Episode 16: Do You Have a Plan B?

Crys: Hello friends. This is Episode 16 of the Write Away Podcast. And we’re recording this—I actually do not know what the date is—the 16th of November, 2020, for historical prosperity. I have some exciting news. I have asked a friend to co-host the podcast with me. You all have met him already, JP Rindfleisch. I’m going to say your name different every time, I swear. Probably everyone does.

JP: Perfect. We’ll just hear all the variations.

Crys: And I’ve said several times that I’ve just had a hard time figuring out how to be consistent with this podcast. I have a lot easier time talking with someone than just speaking into the void. I have a really easy time talking to JP. He was really excited at the possibility of joining me. And so here we are. Hooray! Excited.

Okay. So first we’re going to talk about how our writing week slash business week has gone. So how have the writing things been for you, JP?

JP: So I think I am on the sixth week that my day job has taken me to a hotel. But finally I started to get back into the routine and I’m working on revisions with my collaborator. So… making up a process, and I think in two weeks we’ll be ready to send it off to the editor.

Crys: Ooh. Do you have that scheduled or will it just be ready then?

JP: It will be ready then we’re still working on finding one, but we’ll find one by then. I’m sure. Yeah.

Crys: Cool. For me, I—gosh. I’m trying to remember if I—so the week before on Friday I finished or Saturday I finished the novel, and then this last week was very much a catching up on life week. There was a lot of driving involved, but I managed to get some paperwork I desperately needed.

I’ve started getting organized, which is probably my biggest like business win. I am coming out of a low energy state into a high energy state with a lot of eagerness to do things. Oh! Biggest win of this last week, completely slipping my mind, is I’m joining J Thorn and working with him on The Author Success Mastermind website.

If you go to www.theauthorsuccessmastermind.com—big ol’ mouthful there, we’ll link below in the show notes— you’ll just see a login screen, but what it is it is a community of writers. It is a learning resource. One of the things that I will be working on over the next few months is getting more information on the front end. I haven’t quite decided how to do that, but that’s, uh, where a lot of my planning energy has been going. So I’m super excited about that.

JP: Yeah. I’m really excited to see where you’re going to take it. I’ve kind heard a little bit about it here and there. And um, I’m a member too. So I’m excited to see where you’re going to take it.

Crys: I’m going to nerd out a little more about the strengths, the Becca Syme’s strengths  or CliftonStrengths, because I thought I was good at ideas. And when I told JP a couple days ago, I was like, “Hey, why don’t you go ahead and come up with some ideas to talk about on the podcast?”

He was like, okay, cool. And then yesterday he’s, “Hey, I’ve got 43 ideas.” And it’s… you are a god among men. That is excellent.

JP: I had to stop myself.

Crys: No, don’t stop yourself! Write all the ideas. That’s amazing. He has high Ideation and that is the difference between someone who is good at ideas and someone who has high Ideation, and I discovered that this week.

Okay. So one, so he started entering a few of them on, this note tracking software I’m using called Notion, and one popped out at me and just kind of hit me in the guts. I was like, why don’t we talk about that one tonight? And that was: Is there a plan B?

I am full-time author, a business author, authorpreneur whatever you wish to call it. And I got into it both out of desire, but desire didn’t get me anywhere in the years of working a “safe” job that summarily booted me when it was no longer convenient for them, as they will tend to do. I got into writing and it worked for me and I’ve stuck with it.

So what would happen if writing didn’t work for me again? I’ve thought about that here and there. Not fully, because there’s a stubborn part of me—it’s just, there is no plan B. I’m going to, I’m just moving. I’m always moving forward. There is no fallback plan, per se. Occasionally, I think about selling feet pics on Instagram. And I just, that seems like too much work.

JP: Hey, there’s a market for it.

Crys: Apparently.  Apparently… but that’s all this human interaction…

I would probably, I’d probably have to go back to programming for other people, software programming. Which wouldn’t be the end of the world. But like, just all of me wants to die at the thought of sitting at a desk in business casual, which—most programming places don’t require you to dress up, but the one I was at previously did, and so that’s my hellscape, is having to wear business casual—sitting at an open office or what do they call them? Open? And working for someone else all day long, from eight to five. So that would probably be the plan B, but I honestly don’t think that will happen, because I am too forward motion oriented.

But if it did, that’s probably what I do. The other plan B is just to move in with my parents and be a mooch, which I have done. 

Yeah,

JP: that’s always an option I might take.

Crys: Hey, we just need to rebuild, recover.

So when you were thinking of plan B, do you think of it as in “if my current career isn’t working out” or do you think about it as “if my push for a writing career doesn’t work out…?”

JP: I originally put this as if my writing career didn’t work out, and that—it’s because I had this ideation or this belief that everything was black and white and that while I was still in the nine to five, and this was years ago when I started listening to podcasts and now I’m starting to shift a little closer and closer to the whole writer’s dream.

But I always had this mindset that, I am a writer trapped in a nine to five job. But that’s just not true. I am a writer, but I think that’s a limitation that I’ve put on myself. Because not only am I a writer, but I’m also a scientist. I have a degree in biochemistry. I’ve spent years in quality departments and I do arts and just so many more things.

