Get Booked – Hotel 21

Hello, I'm Hazel with Fierce's Get Booked for Women's and Men's radio station. This week on the show, we are going to be discussing Hotel 21 by the author Senta Rich. Senta Rich began her career as an advertising copywriter. During this time, she also wrote radio plays and articles for magazines, and as soon as she could, she left advertising and moved into the world of film and TV. She currently writes for TV shows in Ireland and the UK, including drama and animation. Her work has been featured on RTE, BBC, CBeebies, Amazon Prime, and her international and European networks. She also has a feature film in development, and Hotel 21 is her first novel. Now, Hotel 21. Noel is a model employee, or so she would have you think. The trouble is, is that she can't help taking a little souvenir as she cleans the hotels where she works. Nothing of value, just tokens of happy, normal lives. A lipstick, a hair clip, some tweezers, anything. And by the time the guest has noticed, she's long gone. As she starts at her 21st hotel, she's determined to beat her record of 1 month in a 5-star hotel before suspicion falls on her. But when she meets her new colleagues, her plans are complicated. These women aren't just hands pushing carts down lonely hotel corridors. They are women with lives full of happiness and worry, pain and joy. The kind of lives Noël has never known how to live. They make her wonder what it might be like to have real friends, people to stick around for. Will the women at Hotel 21 give her the courage to claim the life she deserves? We're going to be chatting away to Santha very shortly, and at the end of the interview, Santha has very kindly read an extract from her book for you to have a little bit of a listen to. Exciting! Next week on the show, we are going to be chatting to Deborah Stone. It's her second time on Get Booked Here, and her latest book is Semi-Detached: Can You Trust Your Neighbors? Terry and Fiona are glamorous, successful, and madly in love. They move into the semi-detached house next door to Amanda and Bill, who are locked in a dull, depressing marriage. Despite having little in common, they befriend each other, and life appears to improve for both couples. But all is not what it seems, and their increasingly interconnected lives are destined for tragedy. Somebody Touched is the latest thrilling psychological drama from the bestselling author of What's Left Unsaid and Me and My Shadow. Uh, one of those domestic noirs that just kind of hook you in right from the beginning. I thoroughly enjoyed it, so I'm super excited to be chatting to Deborah Stone next week. But this is what we do here at Get Booked. We talk to authors, we chat about anything and everything books related, all the joy, enlightenment and escape that good books can provide. So just sit back and let us entertain you with a different guest each week, sharing who they are, what they do, and what inspires them. You can come and join us, get involved, and if you want to catch up on previous shows, you can at womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked and on our SoundCloud. Right now, time on the show to have a chat with today's author, Senta Rich, about her debut novel, Hotel 21. This is a sympathetically written, intriguing and relatable story of belonging, coping mechanisms, psychodynamics, and how wonderful and earth-shattering life can be, often simultaneously. Noel, the main character, is a survivor. She does what she needs to to get by in life without having to rely on anyone because that is all she knows. Sometimes that involves acquiring random and useless items from the hotel rooms that she cleans because it's an art form, especially not to be caught. The thrill she gets from her success and precise methodology gives her purpose and a buzz until it doesn't. And it's— I've had so much fun reading this book, but I know for a fact before I next go away on holiday, I'm going to catalogue everything I've got in my vanity case. Uh, so let's talk about Hostel 21 with today's guest, Santa. Thank you for joining us on Get Booked for Women's and Men's Radio Station. Hi Hazel, thank you so much for having me on the show, and thank you for talking about the book like that. It really brought— it really made me feel quite, um, emotional. Did it? Well, I felt quite emotional reading it because, you know, in a way it's a really simplistic story, isn't it? At the end of the day, it's just cleaners going about their everyday business, and it's one of those industries where you don't necessarily stay— there's quite a high turnover, um, and You know, I stay in hotels a lot. I know for a fact that I wouldn't miss certain things if they went missing. But also in every single industry, everybody has lives and everybody has certain nuance and, and things that they go through, and we just plod along all the time, not really taking in what anybody else is doing. And I guess we don't have the time to involve ourselves in people's lives. And I think, I guess Noël kind of hopes that that is the case for many people. So I thoroughly I really love the book. I think it's brilliant. It was— it went way too quickly for me. Well, you know, the funny thing is, when I— I got the idea for the story from when I stayed in a small hotel in Lisbon, and I accidentally annoyed the hotel cleaner when I didn't leave my room until really late, like it was way after lunch, and she was waiting outside the room for me to leave so she could clean it, and she had her arms crossed and a really nasty look on her face. And I felt really terrible because she, you know, I just thought if I'd had a bit of cop on, I would have stepped outside the room and let her clean it. It's no problem. It takes— it doesn't take very long. So I felt really bad. Later on, when I came back that evening, my hairbrush was missing. And I immediately— now, I don't now think she took it. I really don't. I think I lost it in transit. But because I'm a writer, probably, I jumped to this idea, the cleaner took my hairbrush as a revenge lift. She was so annoyed that she took it to get back at me and ruined my, ruined my night. It's a small thing. It's very irritating when you're standing there with wet hair and you're away and you don't have your hairbrush, right? But