin and Kelton start with the weekly check-in: 775 of 1,500 words, thirty pages of Wandering Stars, and the logline assignment neither of them could quite pin down. Krisserin reads her pitch for Parasocial, Kelton reads the long and short versions of The Second Wind, and they talk about why shrinking your book to a few sentences is so hard (and how Leigh Stein’s plot class helps). Then Kimbe...

Kelton shows up with new baby bangs and a question she can't shake: who do you want to be on a book cover forever? From there the hosts check in on the week. Kelton spent a six-hour Saturday editing and crossed 90,000 words on her "chunky rom-com." Krisserin squeezed out 590 words and got pulled into Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and Jeffrey Ostler's The Lakotas and the B...

Want in on our invite-only writers accountability group? Fill out the interest form here: https://forms.gle/QSdWNYc9cptJ3ZVBA Back in the same room after last week’s voice notes, Kelton is fighting off the sickness she warned us about and admits she didn’t touch her edits. Instead, she spent the week making a mock cover for her rom-com out of a stack of old magazines. Krisserin, meanwhile, queried...

Want in on our invite-only writers accountability group? Fill out the interest form here: https://forms.gle/QSdWNYc9cptJ3ZVBA Back in the same room after last week’s voice notes, Kelton is fighting off the sickness she warned us about and admits she didn’t touch her edits. Instead, she spent the week making a mock cover for her rom-com out of a stack of old magazines. Krisserin, meanwhile, queried...

Krisserin and Kelton are both on the road for work this week, which means no sitting down to record together. So they did the next best thing: voice notes stitched together into one very honest week. Kelton races a highway vehicle fire to make her flight to Texas, takes refuge from the HVAC in a Dallas hotel that feels like a lunar space station, and delivers a heartfelt plea for one interesting w...

Krisserin and Kelton are both trying to figure out how to write when the writing routine stops working. Kelton is deep in structural edits and considering sending Krisserin the first four chapters of her rom-com for a gut check, while Krisserin abandons the fantasy of a perfect morning writing practice and manages to get 1,200 words down wherever she can. They talk about writing dialogue, learning...

Krisserin and Kelton check in on a week that went sideways for one of them and sideways-but-productive for the other. Kelton's spaghetti draft pushes her timeline out a month, while Krisserin logs 4,000 words and a new craft essay on LeAnne Howe's Savage Conversations for her IAIA MFA. Then they're joined by Becca Freeman, author of The Christmas Orphans Club, the voice behind the B...

Kelton crossed 78,000 words this week and has officially retired the word-count goal in favor of structural editing, while Krisserin wrapped a craft essay for her IAIA mentor and is bracing for a stack of looming MFA deadlines. Both hosts admit the season is already busy — school fundraiser season, novel revisions, and the general chaos of trying to write while parenting — but they're feeling...

Krisserin and Kelton are back for Season 3 and this summer, one of them actually wrote a book. Kelton hit 66,000 words on her rom-com after finally abandoning her identity as a "pantser" and writing from a full outline for the first time. Krisserin did not write a novel. She'll tell you exactly why. Instead, Krisserin spent six of eight summer weeks away from her desk — an MFA resid...

Season two is officially in the books 🎉 This week, we’re doing something a little different: opening up the listener survey and sharing what surprised us, what made us laugh, what made us rethink things, and what we’re taking into season three. We get into: The biggest takeaways from your survey responses Who’s actually listening (writers… and surprisingly, a lot of non-writers) The topics you wa...

Kelton brings on one of her favorite outdoor writers: Heather Hansman, award-winning journalist, contributing editor at Outside Magazine, and author of Downriver and Powder Days. Heather's newest book, Fierce Country, uncovers the stories of three women — Grand Canyon guide Georgie White, environmental philosopher Dolores LaChapelle, and wilderness guide Anne LaBastille — who shaped how we th...

📋 WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU! Pen Pals has a listener survey and we need your feedback to make the show even better. Fill it out at: https://form.typeform.com/to/kIosWT3L — it takes just a few minutes and means the world to us. In this late-season check-in, Krisserin and Kelton answer a listener letter from Paige, a new mom asking whether to return to her pandemic-era novel or start one of her shin...

