This week, Crys and JP talk about their top three accomplishments of 2020, their top five media that they’ve enjoyed in 2020, and about goals and plans for 2021.
Show Notes
Movies and TV
The Magicians
Umbrella Academy
Lovecraft Country
Onward
How to Train Your Dragon
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
Picard
The Good Place
The Queen’s Gambit
Books
The Techniques of the Selling Writer
Digital Minimalism
Nonviolent Communication
Atomic Habits
You’re a Badass at Making Money
Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout?
Links provided may be affiliate links.
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. This is episode number 23 of the Write Away Podcast and it is December 29th, 2020, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost, JP Rindfleisch.
So how has writing been? It has been holiday times.
JP: So good for me because, hey, it’s weird, weird times we’re in. Yeah, so normally this time of year we host my partner’s family and we can’t, so I instead I’ve been writing and it’s been going well.
Crys: I had plans to be like normal, productive, because normally on a holiday week, I work at least half speed. There’s things I need to do… shopping, I needed to do all that, but I normally work at least half speed.
But Monday before Christmas, I had an anxiety spiral because this is the first Christmas post separation in my relationship. And I just crashed, I fell into an anxiety nap and then just was like, all right, efff it, this is what this week is.
I think I got some writing done on Monday, but I did not put it on my list. And I was like, Oh, let me go just review what I did for December. And I clicked through my weekly archive of to-do lists and the week of Christmas had zero, literally zero things.
I normally feel like it got zero things done that week. I apparently actually got zero things done and I thought that’s not true. I just didn’t put all the Christmas stuff on there.
Christmas with the child is delightful. My son, he’s a hyper child, so I expected him to go like whirling, dervish, tear through everything because he was basically the only one who got presents this year. And that’s fine.
But he did not. He just oohed and aahed over every package as we presented it to him. My inner child is rip the damn thing up now. Okay? Get up in there. I want to see how you feel about the thing that’s inside.
I appreciate that he appreciates the moment and I’m like, okay, like you haven’t been consumerized quite yet, child. And that is beautiful. Apparently, his cousin who’s nine months older than him is very similar. She took her time opening her presents and I’m like, I don’t understand you, but I love you.
JP: Yeah. My nephew did the same thing this year. My side of the family they got together, but I chose not to. And so I dropped off presents at the house and disappeared quickly. And then they zoom called me. So I got to watch them all open their presents. And my nephew just slowly opening the paper.
And I’m just like, what are you doing? Just tear the thing apart.
Crys: Are you an opiate or a child?
JP: Are you saving the paper for later?
Crys: I never got that. Anyways. That’s a whole different side trail. This is our last episode of 2020. Fairwell and good riddance.
JP: May I never see you again.
Crys: Yes, indeed. Okay.
So we’re going to review the year a bit, and then we’re going to talk about 2021, just for us personally. So this is more about a personal catch-up. No big topic, no big, great ideas.
But I think it’s really good to review. I like reviewing, been doing a lot of that this week. So we’re going to go over what our top three challenges were of 2020 outside of the global, a probably at least I’ve chosen not to focus on that because we’ve all had that craziness.
Our top three accomplishments of 2020, our top five media, because we can’t contain ourselves, that we’ve enjoyed in 2020. And then we’ll talk about our goals and plans for 2021. Yeah. All right. You must start us off with your challenges or one challenge. We can figure out how we go back and forth.
JP: Yeah. So for me, I think the biggest challenge was the day job. As I’m trying to get more and more into the writer world, day job this year has been a big challenge. We have to go to various locations for my job. And for a couple of times I’ve had to do extended stays than what was planned.
And that’s just really thrown off a lot of the like day to day routines. What it has taught me though is like, how to figure out how to change routines when your schedule goes from first shift to third shift and some things stayed and some things went.
Yeah, I would not do well with the changing of the shifts.
JP: Yes. It was a treat to say the least.
Crys: My biggest challenge was everything cascading from the ending of my 15 year relationship. I don’t need to go into too much detail there, but that’s a big one.
JP: Oh yeah, definitely.
Crys: The energy sapped from my life just dealing with that is completely natural, completely expected, completely healthy, but completely frustrating.
JP: That only means that things will get better from here.
Crys: Can I not be a robot, JP? And get all the things done as I want them done? I think I have tried, and it doesn’t generally go well for me.
JP: Yes. Unfortunately, humans are alive and not robots.
Crys: You can’t just plug in.
JP: Second one for me was overcoming the fear of missing out or FOMO.