So when I thought of this question, I always thought about how everyone puts everything in one bucket. And how, you and I have talked about this and also J Thorn with his RevolutionFI podcast. He started to talk a little bit more about this, but we are so focused on putting everything in one bucket that we don’t really view what we are capable of bringing to the table.

And sometimes those are multifaceted. I don’t want a plan B, I want a plan with so many different facets that if one string doesn’t work, I have so many other strings that can keep me up. So that’s, I think that’s where this question came from.

Crys: Yeah. I think we’re both on the same, like push there.

And one of the things I like about what we’ve been talking about, of you being interested in pursuing more of the science aspect of your knowledge is looking at the writing to possibly support, to provide the financial cushion so that you can take maybe a sucky paying job that really ignites your brain.

JP: Exactly. Because I personally like, the more and more I think about it, I would love to be back in a research lab or to be looking at research data, because I’ve veered off of that on my career path to just financially support this idea that I want to be a writer one day when, realistically, like, why am I so focused on this one end goal that I’m hindering myself now?

So I’m right there with you, where you want to take those different paths and take the sucky job just so that you can have the experience.

Crys: Do you think that this last year with all of its craziness of being stuck at home because of COVID, well, you’ve been still shuffled around everywhere, but, still, being in really weird situations has emphasize that, or was all of that like pretty set before this year happened?

JP: It emphasized it for sure. I think this whole strange experience that we’re all going through has really, for me, led to an introspection. What do I actually want? What can I get rid of? Because we’re stuck in this weird state where everything has changed. Everything’s so different. And now you just have to question what is actually important to me, because there are so many pieces that aren’t, that we just went through the motions on before.

I guess I want to throw the question back on you, how do you think COVID has made you take this viewpoint? Why did you have such a strong reaction to plan B? And was it anything correlated to COVID?

Crys: I don’t know that it was COVID, actually. I don’t think has changed my life as much as it’s changed a lot of people’s. One, it hasn’t hit Costa Rica as hard as it’s hit a lot of places. And we definitely have had a hard core lockdown, but I have my kid, I have a roommate, so I had, I don’t know, 95% of my social necessities fulfilled between those two in real life interactions. And then all of my digital friends.

I am very, very secure in my extreme introvert status. And yet anytime I look at WhatsApp and count up the number of conversations I’ve had in the last 24 hours, it is at least 20 different conversations.

I think that what COVID helped me was that everybody got on my level. As far as plan B, I think less influence on that, but it did give me some very necessary downtime. There weren’t a lot of social things I had to say no to, because I didn’t have the energy. No one could go to social things, so it was very helpful for me.

The thing I’ve been wrestling with is—ever since last year, about this time, I hit some really high financial goals. And until then I was like, I’m going to be a writer and a writer only, and that is the only thing I’m going to do. that’s how I make all my money. And then I hit some pretty good financial goals and I was like, okay, ding, ding, done. I’ve just been wandering in the wilderness since then. Okay, well. What now? Like what now?

I don’t know.

I’m finally starting to get an idea and I actually think COVID interrupted that thought process, maybe, because I couldn’t see what the world was going to look like in six months. I couldn’t see what the world was going to look like in a year. I still can’t, but maybe a little better now.

But it did take the pressure off to wonder what everything was going to look like, because I knew that it was too crazy. And so that might’ve actually given my brain space to pick up different threads that I’m putting into motion now.

I know that J. and a lot of other people who’ve been in this writing and publishing game far longer than us are huge proponents of having multiple income streams. Joanna Penn is one. But then there’s other authors like Lindsay Buroker, and like, a hundred, romance authors who, all they do is make their money off of books.

There’s nothing wrong with that at all ,but having had all my eggs in one basket once and had that taken away from me, especially with Amazon being the largest player in the game, so much of our income being, dependent on them—I’m very hesitant to put all of my eggs in the book world, the entertainment world, as much as I love being a writer, talking with writers, helping writers, all, every aspect of that business is just absolutely joyful for me. I do have other plans of owning real estate, investments, just trying to build up a bunch of little things so that I never need a plan B.

JP: And I think that’s a good path to take, because I think we often sell ourselves short by just having that one thing we want.

That’s just definitely a kind of a realization that I’ve had recently is, you don’t need one thing. You can have whatever you want.

Crys: You could have a million things.

 That actually was a limiting mindset I had. I realized this summer, like two, three months ago, I realized that somewhere in my brain, I was like, “You can’t make a ton of money from writing and have three other successful businesses because you’ve never seen anyone do that particular collection of things.”

And I realized, okay, no, I’ve never seen anyone be a writer and do all these other things. That doesn’t mean, one, that there’s nobody out there and I just don’t know them. But also, I can look at a lot of other examples of people who are, not only fabulously wealthy, but fabulously happy, and energized and jumping from one business to another and doing really well.

There’s some skills, particularly people skills that I need to work on, or at least find like my key people who are good at those things to take with me or put in place for projects. but if I feel like I need examples, they’re out there. I just need to go looking for them.

JP: Yeah.  Totally. All right.

Crys: We will convene again next week. JP will be with me just about every week now. Bye, JP.

JP: Bye, have a good one.