I was immediately like excited and intrigued and I thought, you know, does she do this a lot? Does she take hairbrushes? Does she take other things, small things that maybe we don't know are missing, or is it just things she knows we won't phone up the manager about, because I wasn't going to phone up and say, listen, someone's, someone's taken my secondhand hairbrush, you know, I want the hairbrush back with the hairs, you know, like, I wasn't gonna say that. So, so I started thinking more and more and more about this, and because I'm a screenwriter, I was thinking about TV and film, and then I started thinking, you know, she had this way to have to take some, um, control over me you know, by doing this. And I thought maybe she's doing it because she's trying to regain control in her own life in some way. So a couple of days later, I wrote the first 4,000 words of the book. And for me, it was very liberating to write in first person. And what I wanted to do, I was just really excited about this kind of small story of someone who's in crisis, and we pick them up in that moment and we also learn about why they do these things, but we're also seeing how they're managing and how they're coping. And that everyone— for me, it was a great story to want to tell because, you know, we're all in the mess, we're all in the chaos, we're all struggling. It doesn't really matter. And, and I really like the idea that, you know, you don't have to be super rich, super talented, or successful, or saving the world to be an exceptional person, you know. And for me, they're all exceptional. They're all exceptional people. And, and I really enjoyed taking her on this journey out of her crisis and her chaos. And, and I still worry about her. It's really weird. I just hope she's not— I have this feeling, I hope she's okay. Like, is she, you know, is she getting on at Hotel 21 still? Has she got friends? Has she managed to get over the issues? I mean, there's so many different things that were kind of— and as I said, it was like sympathetically written because she kind of you talk about her issues with her mum, but it then gets ignored every now and again because sometimes you just have to ignore things to get on with life, otherwise you'll send yourself constantly crazy. And I loved the idea of kind of dipping in and out of dealing with mundanity at the same time as dealing with abuse and horrific stuff. And we all find different ways to just cope. And what, what really got me is that kleptomania. I mean, there are a lot of people out there, even that I know, that take things just because they can. I mean, I've got friends that are on, you know, £100 grand salaries, and they'll nick a packet of Polos. And I'm like, why do you do that? Because I can. Is that really kleptomania? I mean, um, that is theft. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. But I mean, I, I mean, I, I would say that someone who nicks a packet of Polos, they've probably been doing that since they were a child, uh, because otherwise they wouldn't know what the, what the thrill is to kind of do that. Yeah, I think, I think there are kind of, you know, there are different levels, and for, you know, it is kind of a form of OCD and And, you know, um, an OCD can show itself in all sorts of different forms. There's no real textbook into, well, you know, this is only an OCD and this is only an OCD. It can be whatever you want it to be, really, whatever it is. So for Noelle, it definitely is that. Um, it is a cope, it is a way to cope. She's been in, um, survival mode since she was a child. And I know you talk about how we don't really always go into all the ins and outs of everything with the book and with her mother, but it's her perspective. It's her observation of her own life and, um, and her situation. So she will park things and focus on other things. I mean, if you went to visit Noël in her shabby little flat in London, you would find a trunk there with all the things in it that she's taken, and they are like religious relics, you know. They're things that— this is, this is, um, kind of evidence that she is a person and her life is working and she's got it sussed, you know. But it so isn't, right? It so isn't. But it's also a way of her regaining some control over feeling something as well. She's found something that kind of gives her a buzz. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes you've got to run with that when everything else is falling apart. Absolutely. I mean, really, a really weird example is like, I always used to worry that I wasn't going to see enough and get to do enough, um, and that sometimes we all can feel sometimes that we're being just a bit lazy in life and letting it plod along around us. And I always used to keep stubs of my boarding cards on planes and things just so that every now and again when I go 'Oh, Hazel, you're not doing enough, you're not exploring enough.' And I'd suddenly look at them and go, 'Yeah, Kuala Lumpur, Thailand, Bruges.' And I, I've still got them now from like the last 25 years, and I can't not do it. The idea of throwing away a boarding card to me, even now when I'm 41, is bonkers. And we all have our little quirks and some of them have more deep-rooted issues than others. We all have our trunks. So is it— I'm interested in that, Hazel. Is it because if, if you throw away the stubs, you're kind of throwing away the memory or the evidence? Um, yeah, I think so. Oh, that is that reminder. Yeah, it's just proof. It's proof. You can say, no, actually, I did do this. Here's my boarding card and it has my name on it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do have various boxes throughout the years, and I kind of put it into years. Now, you keep all your stuff of your kids and things like that, but places that we went to, because, you know, life is hectic, and we sometimes, when we get in our head, we need a reminder that what's going on in our head isn't reality. Yeah, that's really hard. That's really hard because that's why a lot of people, you know, with mental health and things like that, we believe the stories. Tell ourselves, we believe our narratives, and they're not real, they're not true. Um, you know, you can get caught up in a thought and a thought pattern, um, and you don't