This year there’s been a lot of various opportunities to join things or to be a part of different communities. And I had to take a step back and realize like the community I’m in is great. Let’s build from there, but let’s not dive into every little aspect. So that was a part of myself that I think I had to overcome and realize that no, I don’t need to do that.
Crys: Yeah. I got to get some JOMO, joy of missing out. The utter confusion on your face is priceless.
JP: I’ve never heard of that. So that was a… that was an interesting moment.
Crys: It’s the introvert’s joy of missing out. Like, peace! I want to be invited, but I don’t want to go.
So my second challenge was rebuilding my systems. Not only has my home life changed drastically. But in the cascade of the ending of the relationship, one of the things that came about was that my health has gotten way better. As the stress left, my health came back and that’s been a really weird balance for me, figuring out where my energy actually is.
I’ve been afraid to push too hard and throw myself back into exhaustion. I don’t have a consistent schedule every day because my kid is with me every other night. And so not every day is the same. This is part of my robot problem. In that I’m not a robot, and so I can’t plug in different schedules for different days and just be like, yeah, cool. You’ll live with that. I do my best.
There’s so many things that I haven’t been this year that I’m now having to deal with it. I have never been a single adult, ever, and I’m a single adult with a kid. I’ve never, ever been that.
There’s just been a lot of figuring out what systems work for me because I can’t exactly return a hundred percent to ones that used to work for me because I am not the same. And that’s very frustrating. I think this theme of wanting to be a robot going to be heavy this episode, my frustration. Anyways, I’m not a robot.
JP: I think for you though, that like this year has just been a big load of reflection to figure out what kind of things you can do moving forward. You’d be the Phoenix rising from the ashes.
Third one for me is finding out when to say no.
At the start of this year, I was given an opportunity to do a blog and a YouTube channel for a company. It was something that I thought I really wanted to do, but realistically, I wasn’t interested in the content that was being created. I was interested in the aspect of it.
it took about a month before I realized that no, this isn’t actually what I wanted to do. Instead of diving headfirst into it or keeping it the way that it was, I just backed out of it. And that was for the better, because that wasn’t what I wanted to spend my time on. And I think I was able to figure out that is a thing that I don’t want to do.
Crys: Always a good thing to learn. It’s been a continual process for me as well. Like figuring out what things I actually want to do, what things I truly must do and not just feel that I must do and organizing appropriately.
JP: Yeah. That’s I feel like that has also bled into a couple other, things with the day job or even things with writing is like, this year has definitely showed me like, Hey, I can just say no and no one’s gonna explode in front of me at least.
Crys: My last challenge, not my only challenge, but my last listed challenge has been one that has been very hard for me over the last few years, but it was forced to come to terms with this year, and that has been accepting temporary limits with grace.
I was very kind to myself this year, at least compared to other years. I probably wasn’t kind to myself like compared to other people being kind to themselves because I’m a workaholic. But I did manage to be quite not workaholic-y. I worked very little this year compared to previous years.
Sometimes that involved a lot of just laying on my bed, doing nothing. November, it was a lot of TikTok during the elections. But a lot of it was also prioritizing spending time with friends, whether it’s on Zoom or in times when we haven’t been in hardcore lockdown here, at cafes.
Prioritizing the things in my life that when I was in high stress, the only energy I had time for, or the only energy I had was to meet the bare minimum I needed to do to publish books, to keep a roof over my family’s head. And as that stress faded away, I had more space and more brain space and more grace for myself to do more refilling-the-well activities.
JP: Yeah, I think I’ve noticed from you this year, that you’ve been able to take that step back and do a lot more reflection and figuring out work-life balance. Because previous years, from what you’ve told me, person who has published like 60 some books and I don’t know, three to five years, I’m not certain of the timeframe, but the sheer amount of books that you’ve been publishing has been so work focused that I think, this year you’ve been able to take that moment back and look back into it.
Crys: And one of the things that I’m still struggling with to an extent is that all of my published words have been in romance, because that’s where I’ve been making the money. And I really want to write the things I want to write, which is science fiction, fantasy, hop skip jump all over the genre map, but it’s not the money. I have fear about doing that. It’s also really hard for me to split my energy between the two very similar energy expenditures. And I also don’t want to hard switch over to science fiction and fantasy and make it bear the weight and the responsibility of providing for me and risk ripping the fun out of it.
Let’s move on to our accomplishments.