Krisserin and Kelton are running on fumes — sleep-deprived, burned out, and staring down a summer deadline that feels impossible. Enter Amanda Fletcher: writer, breathwork practitioner, PEN Center USA Emerging Voices fellow, and one of the most magnetic people in the Los Angeles literary community. Amanda shares her winding path from born storyteller to mathlete to kinesiology major, and the losse...

Krisserin checks in from a Kansas City hotel room fresh off an unexpected ER visit in St. Louis — chest pains, a CT scan, and a lot of unanswered questions — while Kelton battles a household plague of sickness, broken blow-dryers, and postpartum burnout. The two trade brutally honest book reviews: Krisserin DNFs the buzzy bestseller Yesteryear (great concept, rough execution), while Kelton grinds...

This week on Pen Pals, Krisserin and Kelton sit down with debut novelist Alli Hoff Kosik to discuss her buzzy new novel, Too Blessed to Stress — a sharp, funny, and unexpectedly tender story about Christian influencers, megachurch culture, and the complicated women behind perfectly curated feeds. Alli shares how a pandemic-era fascination with influencer culture inspired the book, why she wanted t...

Krisserin and Kelton are running on fumes—and they're honest about it. Both hosts arrive at this week's accountability check-in feeling ragged: Krisserin is limping toward summer with a fried brain and a work trip on the horizon; Kelton is two years postpartum, pausing her newsletter for the month, and trying to remember what living feels like. Their respective goal updates are modest an...

Krisserin and Kelton sit down with writer Rachael Maddux (Life Expectancy: A Memoir, The Void, Third Person) to talk about what happens when a book you’ve spent 14 years writing never sells through traditional channels — and how you decide to make it exist anyway. Rachael walks us through her journey from first draft to cold querying agents to three years on submission to ultimately self-publishin...

Krisserin and Kelton barely make it to record — 15 minutes late despite trying to be 30 minutes early — and that kind of week sets the tone. Kelton's survived two weeks of Colorado spring break without daycare, while Krisserin's mom is in town and the two have been watching movies and running around together. A conversation about Hamnet opens up a question that runs through the whole epi...

Kelton is on a record-breaking week — 5,563 words across three chapters — after ditching Scrivener for the freedom of a Google Doc. Krisserin finished two short stories and sent them to beta readers, though she's staying up until 1:30 AM to do it (thanks, Juliet Marillier). Then they're joined by a very special guest: Ramona Ausubel, Krisserin's former PEN Center USA Emerging Voices...

Spring break writing wins, a faux lip ring verdict, and the announcement of a big summer challenge: both hosts commit to finishing their first drafts by Labor Day. Krisserin wrote three times this week and Kelton locked her gothic novel's timeline and finally wrote the prologue she didn't know she needed. They also get into Kazuo Ishiguro's “Never Let Me Go” (craft: yes, ending: no)...

Krisserin attended Rachel Hochhauser's birthday book signing in Studio City and wrote 3,300 words on her middle grade love story. Kelton got a rejection with feedback from her dream agent — a thoughtful no that somehow made everything clearer, even if the proposal still needs a full rework. Both hosts are sitting with that particular in-between feeling: not stuck exactly, just parked on the s...

Kelton's launching the Rewilding Spring Almanac and kicking off the first night of the murmuration, while Krisserin just landed back from Ohio—sick kid and 90-degree weather whiplash. Both hosts hit the reset button on goals this week: Kelton powered through a low mental health stretch by focusing on necessary work, and Krisserin squeezed in 400 words of writing between travel chaos. This wee...

Krisserin opens with a rollercoaster week: a 5 AM email from her agent pushing book submission to late spring, followed by the joyful news that she's been accepted to IAIA's MFA program in New Mexico. Kelton channeled a burst of creative energy into writing her novel's climax in a single marathon session and is preparing to launch the Spring Almanac of her Rewilding course. The conv...

Krisserin and Kelton finally answer the question listeners keep asking: who ARE these people? This week it's just the two of them — no guest, just origin stories, childhood chaos, and big three energy. From Krisserin's desert horses and Newport Beach culture shock to Kelton's Gettysburg ghost childhood and lunch money con, they dig into how they grew up, how they became writers, and...