even realize, you know. I mean, that's part of the problem of having a brain, you know, a brain that just goes off on one because, oh, we're thinking about this and this is obviously true, so therefore I will have these feelings. Yeah. Complicated. I mean, I, I was actually reading up on you, and didn't you have, um, parents who were Jungian psychotherapists? So I mean, literally everything you did, they— that must have— they would have a reason for it. And you must now want to try and look for reason in everything that happens. I don't know whether I look for reason in stuff. And also, you know, psychotherapists, a really good one, have been through a lot of their own shit as well. Okay. You know, they are not perfect people and they should be able to share that, you know, with you. Can you imagine though if somebody was trying to help you who had never gone through anything? I think the best people out there are flawed people because absolutely, you know, they have perspective. And I know that if I had an issue, I wouldn't want to speak to Mr. Perfect because that just does not sound attractive at all. No, it wouldn't at all. And also it's not just being flawed, it's knowing that you're flawed and accepting yourself for your flaws. And I think one thing I learned from having parents who in that world is that everybody— nobody's story is too weird or too strange. Everybody has a shadow regardless of who they are. Everyone has a shadow. And that— sorry, my voice gone. Hang on a second. Oh, we've got the same glasses. I said shadow. Oh no, it's probably a— it's probably a meaning in that. No, I'm joking. Um, that we all have a shadow and that that's okay. And, and that we need to be aware of our shadows and stuff. But growing up with a parent who's a psychotherapist, you know, it's kind of like I'd be fighting with, with my sister and we'd hear projection coming from the parent. And I'd say to my sister, she's talking to you. She'd go, no, she's talking to you. No, she's talking to you. She'd go, I'm talking to both of you. We're projecting onto each other. Yeah, you're projecting. So, because that's really what an argument is, right? Pointing the finger, you did this, you did that, and we have, you know, whatever, especially at that age, especially as teenagers, you know. I think when you've got siblings as well, the psychodynamics of trying to figure out who you are and using your sibling as a punching bag to kind of air, you know, the different possible personalities. I mean, the things we put our siblings through are horrific. And yeah, and also the secret way that we look up to them and we go, look what they're doing, but I'm not going to tell them. Company. That's great. Like, my, my, my sister is 4 and a half years older than me, but we're really close. We didn't really have any rivalry because our ages were too far apart, but we were— but she was like a big prankster, and, you know, and I would have been the butt of a lot of those pranks, I think. But I think, I think that's great. I think that makes you tough, and it kind of makes you ready for the world, that there's going to be a lot of people are going to mess you around. So get used to it, you know, or a lot of disappointment. I mean, I'm a screenwriter mostly, and that life as a screenwriter really is a life of disappointment and near misses, really, to be honest. So I hope you regularly thank your sister for putting you through your paces because it, you know, toughened you up. Yeah, totally. I think it's important to have siblings. I only have one child, so I do feel a bit bad for him. That he doesn't have that, but he seems to be doing okay. So, well, I have two boys and they constantly say, why don't you just have one? He's so annoying. And they'll say it in front of each other. There's no winning combination. You should say, you're so lucky you feel like that. You're so lucky. Yes. Oh, I don't know. Families, families are bonkers. Are they close in age? Your boys are 3 years apart from each other, both boys. So the house is just a constant— I mean, I'm a northerner who lives in London. I've lived here for 20-odd years, so they've got a northern mum, but they were brought up down south. We have the most weirdest breed of dog going, so the house is just a complete storm of ridiculousness constantly. It sounds great, it sounds great. I mean, it can be fun, it can be a little bit scary for people coming in. I mean, my, my 16-year-old year old has sarcasm down pat. He is brilliant. And half the time I want to tell him off for being rude to me, and other times I'm just like, congratulations, mate, that was a wicked comeback. I know, aren't they brilliant? They— you just go like— I just once, I said to my son once, you're really good at arguing, I don't stand a chance anymore. Like, it's like all day long, you know what, I'm just not going to bother anymore, you're just too good. Yeah, but keeps you on your toes though. I mean, keep on trying. Yeah, yeah, no, I do love it. I do love it. I mean, um, being a northerner, you know, I swear quite a lot. I mean, I think there are lots of other people from other areas that swear a lot as well, but northerners, they seem to use it just like the word 'the.' And, um, I did say to my kids, I was like, listen, I get it that we're a sarcastic family and we all talk a lot, but we need to find a way to just respect each other's space a little bit and give me less reasons to need to swear. How do we think we can move forward in helping me not to swear as much? And my eldest just went, we could get some duct tape. I was like, oh mate, such a good answer, but not what I was looking for. Just had an image of you duct taped, like when you're like, it's okay, it's not a criminal act, it's just my son wants me to stop swearing. You know, swearing, it's swearing great though. I mean, I swear and I, I love it. I love it. And, uh, it's just, it's so expressive. And, and you're right, like, I'm, I'm from London and I don't think we swear as well as other people in different kinds of accents. You know, the Irish, because I live in Ireland, they swear beautifully. They just slip it in. They can say the worst words ever and I go How did you get away with that? You look like an angel when you say it. They say it so poetically. It's