Clay Stafford talks with James Comey on “What Makes Stories Linger”

James Comey interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

James Comey is a figure the world thinks it knows. Former FBI Director, lawyer, public servant. His name has been bound to history’s headlines. Yet away from the noise of politics, which is a world of fiction itself, Comey has quietly stepped into another role: novelist. His fiction, drawn from a lifetime inside courtrooms, investigations, and the corridors of power, isn’t about retelling the past but about exploring human dramas at its center. In his books, readers encounter prosecutors and investigators who feel like old friends with scenes that linger long after the page is turned. In this conversation, I speak with Comey not about politics, but about the art of writing. What makes stories endure? What gives characters their staying power? Why truth, even in fiction, may be the most compelling force of all. “James, let’s talk about writing stories that linger. My wife always asks me when I’m reading a book, ‘How’s this one?’ And I’ll say, ‘This one, when I lie down to go to sleep, I’m still thinking about the people in it, why they’re doing what they’re doing. I can get in their heads. It sticks with me.’ That’s why I wanted to ask you about writing stories that linger. When you’re writing, do you ever think about how a story might stay with readers after they finish? Or do you focus on the moment, and if it lingers, it lingers?”

“I think it’s the latter. I’m not intentionally trying to make a story linger. But in a way, I am. I’m drawing from my own experiences. The coolest things I've been a part of. The hardest. Back then, I’d wake up thinking about a witness, a case, a judge. They were challenging, fascinating, rewarding. I try to bring readers into that world, show them those characters. Most are composites, but they’re based on real people I found interesting. If I can tell a story that feels as vivid as what I experienced, then it’ll stick with readers the way it stuck with me. I don’t set out with that as a conscious goal, but now that you’ve asked, maybe it’s always been close to the surface.”

“As a reader, what’s the difference between a story you forget the moment you put the book down, and one that haunts you for days, weeks, even years?”

“First, it’s good writing that lets me enter the story. Bad writing, sentences that are too long, language that’s overly complex, or fancy words block my way. It’s like being in a theater behind a tall person who blocks the view. I don’t want my writing to be like that tall person. I want a clear view of the stage. Then, I like the action on that stage to make you forget you’re in a theater. You feel like you’re there, like a non-playing character onstage, caught up in the conflict. The way to do that is to make the characters real, memorable, the kind of people you’d want to sit next to and just listen. If I can give you a clear view, make you forget the theater, and make the conflict compelling, that’s the recipe for a story that sticks.”

“Just curious—not for this—how tall are you?”

“I’m 6'8".”

“Holy cow. I’m 6'3", and I’m still looking up to James Comey.”

“Normal-sized person.”

“Unless I’m blocking everyone else in the theater. I bet you were intimidating in a courtroom.”

“Yes. Except with my wife. Early in my career, I was practicing a jury address in our small living room. Patrice watched me pacing back and forth and said, ‘That’s great, but why are you moving around like that?’ I said, ‘That’s what lawyers do.’ She said, ‘You look like a giraffe in heat. You’re tall enough to frighten people. Don’t move, and step back from the jury.’ From then on, in every trial, I stood still. Because she was right, movement would distract. People might start thinking about my size, my clothes, my feet, instead of listening. I didn’t want those distractions.”

“When you’re crafting a scene or character, is there a technique you use to make them stick in the reader’s mind?”

“I try to lavishly picture the scene before writing. How would it play out in real life? I build a mental map, then write. Afterward, I reread and ask: Does this feel real? Can readers see it? If yes, it may stick. I want people drawn into the conversation. If my characters speak with unnecessary flourishes, use words readers can’t grasp, or talk in perfect, complete sentences, it pulls you out. I’ve now written three novels, and I think I’m better at slowing down before writing, taking walks, imagining: Benny’s talking to Nora, where are they? What does it feel like? That patience makes it real.”

“Is there a specific character or scene readers told you they couldn’t shake?”