My top accomplishment is very much related to those challenges in that I published less than half of the titles in 2020 that I did in 2019. And I will put this as a little table on the website, because I find it interesting, but I’m going to go through what I published in 2019 and 2020 as a comparison so people can see like how much I slowed down this year.
So in 2019 I published 20 eBooks, full novels. I think 19 of them were co-writes and I think I only did one solo last year, but this year I only did seven books and two of them were solos.
That’s 65% less titles than last year.
I record how many short story collections I published and those are generally epilogues that go in the omnibus versions, but I only published one last year, we published two this year.
Of the omnibus additions, we published four last year and only one this year. And so those are collections of full series because our books are shorter at 40,000 to 50,000.
Last year I had 12 audio books, this year, I only had four, but this year I also had four omnibus versions of the audio books, where we collected all the audio books together in one file.
All told last year I had 37 titles if you include all the formats, and this year I had 18, which is 49% of last year’s production. So literally less than half, but the big win here is that I only had a 16% reduction in income.
JP: That’s amazing.
Crys: And I’m really happy with that. If I can keep that level of energy towards the work for that level of income, I’m happy.
That’s my top accomplishment. What is yours, JP?
JP: All right. So I think my biggest accomplishment this year is that I met my co-writer. We met in January and since then, the time that we had together, which was like a day, we plotted out an entire series. And then we just got working on it.
Book one is currently in the editor’s hands, book two is in the first draft stage, and book three is being drafted right now as we speak. Yes, that’s a crazy accomplishment because, I think if I had to put a timestamp on when the aspect or the prospect of a writing career really blossomed or became more feasible than just a daydream would have been May of 2019. Within those six months then I met a co-writer and we’re talking about potentially publishing next year. So I’m like crazy excited.
Crys: That’s awesome. When did you join The Author Success Mastermind
JP: January, I think. I could be wrong, but I think it was January.
Crys: So you’ve done two sessions?
JP: Big year. Yeah.
Crys: My second accomplishment was I started this podcast and the corollary achievement to that is bringing you on!
JP: That was actually one of my accomplishments. So I’ll just jump to that. One was joining this podcast! Because, like I had mentioned before, and one of the challenges was I had the prospect of doing something that I wanted to do the whole YouTube and blogging thing. But what I really wanted was a way to be in the community, have these sorts of conversations and ideally, expand on that as we move forward.
So joining this podcast was what I consider one of my top accomplishments.
Crys: Good. We’re on the same page.
JP: What’s your last one?
Crys: My third one is joining The Author Success Mastermind as a partner… creator? I don’t know. It’s we don’t, we never really put a title on it, but I am just so excited about everything that we’re happening over there.
The community is so bumping and it overwhelms me at times because I want to be involved in every conversation because it’s just so good, but I also don’t have the time. Especially like over Christmas, that was when I really got overwhelmed. Because I just didn’t have the time to sit and respond to things.
I’m really excited about the mini courses I’ll be developing for the membership, and the platinum level, the monthly mastermind crew under J, we’ve made a year long commitment. It’s going to be so intense and so good on moving both business and writing skills forward. I’m just really excited about TASM. Ooh, what’s your last one?
JP: My last one is joining TASM, The Author Success Mastermind, which is funny that, yet again, we’re on the same page, but I feel like my craft has improved exponentially through The Author Success Mastermind. We were able to submit scenes every week that would be both reviewed by J, but others as well, and they could offer input and others have given the feedback that my craft has improved.
And I feel like my craft has improved through making these scenes and figuring out the choices and the conflicts and consequences. And so I feel like this year, my accomplishment is the improvement of craft, but doing that through an author community.
Crys: We’re actually on par for all three of ours. The top one was publishing/writing and then the next two podcasts and mastermind.
There’s a reason I invited you onto this podcast!
So now the fun part, the media we have consumed this year that we loved. What was your top?
JP: So much media. Okay. So my top one is the final season of The Magicians. I love The Magicians like nobody’s business. Jeff Elkins, fight me, I like it more.
So the final seasons of The Magicians came out this year. And the whole thing was just amazing. The last season, the characters had to deal with a huge trauma that occurred in the previous season. And that’s basically the running theme of the whole entire season is just people dealing with trauma. And it is like hard hitting and the characters are just so good and so well fleshed out. I’m saying the final season, but what I really mean is the whole thing of The Magicians and just how amazing the whole thing is.