to do with delivery, isn't it? It's just, it's just like you said, it's like any other word. It's just slip it in. And, but I notice it because we kind of screw up our faces and we emphasize the swear word. It's like overkill, you know, or it's like really aggressive. You know, so I think, yeah, there is a lovely way to swear, I think, and there is some art, there's some art in it. There is definitely an art to swearing beautifully. Maybe that should be my next book, or your next book, maybe your next book. You don't even need to do a book, you could do a podcast on it. This is how to swear nicely so that people will actually admire you for it. Do you know what? I'm just writing this down now. Can we swear? Can we swear on this podcast? I'm just checking, just in case. I mean, in theory, no, but again, if we do it in a nice way, then it comes across and feels organic. I think it's when it's intentional that you tend to get in trouble on certain radio shows. Yeah, well, I won't then because I'm from London and it won't sound very good. Well, it is a mental health and mental wellbeing show, so I guess swearing's part and parcel. Yes, and I'm sure most people who are listening swear. Yes, I'm sure they do. Start swearing, you'll feel better. Yeah, yes, exactly. Do you remember when people used to say— I can't swear well enough. Sorry, I was just about to say, do you know when people used to say, only unintelligent people use swear words because they can't think of the correct word? I'm like, no, that's not true, mate. You're clearly not doing it properly. I think, I think somebody told me this recently, and it was probably my son who reads loads of random stuff, but the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to swear. I agree with that wholeheartedly. So do I, so do I, Hazel. Let's go with it, go with it. I mean, there's quite some decent swearing in Hotel 21 without it being particularly noticeable, I thought. Yeah, I did have to take out two words, uh, that I had in it. I can't say what, what, what they were, but, um, but I'm actually really pleased that I did because when I was actually writing it, you know, you write with energy and you write because you're in the moment and like, I'm not going to hold back. If I start to hold back, it's not going to be honest. So only in the editing kind of process, um, did I have to take out just two, just two words. And I'm really pleased that I did, and I replaced it with something else. But yeah, there's a couple of swear words, but you know, it shouldn't be a go-to, you know, when, you know, for writing. And also, you know how in stand-up, if you go to stand-ups early on in there when, when they're starting off, they kind of swear a lot, don't they? But then when they get nerves Yes, but when they get later, later, later, they hardly swear at all, you know. Uh, you know, it depends. Do you not watch Jimmy Carr then on Netflix? Because that is— oh, does he just blow his head off? Does he? Oh yes, brilliant. I'm thinking more like, um, Eddie Izzard. He used to swear quite a bit and then he stopped. Um, I think, I think that was one of them. And somebody else as well. And then I noticed as, as they got on and on, so yeah, it might just be that kind of— can't remember why we were talking about that now, sorry Hazel. I love a tangent. Stand-up comics. I would love to be a stand-up comic, but there's just like— I just think it sounds great to make people laugh. It would be brilliant, but you know, you've got to be really funny. Well, that is the thing. I can only be funny accidentally. Yeah, funny, like people laugh at you, not with you. It's kind of a bit different, isn't it? Or sometimes I'll make a really quick response and then it'll take me about 10 seconds to realize just how actually funny that was, and it probably wasn't intentional, but nobody knows that. I'm accidentally funny sometimes. Yeah, yeah, that's, although I can't give all my secrets away. If anybody, if anybody else asks, just say no, it's intentional and she, she's, you know, it's a natural gift. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, someone told me that once, to be funny, you're just born funny, you know. So you just go, well, I'll just give up now then, you know. Be funny occasionally. I think writing the comedy comes from characters, so it's not kind of not from you, if, if you know what I mean. It's not the authorial voice, it's kind of coming through you, but you're taking on a different persona. So it might not be your persona, but you're definitely still the conduit. You're kind of imagining that that you see that character and how they might, and how you would like them to be so that you would find them funny, you know. I love that though, because so when you're writing characters, you can be whoever you want to be. You can be so many different people. That's great. Yeah, I do. And I really like the first person thing. There's some authors I've read, they don't like first person because they think it's limiting, and I understand that, but I think it's massively expansive to write first person. I don't see any limits in that, but yeah, I don't know, it's just a different way of looking at it. I quite like the novels where the different characters write from the first person, and so you can, you can see how people see different situations, because everybody has their own reality, and just because something happened doesn't mean that somebody else sees it exactly the same way, and Person A is not more right than Person B, but it just shows that sometimes we need to think outside the box. And just because we thought something was fantastic or we thought something was done horrifically, everyone's allowed their own opinion. I'm so pleased you brought that up because it's one of my favorite things, is how we can never really get to the truth of anything apart from scientific, maybe, but we can't because everything we see is, um, through our own eyes and through our, um, perceptions and our— just the way that we see things. We can't ever really get to the truth. And did you ever watch The Affair? Oh, I loved that because it— the way that she— yeah, when they did this, because they actually replayed, didn't they, the same events and how it was completely different and wearing different outfits as well. It blew my mind, that show. I haven't watched the latest, uh, series, but the first 2 or 3, I just thought, that is just brilliant. It's just brilliant, you know, how he sees this and she sees that, and we never know. We never know which version of the truth is, is the truth. And it's probably something in the middle or nothing. Exactly. And I think that's always the answer to everything. It's always somewhere in the middle. You know, and I just really, really loved that, um, that idea, um, yeah, of how you can never really get to what is actually going on. Like, you would never really know. Like, my, my husband, so I know him very well, we've married a long time, we've been together for a long time, but I will never really, really know exactly how, how he sees everything and how he, you know, it's, it's all perception and and constantly evolving at the same time. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is why I'm a huge fan of reading, because it means that we get to kind of delve into other people's lives and see their, their way of thinking. And that we have to remember that what we see is not always— well, what we see on the surface isn't always what's going on. Especially with Noel, where to some people she's just kind of insular and nicks a couple of things every now and again of no value, whereas in fact she has deep-rooted issues because she was abused as a child. And I think it's books like this where you kind of go, okay, either if you don't understand somebody, either leave them alone or try and figure it out, or try and have a little bit of, um, what am I trying to say? It's— I think the more we read about other people and how intricate their lives can be, and they've had different upbringings, the more that we can just give ourselves a little bit of a break as well. I think what you're talking about, and this is why I write, is because you want to explore what it means to be human. And, and I think, you know, it's chaotic to be human. And it's a struggle. It's not, you know, well, maybe it's easier for some people, but everybody has issues and problems and trunks where they keep their things and boarding passes that they don't wanna throw away in case it affects their life. And so, you know, we're all in that. And for Noël, she's in the chaos as we pick her up and we go on this journey with her like we do with all stories. With a hero through the chaos, out of the chaos, and somehow finding a path through that struggle. And that is why I wanted to go on this journey with Noël and in first person. That's why I sat down and wrote this book, not knowing if anybody would ever read it, and if they did, if, if they would like it. But I was so compelled to want to write that story and want to go on that journey with her. So I only had a rough idea, but I wanted to, go on. I wanted to do this so much because I was excited, and, and I thought it, it, it was going to matter to me to do that. I think what was important in this book is that it showed that the other women in Hotel 21 had chaotic lives, and they shared rather than keeping it from other people. And although it was chaotic, it gave people a chance to actually help and support each other rather than just be insular. And I think that's a really important message. That's a brilliant way of looking at it. Thank you for saying that. That's brilliant. Yeah, no, it really was. And I think really Marley is the ringleader of that, of that group, really. She is the one that wants everyone to be happy all the time and everything to work out okay and everyone to be part of the Tequila Crew and all this kind of stuff. And so she is the one who insists on the, on the group always being gelled. And, um, and I think through, through her doing that and the fact that they've been working together for so long, it is natural for them to want to see, is Noël going to be one of these people? Is she going to be able to be part of the group? So they give her a very good chance from day one 'Are you coming out? Are you going to drink some? Are you going to do this? Are you coming to the hospital? Are you going to do this? What are you doing here?' And it's just like they're in her face challenging her all the time. And that is her crisis point and the point where she's going to start to transform, you know. Like, it's not all tied up with a neat bow at the end, is it? But yeah, but that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is she's kind of ready That's why I say I'm still— I still— oh, when I think about her, I still get quite emotional because it was a big part of my life, and I— for, uh, for a long time. And I miss— I miss the characters, and I miss writing the book, you know. Well, it's going to be part of your life for some time. Hasn't it been optioned? Yes, it's been optioned, uh, for TV series. Um, that was last year. I'm waiting to hear They're really fabulous people, very smart, very, you know, they really like the book. So we're just— I'm just waiting to hear. Yeah, I mean, this is TV and film business. Nothing's guaranteed. So I'm waiting to hear. And then I might be part of their story room, which would be really great. So yeah, because can you imagine if they kind of didn't do it the way Oh no, well, they probably won't because, you know, it's an adaptation and they'll have a showrunner and it will be their vision. But I don't care, I just want to be in the story room and just— if not just for the free food, there's always great food in there. I would say it's free snacks, so no, I don't want to be eating sugar all day. Well, I mean, I was going to ask you what the response was to your book, but at the end of the day, if the response is that it gets optioned, it's a good response, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we'll have to wait and see. It's out next week. Some of the reviews that I've had have really, really warmed my heart when they've talked about this is a book about what it means to be a human being. And that's, that's when I just, because that means it's landing the way that it was for me when I was writing it. And that's all you want as an author of anything. For it to land the way that you wanted it to. So, no, obviously won't land with everybody. I mean, I, I have books that I read that don't land with me, uh, and that's fine. Um, but when it does land, it really is— it really warms my heart. I can only say that it brings tears to my eyes. Like, when you're so involved in a particular character and then you get quite protective— don't you pick on Noelle, she's had a bad enough life as it is! Well, I don't feel like that. No, I don't feel like that. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a piece of storytelling, and, you know, it's my job as the author to engage the reader from day, you know, from page one. Um, and, um, and when I managed to do that, I'm really, really feel like I've done my job well and properly, you know. Yeah, well, I think you have. Is it going to be another book? Coming soon? There's a— the draft one of my second book is currently with the publishers. So, um, yeah, it's not at all the same sort of story, but it's definitely written by the same author, you know, some of the same themes, things that I, um, am interested in and excited about. Yeah, so kind of psychodynamics, uh, first person, and kind of exploring the psyche of, you know, and kind of what we were talking about with the with, um, The Affair about how do you know what's really true, you know. I'm very interested in that. I find it fascinating that we can never, you know, really know unless you get it on video. Yeah, from all different angles as well, because, you know, what you capture on film isn't always accurate either. Hey, and also, it's also about what the person is feeling and thinking and how they're reading a situation, you know. So human beings are amazing at picking up on, you know, the smallest, tiniest little bit of body language, and it tells a whole story. Uh, yes, but we're equally terrible at it as well. Yeah, we also add, we also add stories to it, and we add our own, you know, thoughts about what that means, and we're not always right. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's confusing. And often we go on our gut feeling and we go on, um, on, um, on our instincts, you know. So, and if you kind of add trauma into that, that's a complete minefield as to how that messes with our memory recollection, um, And, you know, and people deal with trauma in all different sorts of ways, and trauma also can be small and big, you know. Yeah. Or it just really, you know, you just need to be really nice to yourself, really kind to yourself. I love that. No, brilliant. And actually, that leads on quite nicely because we're running out of time, which is not a huge surprise. Um, is it? I like to ask all my guests here on Get Booked for 3 top tips. On mental well-being? Oh, okay. So for me— so for everyone it's different, right? So me, I really do need to exercise. I really do, to feel well. So maybe not everybody does, but I do, and I miss it when I don't. So that's really important for me. Um, like I said, be kind to yourself. I think that's really important. Let yourself off don't beat yourself up about things, I think. And the other thing is, for me, is secondary interactions. So I quite— I'm a very sociable person, but I write by myself and I'm at home a lot working alone. So I really like to, like, go out to the supermarket and have a chat with everybody. And I go to the health food store and I know all the people in there, and I just have a chat in the afternoon with someone, and I'll come home and it's It's just really important for me that I have some kind of social contact that is outside the home, you know, because I love to work with, with people and to be with people. But because of the job I have now, uh, I'm on my own a lot. And sometimes I go, you know what, I'm going to go to the supermarket. Yeah, I'll just like going to a random cafe and, you know, chat with someone. Yeah, I had a chat with a guy the, the other day. He didn't know how to use the till and he asked the girl. I said, Is it your first day? He went, no, it's week 3. And we both burst out laughing because there was no coming back from that. I was like, I'm so sorry. I've been here for 4 years. I own the company. He was laughing going, yeah, I know. And I said, no, listen, you've probably just never done that bit before. And he went, yeah, no, I haven't. I went, listen, you're doing really well. But we were both laughing because I promise you. So that was important. And they say, I think scientifically they say the more of those you have a day, the better you feel. So, oh, I 100% agree. I know that sometimes if I've just been indoors or I've had to just be in my own head too much, I'll just pop to the local newsagents or, you know, you can strike up conversations anywhere. And sometimes, you know, that tiny bit of interaction was something that somebody else needed as well. And it can kind of come through and it's very altruistic. Stick. Yes, no, I think so, I think so. And, and everybody needs it. And, uh, yeah, brilliant. So I think that's a fantastic way to, uh, to end the show. Thank you so much, Santa, for chatting to us on Get Booked about Hotel 21. You, Hazel, I really enjoyed it. It's been really funny. Yeah, I really enjoyed it too, whether we intended it to be funny or not. So funny. We are so funny, right? And it's not It's not an accident. We are hilarious. Thank you so much for joining us on Women's and Men's Radio Station, and best of luck with Hotel 21. Thank you, Hazel. Bye. Hello, this is Zenta Rich, and I'm going to read an extract from my book Hotel 21. I like to set myself little challenges. I've decided the extra thrill for starting in the Magnolia is to aim to beat my previous 5-star record by lasting longer than a month, so I need to have my wits about me and take it slow. I did make it to 7 months in Hotel 15, a 4-star in Cornwall, 2 years ago. My supervisor at the time, Mrs. Gomez, was quite upset when I announced I was leaving, to be nearer my family. No one ever questions that excuse. I was surprised when Mrs. Gomez's large wobbly face fell and her already moist eyes filled with tears. She gave me a big bear hug, pressing my cheek into her full soft bosom, which which smelled of talcum powder and lily of the valley. For a moment, in her arms, I wondered what my life would have been like had Mrs. Gomez been my mother. Would I have become a person who stays in 5-star hotels