“Yes. In all three books, people have mentioned scenes that have stayed with them because they sparked strong emotions or were simply unique. That’s what I want: for the scene to feel like it happened yesterday, real in your mind because of how I wrote it.”

“Did that feedback ever surprise you? Or did you smugly say, ‘Yep, that’s exactly what I intended’?”

“No smugness. That kind of feedback usually comes first from my five kids: ‘Dad, you screwed this up,’ or ‘This scene is chef’s kiss.’ They’ll send emojis. When readers later say something similar, I’ve usually already heard it from the kids. What makes me happiest is when readers say starting FDR Drive feels like being back with old friends, Benny and Nora returning. That’s exactly what I want.”

“Speaking of old friends, when you’re creating unforgettable characters, do you have any habits that help make them feel real?”

“For me, it’s easier. One key character, Benny Dugan, is based on my dear friend Ken McCabe, the greatest investigator I ever knew, who died in 2006. I try to honor him through Benny. Ken wore no socks, carried a revolver on his ankle, spoke with a Brooklyn accent, and was enormous. He called me Mr. Smooth; I called him Mr. Rough. He’d offer to ‘throw someone a beating,’ and I’d say, ‘No, Ken, please don’t.’ He once drove me to LaGuardia, siren blaring, shouting at people. By the time we arrived, I was sweating, but he just said, ‘Say hello home,’ as if nothing had happened. Painful as it is that he’s gone, writing about him gives me an advantage. I also base Nora Carlton partly on my daughter, a prosecutor in Manhattan, and blend in traits from my other kids. Early on, I struggled writing a protagonist until I realized it had to be a woman. That unlocked everything. Writing became a labor of love, being true to the composites of the people I care about. Characters come alive because they’re grounded in real people I know and love.”

“We talked about ambiguity, threads left open versus tied up. Is there a sweet spot?”

“I don’t know. I rely on Patrice. She’s ‘every reader.’ She’ll tell me, ‘End this thread,’ or ‘Leave this one open.’ Almost always, she’s right. I’m married to a test reader, and that’s how I figure it out.”

“Your novels explore the justice system in depth. How do you keep the narrative gripping without drowning readers in detail?”

“By worrying about it constantly. I know the system inside and out, but readers don’t want to hear all that. I always ask myself: Am I giving too much? For example, in my current espionage book, I went deep into paint analysis. Patrice read it and said, ‘Drown some of these puppies. Way too much paint.’ Tom Clancy was brilliant, but often went too far into submarines and torpedo tubes. I don’t want to overwhelm like that. My guardrails are constant self-check and Patrice’s honest feedback.”

“Have you always wanted to be a writer?”

“No. I loved writing. I thought I might be a journalist. I never imagined novels. I always wrote, though: speeches, emails to the FBI workforce. Writing was part of me. My agent once pitched me to co-write a novel with James Patterson. I said no, I wanted to write myself. My nonfiction editor later encouraged me to try fiction, saying it gives me the freedom to show readers the worlds I know. I resisted, but once I started, I was hooked. It’s harder than nonfiction. You’re not just checking facts; you’re building a world. But I like complicated things. And I don’t need to invent car chases or helicopter jumps to make it exciting. Reality is exciting if told truthfully.”

“And maybe that truth is what makes a story linger.”

“I hope so. That’s my goal, to draw people in and have the story stay with them. And no, I won’t be writing sex scenes. My kids made me promise. But believe it or not, there’s not much sex in counterterrorism or espionage.”

“But there is dancing.”

“Yes, there is.”

“And that’s just vertical.” As the conversation wound down, what lingered was not just the stature of James Comey, the public figure, but the voice of a writer intent on making his characters real, his stories truthful, and his readers compelled to stay a little longer in the world he’d created. For Comey, fiction is not an escape from his past, but a means of reshaping it, transforming experience into narrative and memory into meaning. Perhaps that is the mark of every story that endures: it refuses to be forgotten, echoing long after the book is closed.