Crys: Okay, so I have a question about it because I attempted to read the first book and I don’t think I got past three pages because it had this– and this is why I’m asking this, because if the TV show does not have this feeling than I really want to watch it because it seems so up my alley when I read the blurb, but the author has this tone and I get this from Stephen King as well, what feels like someone has been smoking smelly cigars in my soul, and it’s very uncomfortable, and I don’t like it.
JP: Okay…
I know, I guess I know what you mean. Like I… I don’t, but–
Crys: I guess my question is, does the show have this same kind of nihilistic onnui sense that the first three pages of the book has?
JP: Maybe.
So I guess the truth of the matter with The Magician series is that magic never solves your problems. It always makes things worse. And that is another running theme throughout the entire thing is they always try to use magic to solve a problem and it always makes it worse.
I’m not going to say that the show is happy sunshine and daisies. There are shows where you feel wrecked at the end and they have like warnings at the end of the show to call certain numbers. That’s a thing. It’s just the fact that they went there and they hit these heavy topics at the time.
And I think even now, like this was one of those shows that was just so resonating that I just, I love the whole thing.
Crys: I’m definitely gonna try it. Is this the final season or are there more to come?
JP: Well, unless some magical, wonderful thing happens, which won’t because it’s The Magicians , it’s done.
Crys: So mine aren’t in any particular order of what I loved most, at least for my top three. Because I can’t, you can’t make me pick. It’s just not possible. I love them all.
But Umbrella Academy! So good. Umbrella Academy, Klaus. Season 2, they really upped it. The characters that annoyed the hell out of me in Season 1, because they were whiney bitches, did not change, but they nailed them so well while getting rid of the annoying bits or just… I don’t even know.
Diego’s one of them. He’s just so dumb but they call it out constantly. And yeah, I don’t know. I just get all like jazz hands over here about the Umbrella Academy. And I can’t believe that we have to wait. I don’t even know how long now. Thanks, COVID.
JP: Yeah, I really liked the Umbrella Academy. Season 2 significantly more than Season 1. I really like where they went with the characters and also just the story itself. So good.
Next one. Here I am with depressing shows: Lovecraft Country, so good. Another one where characters make unlikeable decisions because they have no wind choices.
The main hero, Atticus, he goes places where most heroes don’t go in most series because you always want your hero to be the epitome of perfection more or less. And he’s not. And the fact that they go there for this character is so good. And I also highly recommend the side podcast that HBO has with this, because then you get to actually hear the motivations and the decisions that were made during this, but it was just… it was so good and it really had well diverse, perfect characters that just, I was hooked to the entire series.
Crys: That sounds delightful. And that’s one of those, again, one of those ones that’s on my … I’m side-eyeing it. Like, we could be friends, but I don’t know…
JP: In comparison to The Magicians, it’s not as heavy. I don’t think they ever had warnings at the end of the episode. But there are things that they go to that you feel deep inside.
There was a one choice that one character made. And at the end of her episode you, I’m trying to be as un-spoiler-y as possible, but you assume that she’s going to take this decision because you’re like, obviously she’s going to do that. Why would she do something that would harm someone that she loves?
But this person is making a choice for themselves. And you think it’s so selfish, but then you wonder, why do you think it’s selfish? And I don’t know, I just love like that. They almost hit these preconceived notions that you assume someone’s going to make a choice and then they make the other one.
Crys: Excellent.
Umbrella Academy was literally my darkest option so that kinda shines a light on where I come at things from, because my next one is the Pixar Disney movie Onward.
Oh my goodness. It’s probably my favorite Disney Pixar since the dragons, How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, which I can’t even pick a favorite out of those three.
I’m still in the midst of deconstructing Onward because not only was it a beautiful story, also beautiful art because Pixar, but it was so well paced that it astounds me. And so I’m deconstructing it using the Three Story Method and scene and sequel from The Techniques of the Selling Writer. And I need to just make that a priority because I’m like, I just, Ugh. I love it.
JP: I will be the first person that reads this.
Crys: Have you watched this?
JP: I’ve watched the whole movie, so good. Definitely hit all of my little nerd factions here and there with the D&D–
Crys: –with the D&D and like actual the Minotaurr
JP: and the actual quest. Yes.
All right, another hard hitter.
Crys: Get it, bring it.
JP: Again, here I am. Now you learn more about me. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark.
Crys: I never even heard of this.
JP: It’s an HBO docuseries. It is the story of how Michelle McNamara, who is Patton Oswald’s wife. She is a crime writer and she got really invested in who became known as the Golden State Killer because of her. Before she gave him that name, he was known as the East Area Rapist. That’s not a popular name, people just didn’t really pick up on that.
