In this week’s episode, JP and Crys discuss what they have planned for the show going forward now that their Journey through Tarot is complete.
Question of the week: What topics would you like us to cover? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode 111 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is September 8th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: How has your writing week been, Crys?
Crys: It’s been pretty good. I have set a deadline for myself to finish this book before the 17th because that’s when the kid goes on the vacation for a week. It’s kind of their equivalent to the North’s Spring break. And I don’t wanna be stressed out while we’re running around creation.
The deadline to upload this book I believe is September 27th, so that should give my editors time to go through it. But it does mean that I have to write a chapter every day, even on the weekends, which I haven’t done in a while, or those last few days I’m gonna be holed up in my room, ignoring life and everyone, possibly buying a round of Brie, a bottle of kombucha, and a jar of jam, because that is my secret brain food when I am not going to see anyone and not leave my house, like not leave my room except for like short walks to keep my body going. And then I just Brie, and drink kombucha so I don’t screw my tummy up with all Brie, and I get lots of words done. There’s my magic ritual.
JP: Brie, kombucha, and jam. What kind of jam?
Crys: Raspberry, if I can get it. I slice the Brie up, and I put the jam on the Brie, and then a drink kombucha.
JP: That sounds wonderful. That sounds wonderful. Yes, that does sound wonderful.
Crys: The first time I did this, I was in a hotel like on a personal writing retreat. I was with a friend, she had to go for the day, can’t remember. We were in a hotel in her hometown and she had to go, I think, for a funeral. It was weird. And so I was by myself and I just had my Brie, kombucha, and jam. And I think that was the first day I had more than 10,000 words because I was literally just writing sprints. And after every sprint, I’d take a 10-minute walk and then I’d come back and I’d do more.
JP: I like it, sounds wonderful.
Crys: It’s not sustainable for like long-term life, but for an intense writing retreat, it’s pretty decent.
JP: Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Crys: How about you?
JP: My week, I’ve been in Montana. Yay. We’re staying at a mutual friend’s townhouse, and I get to overlook a lake with mountains in the background.
And for writing it’s been okay. I wouldn’t say it’s stagnant, but it has been kind of stagnant. It was a vacation week. I’m kind of enjoying myself. I took my watch off, which I never do. And I just kind of don’t care what time it is. I just kind of go with the flow.
I’ve been working on a project for J, another art project. And so I’ve been focusing a lot of my creative energy on that. But I’ve just been having a wonderful time, I’m not gonna lie. It’s been fantastic. So I will come back to the real world after a 20 hour drive this weekend. And then I’ll probably get back to life.
But like book two of the series is with the editor. So we do one final like line editor and then we do the proofread. Both of those have been really fast for the book one, so I’m assuming it’s gonna be relatively fast for book two. Book three is out to beta readers, so that’s outta my hand. So it’s been really nice because I don’t have like huge projects sitting on me and I’m just trying to push everything off my plate. So it’s been nice. Yes, it’s been good and very relaxing. I recommend it to everyone.
Crys: So one thing I just wanna say to our listeners is we have been talking about using this particular Montana location for a writer’s retreat. So if that’s something you’re interested in, please just drop us a comment. Like we’d love to know, just like vague interest, would you be up for that?
I also wanted to add that I realized this week that I have two releases on September 1st scheduled, but one’s German and one’s English. So it’s two completely different markets, so it’s gonna be fine. But yeah, hopefully September pays well.
JP: This September? Like we’re in September…
Crys: Oh, no, I keep saying that. October 1st. I keep saying that, I keep thinking I’m still in August, even though it’s clearly September. I freaked my German copywriter copy editor out when I said that. She’s like, but September 1st was like yesterday. I was like no, no, no, man, don’t trust me.
Crys: So this is going to be a relatively short episode today because we are gonna let you guys know kind of what we’re planning on doing. So JP and I have been talking about moving to more of an interview format for a while, and we’re finally gonna get there. Not right away, we have to load up for a couple of weeks on some interviews.
We’re also gonna kind of move to a seasonal format. And when I say seasonal, I mean that we’re gonna pick a topic and go kind of in depth on that topic for a while, and then move on to another topic. It’s not gonna be a time-based thing, it’s gonna be like, how many top subtopics do we have under this big topic until we’re done, and then move on to the next one.
And the first topic that we’re gonna be talking about is marketing because this has been coming up so often when I’ve been talking to authors. Whether you’re releasing your first book or you’re a couple books in, they’re like, what do you do to market? What can you do to market? What’s reasonable to do to market for your first book versus 10 books in?
And I know there’s a million podcasts out there on all the different topics of marketing, so what we’re wanting to do is just pick this topic, stay with it, cover as many things we can with as many experts as we can, over the course of our season. And we have some people picked out we need to reach out to, we have some topics picked out that we don’t have people for yet. And so that’s what we’re gonna be doing in the next couple weeks is putting all of that together.
Over the next couple weeks, we’re gonna have a mini season. And this is one JP brought up, since we just finished our Journey through tarot with the Major Arcana, we wanna spend a couple of weeks talking about intuitive writing, using tarot as a tool. So what we’ll be doing is we’ll be going over some of the basics of tarot and how you can use them. We’ll probably touch back on some different card spreads that we’ve used to guide our tarot, and just kind of getting a little bit more in depth on that. We’ll link our previous episodes.
I’m not sure if we’re going to have Patreon exclusive episodes during this time. We might, we’ll see. At the max, I think we’ll probably take four weeks on this, we don’t quite know yet. That’s something we’re gonna be sitting down and planning for this month or this week. And then after that, we’ll start our season on marketing. So that’s where we’re at right now.
JP: Excellent. And I would say too, if you have any topic out there that you want us to cover, let us know in the comments. If you have any big questions about marketing, like even if we have it written down, ask us because we’re only two people, so we may miss a question or two. And we would love to know what your feedback is so that we can supply you the content that you’re asking for.
Crys: Excellent. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this and every other week. We’ll be keeping you updated on what the new exclusive episodes will be for our Patreon as we figure that out as we’re going into this new phase. And we hope that you will stick around with us, even though we’re changing our format a bit. We will still be having our every week updates on where we’re at, what’s going on, and we’ll still be doing transcripts. We love you all and we’ll see you next week.
JP: See you later.
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