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, Killer Nashville Magazine, and the Killer Nashville University streaming service. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

James Comey has been a prosecutor, defense lawyer, general counsel, teacher, writer, and leader. He most recently served in government as Director of the FBI. He has written two bestselling nonfiction books, A Higher Loyalty and Saving Justice, as well as three novels in his Nora Carleton crime fiction series.

https://jamescomeybooks.com/

“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”

Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

I had a wonderful opportunity to just chat with bestselling author and mystery legend, Susan Isaacs, as a follow-up to my interview with her for my monthly Writer’s Digest column. It was a wonderful conversation. I needed a break from writing. She needed a break from writing. Like a fly on the wall (and with Susan’s permission), I thought I’d share the highlights of our conversation here with you.

“Susan, I just finished Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown. I loved it. And I now have singer Jim Croce’s earworm in my head.”

“Me, too.” She laughed.

“I love your descriptions in your prose. Right on the mark. Not too much, not too little.”

“Description can be hard.”

“But you do it so well. Any tips?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I do. Two things. First, I see it in my head. I’m looking at the draft, and I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing here.’”

I laugh. “So, what do you do?”

“Well in Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown, the character with the problem is a college professor, a really nice woman, who teaches film, and her area of specialization is big Hollywood Studio films. When she was five, her parents were murdered. It was an arson murder, and she was lucky enough to jump out of the window of the house and save herself. So, Corie, who’s my detective, a former FBI agent, is called on, but not through herself, but through her dad, who’s a retired NYPD detective. He was a detective twenty years earlier, interviewing this little girl, April is her name, and they kept up a kind of birthday-card-Christmas-card relationship.”

“And the plot is great.”

“Thanks, but in terms of description, there was nothing there. But there were so many things to work with. So, after I get that structure, I see it in my head, and I begin to type it in.”

“The description?”

“Plot, then description.”

“And you mentioned another thing you do?”

“Research. And you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to do it. I had a great time with this novel. For example, it was during COVID, and nobody was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘Write’ so I had the leisure time to look at real estate in New Brunswick online, and I found the house with pictures that I knew April should live in, and that’s simply it. And I used that house because now April is being threatened, someone is trying to kill her twenty years after her parent’s death. Though the local cops are convinced it had nothing to do with her parents’ murder, but that’s why Corie’s dad and Corie get pulled into it.”

“So basically, when you do description, you get the structure, the bones of your plot, and then you go back and both imagine and research, at your leisure, the details that really set your writing off. What’s the hardest thing for you as a writer?”

“You know, I think there are all sorts of things that are hard for writers. For me, it’s plot. I’ll spend much more time on plot, you know, working it out, both from the detective’s point-of-view and the killer’s point-of-view, just so it seems whole, and it seems that what I write could have happened. For me, I don’t want somebody clapping their palm to their forehead and saying, ‘Oh, please!’ So that’s the hard thing for me.”

“You’ve talked with me about how focused you get when you’re writing.”

“Oh, yes. When you’re writing, you’re really concentrating. We were having work done on the house once and they were trying to do something in the basement, I forget what it was. But there was this jackhammer going, and I was upstairs working. It was when my kids were really young and, you know, I had only a limited amount of time to write every day, and so I was writing and I didn’t even hear the jackhammer until, I don’t know, the dog put her nose or snout on my knee and I stopped writing for a moment and said, ‘What is that?’ and then I heard it.”

“But it took your dog to bring you out of your zone. Not the jackhammer.”

“You get really involved.”

“Sort of transcending into another universe.”

“The story pulls you in. The weird thing is that I have ADD, ADHD, whatever they call it. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then, back when the jackhammer was in the basement. In fact, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought, ‘This is how I am.’ You know, I go from one thing to the next. But people with ADHD can’t use that as an excuse not to write because you hyper-focus.”

“That’s interesting.”

“You don’t hear the jackhammers.”

“So things just flow.”

“Well, it’s always better in your head than on the page,” she says, “as far as writing goes.”