So basically once she named him the Golden State Killer, that really brought it as a national attention on top of her perfect writing. Like she has this amazing voice in her writing style. Now this, if you, if this is a true story if you don’t know this, then I’m sorry, but Michelle McNamara actually died before she was able to publish her first book.
And so I think for writers it’s just, you can see how invested she is in the topic and how many times she could have published it, but she wanted perfection and she couldn’t. Now, ultimately for this story, there were some pieces that still needed to be webbed together as she was able to get more and more information.
But I think that it’s a good piece of information for writers when it comes to their writing.
Crys: She’s the reason they found him. In the web of like why he was found, she brought the attention. She did dig out some facts and were it not for her it may never have gotten the attention that it needed.
JP: She, at least in the series and from the person who more or less is the limelight for the person who like sequenced the DNA to link them all together. It sounds like she was the reason that he came up with that because she was really pushing towards this whole 23&me and Ancestry.com and using that as a potential tool to link relatives. And she apparently came up with this idea well before anyone else.
Crys: Fascinating.
JP: But yet again, who knows if that’s a hundred percent accurate and I just don’t know that.
Crys: Mine, my next one is Picard. There were definitely weaknesses in the storytelling, but it was a nostalgic revisit to a character that is so beloved by the Star Trek universe. One of the things I did love about it, that a lot of people who are Star Trek fans do not love about it, is that it was a long narrative arc it wasn’t an episodic monster of the week or problem of the week style. So I totally understand people not connecting with it, but that is what I do connect with are the long stories. It’s one of the reasons that when I do sit down and watch media, I tend to consume television shows over movies because of the depth of character and storylines you can dig into.
And it hit just so much joy for me with that. And it also hit on some topics of, what is life? Particularly the character of Data, who’s an android. Was he alive? Did he matter, blah, blah, blah. Of course Picard loved Data and the way they created this world that came to an existence after The Next Generation.
I just, it’s fascinating. And I love it.
JP: I have not seen that, so I may have to.
Crys: Yep. All right.
JP: All right. We have top five 2020 media, but it’s not media that has necessarily been made in 2020. So my next one is a book. It is Digital Minimalism. There’s a book I read this year and it really helped me figure out how to reduce and remove certain things in my life.
This book came after my hyper addiction to TikTok. Which was just madness. And I read this and I think this one convinced me to delete Facebook off my phone and really start deleting certain apps and certain things off of my phone and try to reduce a lot of things. This was the stepping stone that I took to try and configure a better morning and just daily routine in my life.
Crys: That’s fair. I have another not created this year. Gosh, I don’t even know how old this book is. It changed the way I interact with other humans and that’s Nonviolent Communication. The precepts are very simple, which means they’re terribly hard.
Communication has always been a fascination of mine because I don’t communicate naturally. I was not raised in a family that knew how to communicate well.
I am an extreme introvert who has very strong opinions because I’m from upstate New York and we speak in absolutes, while understanding that everything is negotiable. Southerners do not approach language the same way. I had to learn that when I went to school in the South.
And so it’s been very fascinating to me, learning how to communicate effectively. Nonviolent Communication has changed the way that I speak with those I love, with strangers. And it’s probably the book that will serve me the most that I read this year and for the rest of my life.
JP: Yeah. That’s awesome.
I have that like weird Midwestern “just don’t talk about anything” mentality, which in and of itself, isn’t a good thing. So I think that I’ll add that to the list because I think that’ll also I’m assuming that’ll also bleed into how you write characters.
Crys: Absolutely. And there’s just negotiating who is mindful, who is not– it’s fascinating.
One of them, it’s interesting, just thinking about how my communication has changed over the last 20 years. New Yorkers tend to speak in 100% sarcasm. And again, this does not translate well in the South. And I am not good at modulation. There’s no “Oh, I’m a little bit sarcastic in this setting or I’m a lot sarcastic in that setting.”
It is either I am sarcastic or I am not. And so I had to switch, I had to flip that switch to not sarcastic years ago, probably about 13 years ago, so as not to hurt people .
That’s been something I’ve been reflecting on a lot this year because I did it to fit in, and I don’t think that choosing to flip the switch was necessarily the wrong choice, but I don’t necessarily like the reasons I chose to do it. And it’s very strange to reflect on those things.
Would I have chosen something different? Probably not, but would I have preferred to have a different thought process? Yes. Does it matter? Probably not, but all those lovely theoreticals we writers like to ponder about.
