Rebecca Serle wrote In Five Years because a psychic once told her exactly who she would marry, and the psychic was right, and then the psychic was wrong. At 24, Serle sat for a medium reading that delivered a love-life prophecy: the name of her future husband, how she would meet him, when it would happen. She met him. The timing landed within a day. Then it turned out he was not, in fact, her future husband, because years later she met someone else, married him instead, and realized the psychic had given her the most interesting premise of her career.
"It was all true and I ended up meeting him and then like the timing was just like it was honestly off by a day," Serle tells Ponton on the season-one finale of Booked & Busy, a best-moments compilation pulling from ten guests. "Thank God it didn't work out because I ended up meeting my husband who was my genuine true soulmate. But, how crazy like this prophecy and then I end up meeting him but like it's not it's him but it's not him."
That slippage became the novel's engine: the idea that you can see what is coming and still have no idea what it will mean.
The psychic and the premise
"This idea that even if we can see what's coming, we can't see what it will mean," Serle says. "And that became the entry point of In Five Years, that you can see you could maybe see what's coming. Like we have ideas about our lives and then like how they're going to turn out and what we want and we can build and we can plan, but we can't ever actually know what the things that we want will look like or feel like in our actual life once we're there."
The book follows a lawyer who wakes up five years in the future for one hour, sees herself with a man who is not her fiancé, then returns to her present life with the knowledge that her plan is about to detonate. The prophecy framework is not metaphor. Serle got a real reading, met a real person under the exact circumstances described, and then watched the universe swerve. The wrongness mattered more than the accuracy.
The psychic incident is one of several manifestation moments across the episode. Serle is a self-identified manifestor, and Ponton admits the same: "I'm a manifestor. Oh, thank god. All right." Serle describes her writing process as feeling-first. "What is the feeling that I want to deliver here? And I get into that feeling and then I write the scene." Ponton calls it mind-blowing. "You write this and you feel this and then you read it and you feel the same thing."
Friendship as aspiration
The Danny-and-Dannie friendship at the center of In Five Years inspired a confession from Ponton: she was jealous. "Having that sense of friendship with Danny like almost kind of made me emotionally sad because I've always craved that friendship... And honestly, I think I was just jealous. That at the core of it."
Serle does not dispute the envy. She says it is aspirational by design. "I think part of the like unglamorous reality of that kind of friendship is that inevitably some sacrifices have to be made for like the differing lives that you start to lead... your lives grow in different directions and some people get married or some people don't... it becomes more and more challenging to prioritize each other."
She wrote the book while single, when her friends were her family. Now married with a daughter, she finds herself longing for the very thing she invented. "It is something that I even myself find like I long for." The novel sold the dream knowing the dream does not hold.
The grief of changing your mind
Several guests circle the same wound: what happens when your dream stops being your dream. Serle spent her entire life as an actor, then hit a wall. "I was coming up against but is this what I want to do? And it's that moment that happens when you realize your dreams change."
Ponton interrupts: "I'm quite literally going through that right now." She has spent months asking whether the plans she made at 18 are plans she still wants. "I was like is that really what I want or is that just something that I thought I wanted for the past like 10-ish years?"
Caitlin Bea delivers the framing that makes the grief legible. "We tell people never give up on your dreams. Make sure you're checking in with your dreams. There's that saying, you know, that like a crush is just a lack of information. And sometimes that's what a dream is... once you have more information and you see what it requires of you and what your life is like maybe you don't want to do it anymore and it's not a problem. It's not a failure to quote unquote give up on that dream."
Bea also lands the thesis on what the twenties are actually for. "The 20s are for experimenting... you need to try as many things so you know exactly what you like and what you don't like. Don't try to settle down into something... don't try to like pigeonhole yourself into some career or whatever in your 20s. No. Try everything."
Crying in the back of an Uber
Rebecca Yarros, author of Fourth Wing, admits the thing most publishing-three-books-a-year writers will not: this year has been the hardest of her life. "I've tried to be really honest about this because I do think when people see like, oh, you're publishing like three, four books a year... if you just say like, oh yeah, it's great, then people who are struggling feel worse... I have had multiple like burnout moments. I have had multiple times where I'm like on tour just like sobbing on the floor like in the shower."
Ponton names the specificity: "Crying in the back of an Uber. Very real."
Yarros is on book tour with her husband and baby daughter. Halfway through day one, she texts SOS. She is also producing five film adaptations. She loves her job and wakes up grateful and also sometimes cannot speak. Both are true.
Lucy Score, author of Things We Hide from the Light, has sent thousands of emails explaining why a character's name changes mid-scene in two of her books. Her editor asked her to change a name that was too similar to another character's. Score said okay, change it. The editor thought Score would change it. Score thought the editor would change it. The result: a character introduces someone, then in the next sentence another character says nice to meet you, different name. "I cannot tell you how many how many thousands of emails I've gotten over that."
After the second time, Score stopped agreeing to name changes. "Every time they say this name is too close, I say too bad."
The thing that made Ponton cry
Juliette Cross wrote Crown Tides, and Ponton read it the night before a big shoot, thinking it would be light. She posted herself sobbing on Instagram Stories. "I have not cried over a book like that in ages." Cross describes her writing process: index cards on the kitchen floor, no dinner for a week, DoorDash only. She thought she would map the timeline in a day. It took seven.
Cross also reveals the detail that will make Yarros readers spiral: Crown Tides contains the biggest plot twist of the entire series, and a villain who has been mentioned since book one but never met. Ponton guesses who it is. Cross says nothing.
Emma Brooks, Ponton's best friend, is the reason any of this exists. In 2021, they lived together in what Brooks calls "that rat apartment." Ponton came home with Crave by Tracy Wolff, a 500-page fantasy she picked up during a COVID quarantine in New York. "You loved it so much and it made me want to love something that much," Brooks says. That sentence is the origin story of the podcast.
Serle admits she does not listen to audiobooks, even though many are narrated in her voice. "I don't listen to myself, so what could possibly be left?" She has so much narrative in her head at any given time that she sometimes cannot listen to music with lyrics. "If it's been a big word day, I'd like some instrumental, please."
Ponton listens to playlists that match her book. When she read Throne of Glass, she played battle music. "They were on the battlefield and like the perfect song starts playing and like a scene is playing out in a book. Oh my god. It just feels like so serendipitous."
The psychic got it right and got it wrong, and Serle wrote the book about the gap between the two. The prophecy was accurate. The meaning was not. That is the space where In Five Years lives.