“I’d love to see your stories in your head, then, because your writing is great. As far as plotting, the book moves along at a fast clip. I noticed, distinctly, that your writing style is high with active verbs. Is that intentional or is that something that just comes naturally from you?”

“I think for me it just happens. It’s part of the plotting.”

“Well, it certainly moves the story forward.”

“Yes, I can see it would. But, no, I don’t think ‘let me think of an active verb’. You know,” she laughs, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even think of an active verb.”

“That’s funny. We’re all made so differently. I find it fascinating that, after all you’ve published, your Corie Geller novel is going to be part of the first series you’ve ever written. Everything else has been standalones.”

“Yes. I’m already writing the next book. Look, for forty-five years, I did mysteries. I did sagas. I did espionage novels. I did, you know, just regular books about people’s lives. But I never wrote a series because I was afraid I after writing one successful mystery, that I would be stuck, and I’d be writing, you know, my character and compromising positions with, Judith Singer goes Hawaiian in the 25th sequel. I didn’t want that. I wanted to try things out. So now that I’ve long been in my career this long, I thought I would really like to do a series because I want a family, another family.”

“Another family?”

“I mean, I have a great family. I have a husband who’s still practicing law. I have children, I have grandchildren, but I’m ready for another family.”

“And this series is going to be it?”

“It’s not just a one-book deal. I wanted more. So, I made Corie as rich and as complicated and as believable as she could be. It’s one thing to have a housewife detective. It’s another to have someone who lives in the suburbs, but who’s a pro. And she’s helped by her father, who was in the NYPD, who has a different kind of experience.”

“And that gives you a lot to work with. And, in an interesting way, at this stage of your life, another family to explore and live with.” I look at the clock. “Well, I guess we both need to get back to work.”

“This has been great. When you work alone all day, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone.”

We both laughed and we hung up. It was a break in the day. But a good break. I think Susan fed her ADHD a bit with the distraction, but for me, I learned a few things in just the passing conversation. Writers are wonderful. If you haven’t done it today, don’t text, don’t email, but pick up the phone and call a writer friend you know. I hung up the phone with Susan, invigorated, ready to get back to work. As she said, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone. As I would say, it’s nice to talk to someone and remember that, as writers, we are not alone, and we all have so much to learn.

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Susan Isaacs is the author of fourteen novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat, and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/

Author Amulya Malladi on “Research: Doing It, Loving It, Using It, and Leaving It Out”

Amulya Malladi interviewed by Clay Stafford

---

“I’m talking today with international bestselling author Amulya Malladi about her latest book A Death in Denmark. What I think is fascinating is your sense of endurance. This book—research and writing—took you ten years to write.”

She laughs. “You know, it was COVID. We all didn’t have anything better to do. I was working for a Life Sciences Company, a diagnostic company, so I was very busy. But you know, outside of reading papers about COVID, this was the outlet. And so that’s sort of how long it took to get the book done. I had the idea for a long time. I needed a pandemic to convince me that I could write a mystery.”

“Which is interesting because you’d never written a mystery before. Having never worked in that genre, I’m sure there was a learning curve there for you.”

“A lot of research.”

“You love reading mysteries, so you already had a background in the structure of that, but what you’ve written in A Death in Denmark is a highly focused historical work. It’s the attention and knowledge of detail that really made the book jump for me. Unless you’re a history major with emphasis on the Holocaust and carrying all of that information around in your head, you’re going to have to find factual information somewhere. How did you do that?”

“Studies.”

“Studies?”

“You’ll need a lot of the studies that are available. Luckily, my husband’s doing a Ph.D. He has a student I.D., so I could download a lot of studies with it. Otherwise, I’d be paying for it. Also, I work in diagnostic companies. I read a lot of clinical studies. So these are all peer-reviewed papers that are based on historic research, and they are published, so that is a great source, a reference.”

“But what if you don’t have that access?”

“You can go to your library and get access to it as well. If you’re looking for that kind of historic research, this is the place to go.”

“Not the Internet? Or books, maybe?”

