(typewriter clacking) (romantic music in background) - [Lily] Hi, my name is Lily King, and this is "Five Tuesdays in Winter."

It's a collection of short stories, mostly about all kinds of love, from romantic love, to sibling love, to passionate love between coworkers.

(romantic music) - How did you assemble this collection?

I was completely entranced by it.

It's as you said, it's an exploration of the vagaries of love, and all of its disguises, all of its forms, how it can twist us, as well as how it can heal us.

- It was interesting to assemble them.

And one is, is a 14 year old girl, just at the cusp, just at the moment when she discovers that she might be a writer, and then somebody in her mid-twenties just started to make that commitment.

And then, somebody later who is working on her third book.

And, and those were sort of the pillars.

They're very, very different characters in different situations, but I felt like those were the pillars of the collection, kind of holding it all up.

(romantic music playing) - What feels easier to you, novels or short stories?

- You know, a novel requires so much more of that kind of real commitment, but stories are hard.

I mean, to make a story really work, it's like a little tiny, you know, jewelry box, and it just, everything just has to be so, fit in so well.

And that's really what I wanna give people, you know kind of some fresh memory, you know, some some interesting situations and you know that they go on kind of an emotional arc of their own as they read the story.

- Lily, thank you so much for being here.

This has been a delight.

- No, thank you so much.

I loved it so much.

- [JT Ellison] And thank you for watching a word on words.

For more of our conversation, please visit a word on words.org.

I'm JT Ellison, keep reading.

- [Lily] I don't often know where the ending is.

I certainly remember writing the ending of my first novel.

I was just writing along and I wrote this sentence and it was like, my pencil wouldn't go anymore.

But there, there is kind of a, just a moment where you, oh!

I've said what I had to say and that's it.