instead of cleaning them? Would I want to be different to the way I am now? I normally abandon these thoughts quickly, as they're not helpful and don't go anywhere. Mrs. Gomez finally released me from her bosom and held me firmly by the shoulders. "You are the best little worker I've ever had," she said. I smiled at her, genuinely appreciative. It was nice to hear I was good at my job, but even nicer to know she didn't suspect me one bit. I was quite sad to leave too. The guests tended to be long-term stayers with mountains of luggage brimming with personal possessions. The wardrobes were always stuffed full of elegant clothes and fussy designer shoes, And the bathrooms, my favourite space in any hotel room, were strewn with delicate pots of expensive-smelling creams and makeup boxes that popped open to display an artist's palette of eyeshadows with elegant brushes and glistening lipstick cases. One guest had 52 lipsticks. Yes, I counted, and I couldn't help but be impressed. I had contemplated taking one, I held the black shiny case between my blue gloved fingers, twisted the bottom, and watched in wonder as an untouched ruby red stick slowly emerged, gleaming in the bright bathroom lights. A rush of adrenaline shot up my spine to the base of my neck, but with a heavy sigh, I put the lipstick back in its designated velvet-lined pouch. A woman with that kind of collection and attention to detail would know in instant if something were missing, and I'd had a bad experience with a lipstick before and felt it was too risky. Instead, I slowly unzipped her toiletry bag, watching the individual teeth part way as it flopped open to reveal a lucky dip of tubes and pots and shiny plastic containers. I slipped my hand in, pushing down deep to the very bottom where smaller items like forgotten lip balms live, I dug gently in and around the pots and tubes until my forefinger landed on a small lid. I ran the tip of my finger around it, getting a feel for the size of the mini container, and then carefully lifted it out, all the while relishing the rush of adrenaline thundering around my body, my breathing faster than normal. It was a small white testa pot, slightly dirty from being buried in the bottom of the bag for so long. And no bigger than the top of my thumb. It was perfect, not something the guest would notice was missing. I dropped it into the front of my apron and stood for a moment, allowing the rush to subside and my vital signs to return to normal. It didn't matter that I had no idea what was in the pot. I never use the things I take. I just keep them, like that woman kept her lipsticks. 'Nobody's memory is 100%. Even if she had noticed the little pot was missing, she'd never suspect the cleaner. She'd think she lost it in transit, or assumed she'd thrown it away and forgotten. And if she had noticed and made a complaint, Mrs. Gomez would never have believed that I would steal anything, let alone a small tester pot from the bottom of a toiletry bag.' And I would swear, forcing fake tears, that I would never even touch a toiletry bag. We're trained not to move guest items unless absolutely necessary. But the first complaint sets a precedent. What if another was made against me, even if it was again over a small item of no value? A flag would be raised, a question mark would appear next to my name, and I couldn't risk that. There's always a complaint eventually. As I begin to increase the level of risk, It's inevitable. 3 weeks after taking the testapot, I took a little bottle of pink nail varnish from a huge overflowing vanity case. The guests marched down to reception and loudly accused the cleaner of being a thief. Mrs. Gomez stood by me like a guard dog, teeth bared, as she squared up to the hotel manager. As far as she was concerned, I was an angel, and so were the rest of her cleaning staff. I got away with it, of course, but it was highly unlikely she would have defended me a second time. Once a complaint is made against me, I keep a low profile for 2 weeks and take nothing, which kills me. I bite my nails and lose my appetite and have to force-feed myself buttered toast. Then I hand in my notice with a worthy excuse and leave for a new hotel in a new place. Not every hotel cleaning job is straightforward, and it's not always easy to simply up and leave. I went to work in a small 3-star in Jersey once, just to give the English hotel industry a break. Hotel 8. The minute I arrived, I knew I'd made a mistake. Not because they were alert to cleaners taking things, but because the cleaning team was a well-established clique that was going to be tough to infiltrate. It consisted of 8 older women, all from the same Italian family. They spoke Italian among themselves and clearly didn't have much time for the new girl, so my ability to make them like me and fast was already severely compromised. I thought about employing my first day rule and leaving immediately, but I'd only just arrived on the ferry. It had been my first time on a boat, and I'd spent most of the journey with my head over the side vomiting into the wind. I couldn't face the trip back just yet, so I was prepared to give it a day or two to see if I could get the women on side. Thank you for listening. Well, that is a wrap for today's Get Booked with me, Hazel Butterfield. A huge thank you to today's guest, Sento Rich, chatting to us about Hotel 21 and so much more as well. I've had an absolute riot. I hope you've enjoyed listening in. 2. Just a quick reminder, next week we're going to be chatting to the author Deborah Stone about her latest release, Semi-Detached. Just playing us out for the end of the show, we're gonna play a little bit of last week's show. And a quick reminder, you can pop on to womensradiostation.com/shows/getbooked to catch up on any of your favorite shows Right now, time on Get Booked to discuss moths with today's author, Jane Hennigan. And I really don't know where to start with this one. It's such a clever and introspective fictional look at a world in which men had to be contained and sedated for their own safety, leaving women in charge, following on from a plague of moths carrying an infection that attacks the male central nervous system, rendering them a blue, where they die pretty quickly, or affecting their whole psyche that turns them into prolifically violent and murderous manics. However, we still need to procreate to keep humanity alive. The men need to be cared for, both those infected and those from being infected. 