“Clinical studies and peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed clinical studies, they’re laborious.”

“And we’re talking, for this book, information directly related to the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and Denmark’s involvement in that history?”

“You have to read through a lot to get to it. And it’s not fiction. They’re just throwing the data out there. But it’s a good source, especially for writers because we need to know about two-hundred-percent to write five-percent.”

“The old Hemingway iceberg reference.”

“To feel comfortable writing that five, you need to know so much more. I could write actually a whole other book about everything that I learned at that time. And that is a good place to go. So I recommend going and doing, not just looking at, you know, Wikipedia, and all that good stuff, but actually going and looking at those papers.”

“Documents from that time period and documents covering that time period and the involvement of the various individuals and groups.”

“When you read a paper, you see like fifteen other sources for those papers, and then you can go into those sources and learn more.”

I laugh this time. “For me, research is like a series of rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. How do you know when to stop?”

“The way I was doing it is I research as I write, and I do it constantly. You know, simple things I’m writing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he has to turn on this street. What street was that again? I can’t remember.’ I have Maps open constantly, and I know Copenhagen, the city, very well. But, you know, I’ll forget the street names. That sometimes takes work. I’m just writing the second book and I wanted Gabriel Præst, my main character and an ex-Copenhagen cop, to go into this café and it turned into a three-hour research session.”

“Okay. Sounds like a rabbit hole to me.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of that hole, because, literally, that was one paragraph, and I just spent three hours going into it. And now I know way too much about this café that I didn’t need to know about. Again, to write that five-percent, I needed to know two-hundred percent. I am curious. I like to know this. So suddenly, now I have that café on my list because we’re going to Copenhagen in a few weeks, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we need to go check that out.’”

“So you’re actually doing onsite research, as well?”

“Yes. I use it all. I think as you write you will see, ‘Okay, now I got all the information that I need.’

“And then you write. Research done?”

“No. I was editing and again I was like, ‘Is this really correct? Did I get this information correct? Let me go check again.’”

“Which is why, I guess, your writing rings so true.”

“I think it is healthy for writers to do that, especially if you’re going to write historical fiction or any kind of fiction that requires research. Here’s the important thing. I think with research, you have to kind of find the source always. You know? It’s tempting to just end up in Wikipedia because it’s easy. You get there. But you know, Wikipedia has done a pretty decent job of asking for sources, and I always go into the source. You know you can keep going in and find the truth. I read Exodus while I lived in India. One million years ago, I was a teenager, and I don’t know if you’ve read Leon Uris’s Exodus, but there’s this famous story in that book about the Danish King. When the Germans came, they said, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask the Jews to wear the Star of David,’ and the story goes, based on Exodus, that the king rode the streets with the Star of David. I thought that was an amazing story. That was my first introduction to Denmark, like hundreds of years before I met my husband, and that story stayed with me. And then I find out it’s not a true story. You know? You know, Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’ And so it was like, ‘Oh.’”

“Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.”

“No, and the apple didn’t fall. I mean, it’s simple things we do that with, right? With Casablanca, it’s like you said, you know, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ And she never said that. She said, ‘Play it.’ And you realize these become part of the story.”

“Secondary sources then, if I get what you’re saying, are suspect.”

“Research helps you figure out, ‘Okay, that never happened.’”

“When you say that you’re writing, and you’re incorporating the research into your writing sometimes you can’t, you’re not in a spot where the research goes into it. So, how do you organize your research that you’re not immediately using?”

“I don’t do that. I’m sure there are people who do that well. I’m sure there are people who are more disciplined than I am. I’m barely able to block my life. I mean, it’s hard enough, so you know if I do some research, I know there are people who take notes. I have notes, but those are the basics. ‘Oh, this guy’s name is this, his wife is this, he’s this old, please don’t say he’s from this street, he’s living on this street…’ Some basics I’ll have, so I can go back and look. But a lot of the times I’m like, ‘What was this guy’s husband doing again?’ I have to go find it. I won’t read the notes in all honesty, even if I make them. So for me, it’s important to go in and look at that point.”