40 years on and the world is evolving. Anyone younger than 40 has no real understanding of how it was before. It is inconceivable that these terrified men, protected in confinement with limited knowledge and uses, how they could ever rule the world. Could a potential vaccine be the answer? Decisions need to be made about what is best for everyone's futures. Those originally infected are dying off. The only men left are those born since the pandemic that no longer have inherent ideas of superiority or expectation, quite importantly. So many complex ideas, opinions, and basic human rights issues to be addressed, and quite frankly, this book is Brilliantly written. Jane, thank you for joining us on Get Booked to discuss Moths. I can't wait to get started. Well, thank you very much for having me. Yes, that's a pretty comprehensive, um, description you've just done there. Thank you. Yeah, I was so absorbed in the book, and as I said a little bit off air, I kind of spent a couple of weeks just getting really angry with men, uh, which it's not the aim, but it's just that whole We get angry when we've got complex feelings about, well, anything and everything. Um, the book is fantastic. Why don't you kick off by telling us a little bit about yourself? Oh, okay. Uh, so I am— so I've been writing probably about 10 to 15 years. Yeah. Um, before that I was in marketing, and then I went from marketing— I worked in marketing for about 15 years, and then I was a teacher for 6 years, an English teacher for 6 years. And, and then I went and did a master's in creative writing at University of Surrey. And then kind of the pandemic hit, and I was, I was toying with the idea of giving up teaching at that point anyway. And I had, during my master's, started to write a number of novels. I had written a couple of novels before that as well. And, and I I was writing Moths during the pandemic, although I had started writing Moths before the pandemic hit. And yeah, I decided to give it a go. I decided to stop teaching. There were other things happening in my life at the time as well. There were sort of relatives that needed looking after and such like, which didn't work with kind of with being a teacher. Life gets in the way. Exactly. And it kind of gave me the confidence actually to come out of teaching and to start writing in earnest. And yeah, then, yeah, so that's basically where I got to. And then I started writing Moths as part of my master's MA in creative writing. And it went down well. It went down really well at the kind in the workshops. I got a lot of encouragement. I met some fantastic writing friends whilst I was on the Master's as well, and they were a huge encouragement to me, and we would swap work quite often, and it just kept the focus on writing. And yeah, so I ended up writing Moths. I can imagine if you started before COVID-19 and then continued afterwards, I guess that changed your tack a little bit because you actually had real-time knowledge of how certain pandemics affect how we live. I mean, these dystopian novels, they're getting increasingly scarier due to how pandemic research is going. They're not completely inconceivable. We've seen the effects of COVID-19, and The Last of Us on Sky Atlantic or Sky something or other is based on factual evidence of a disaster that could actually happen. So these novels, we kind of, as I said before, when I was getting a little bit kind of stressed but so engrossed when I was reading it because it just stirs so much inside of you, you really kind of get into the psyche and you cover so many different viewpoints. So well. I mean, the hugest congratulations on writing the book. And I know you released it— was it last year? And then it's got picked up again, and you've been, you've been taken on by an agent, and it's getting re-released with slight changes, and I've just been released. Am I correct? Yes. So, um, well, your first point, uh, when I— so writing a pandemic before a pandemic and writing a pandemic during a pandemic are very, very different things. And I actually had to take 6 months away from writing it in the actual pandemic, because there's something ghoulish about writing a pandemic when you're surrounded by the effects of, you know, of that, of a disease that is, you know, that is making people ill and killing people. So I could, so for a long time, I just couldn't. I mean, I imagine it's the same for a lot of people in the pandemic as well. For a long time, I couldn't really concentrate on very much except just getting through the next day and not thinking too deeply about anything. And I definitely wasn't going to think too deeply about a story I was writing about a pandemic. So, actually, as it happened, I'd written most of the story by the time the pandemic hit. Later on in the pandemic, when it— weird to say— it kind of normalised a bit, then I went back to editing and changing some of the parts of the novel in line with what I now know— knew how the government might react, how other countries might react, what what the fear was like. There's a— there is a lot of fear in the book, and that fear comes from the actual fear that I was feeling during the pandemic. So yeah, there is a big difference between, um, between the fantasy of a pandemic and the reality of a pandemic. One you can write excitedly into the, you know, and just carry on with it. The other one, you think very carefully about the reality of it. So, uh, yeah, it did change the novel. And yeah, well, I think also moths, it is not like COVID-19. We will look back on COVID-19 in 40 years and it's, you know, it's a bit like SARS. We get over it, we'll probably slightly change the way we do things, but we're not locking up people and changing the whole way that life is kind of run. It is very different to COVID-19, but it's still helping us understand, you know, what could happen with these slightly more dangerous pandemics. I mean, have you watched The Last of Us? I guess that's something that's— I absolutely loved The Last of Us. I consumed every episode. It is the exact sort of thing I love. So yeah.