“And this is why you write and research at the same time.”

“And this is why maybe it’s not the best way to do the research. It takes longer, like I said, you spend three hours doing something that is not important, but hey, that was kind of fun for me. I was curious to remember about Dan Turéll’s books, because I hadn’t read them for a while.”

“Some writers don’t like research. You like research. And for historicals, there’s really no way around it, is there?”

“I take my time and I think I really like the research. I have fun doing it.”

“Does it hurt to leave some of the research out?”

“Oh, my God, yes. My editor said, ‘You know, Amulya, we need the World War II stuff more.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, really? Watch me.’ So I spend all this time and I basically wrote the book that my character, the dead politician, writes.”

“This is an integral part of the story, for those who haven’t read the book.”

“I wrote a large part of that book that she is supposed to have written and put it in this book. I put in footnotes.”

“Footnotes?”

“My editor calls me and she’s like, ‘I don’t think we can have footnotes and fiction.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ And she goes, ‘You know, you can make a list of all of this and put it in the back of the book. We’ll be happy to do that. But you can’t have footnotes.’ I felt so bad taking it out because this was really good stuff. You know, these were important stories.”

“So it does hurt to leave these things out.”

“I did all kinds of research. I read the secret reports, the daily reports that the Germans wrote, because you can find pictures of that. I kind of went in and did all of that to kind of make this as authentic as possible, and then she said, ‘Could you please, like make it part of the book, and not as…’ She’s like ‘People are going to lose interest.’ So yeah, it does hurt. It really didn’t make me happy to do that.”

“You reference real companies, use real restaurants, use real clothing, use real drinks. You use real foods. Do you have some sort of legal counsel that has looked over this to make sure nobody is going to sue you for anything you write? Or how do you protect yourself in your research?”

“When I’m being not-so-nice about something, I am careful. I have not heard anything from legal. Maybe I should ask tomorrow. I think Robert B. Parker said this in an interview once: ‘If I’m going to say something bad about a restaurant, I make the name up.’”

“Circling back, you do onsite research, as well.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been to Berlin several times, so I know the streets of Berlin. I know this process. I know what they feel like. It’s easier to write about places you’ve been to, but the details you will forget. Even though I know Copenhagen very well, I still forget the details. ‘What is that place called again? What was that restaurant I used to go to?’ And then I have to go look in Maps, and find, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s called here. How do they spell this again?’ But I think, yes, from a research perspective, if you are wanting to set a whole set of books somewhere, and if you have a chance to go there, go. Unless you’re setting a book in Afghanistan, or you know, Iraq, then don’t go. Because I did set a book partly in Afghanistan and I remember I talked to a friend of mine. She’s a journalist for AP and she said, ‘Oh, you should come to Kabul.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so, just tell me what you know so I can learn from that and write it.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll have a great time on it.’ And I said, ‘I will not have a great time. No, not doing that.’ But I think, yes…”

“When it comes to perceived safety, you’re like me, an armchair researcher. Right?”

“Give me a book. Give me a clinical study. Give me a peer-reviewed paper, I’ll be good.”

“What advice do you have for new writers?”

“Edit. Edit all the time. I’ve met writers, especially when they are new, they say things like, ‘Oh, my God! If I edit too much, it takes the essence away. I always say, ‘No, it just takes the garbage away.’ Edit. Edit, until you are so sick of that book. Because, trust me, when the book is finished and you read it, you’ll want to edit it again because you missed a few things. I tell everybody, ‘Edit, edit, edit. And don’t fall in love with anything you write while you’re writing it because you may have to delete it.’ You know, you may write one-hundred pages and realize, I went on the wrong track and now I have to go delete it.”

“And take out the footnotes.”

“Yeah, and take out the footnotes.”

---

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Clay’s book links: https://linktr.ee/claystafford

Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/

Amulya’s book link: https://linktr.ee/amulyamalladi