JP: Yeah. I think I’m in the same boat as you, where you have that like Midwestern, weird niceness, don’t talk about it, but also like just cruel sarcasm and on the positive note, anytime that I’ve gone off the deep end and sarcasm, I always check in afterwards because at this point in my life, I’m like, wait a minute. I think what I said was borderline cruel. And then I realized everyone’s part of the joke. Everyone’s part of it. And no one seems upset, but it’s still maybe you shouldn’t have approached it that way.
Crys: I was told that my level of sarcasm was that I ripped someone’s heart out, stomped on it, then shot their puppy in front of them.
JP: Oh, poor puppy. I guess I am that person.
Crys: I would never shoot a puppy except in fiction. I’ll do it once. I will do it once. At some point when I’m brave and want to cry buckets on my own. It’s just one of those fears I have to face. So what’s your last one?
JP: My last one is another book Atomic Habits. I’m apparently slow on the roll with everyone else, but this was another recommended one from the TASM group and it just really emphasized that small actions build and compound on each other.
It’s just something that I needed at the time and it’s helped with morning routines and keeping progress or keeping track of the flow.
Crys: There’s something he says, and I’m probably, I’m definitely paraphrasing, that I have held with me ever since I read that book, but every choice you make is a vote for the kind of person you want to be.
And that helps frame a lot of my in the moment decisions.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: My last one, we’re going back to pretty fluffy here, is my first binge of the year. And just in some ways, just an absolute perfection, an absolute gem of perfection of a show. And that is The Good Place.
I was slow on the roll on this one, so thankfully all four seasons were out and I binged them, probably mostly in the space of a week. And I binged on my flight back from New York, this is back in February, my flight back from New York and the bus ride the next day, I just binged the entire last season So I’m sitting on this bus surrounded by other humans, just bawling my eyes out in the best kind of way.
JP: Yeah, I love that show and how it takes real world philosophy and it’s able to define it and explain it in such a like perfect way, but still be surrounded by like comedy and like ways to keep you attentive. This is so good.
Crys: I think one of the things I like most about it, it’s so perfect, four seasons, four acts. The first season is literally act one. The actual inciting incident, or not inciting incident, but the crossing of the threshold is the last episode. Ah! So good.
JP: Yeah. Oh, so yeah.
Crys: I don’t know how I could have functioned if I was watching it as it came out. This is why I don’t do that.
JP: That’s what happened to me for the last season. It wasn’t great. I can say that.
Crys: Did you have your bonus media that you wanted to share?
JP: My bonus one would be The Queen’s Gambit. That was really good.
Crys: Oh yeah. I haven’t watched it yet.
JP: Yeah. It surprised me. I knew about it because some other people in the podcast space had been talking about it and I’m like yeah. Maybe I’ll give it a try.
But it hit on more than just chess. It talked about addiction and different things like that. Another heavy one for me, but Hey, it was good.
Crys: So 2020 is done. We’re kicking it in the can.
JP: Get it out of here. Throw it in the dumpster, light it on fire, push it down the road.
Crys: Excellent. Let’s throw some glitter bombs in there too.
JP: Yeah, of course. You gotta make it look fancy.
Crys: No, we need something good and also terrible to come out of this. Okay. We both approached the goals of 2021 a little different. So I’m going to start.
I have three words. Normally I pick like a word for the year that I want to focus on. I honestly can’t remember what my word was for 2020, because 2020 was 10 years long.
But either 2019 or 2020 was joy. And I don’t know which one, I think it was 2020. But as I flipped through my planner, which allows you to put a word per month and a word per week, the word I saw most was consistency. I just wanted consistency.
And I think that I definitely worked towards consistency pretty regularly. Did I achieve it? Of course not. We rarely achieve the things that we aim for, but that is okay. So my three words for 2021 are
1.Ask
2. Start
3. Connect.
And what those mean for me is ask: asking questions is part of my focus on communication. And one of the things I realized, or was able to put into words, as I was on a road trip–I love road trips for this. I want a car so bad, so I can do road trips by myself thinking. And I was listening to a book called You’re a Badass at Making Money by Jen Sincero. Really good book.
Probably not like a lot new in it for most people. It’s very much more mindset than tactics or strategies, but a thought came to me on this road trip that, if I’m going to be the best at anything in the world, I want to be the best at asking questions. I want to be the best question asker in the world.
I find that I can learn a lot more when I ask people questions and when I am helping others, they almost always know the answers. They just don’t necessarily have the right questions and I really like seeing someone– I love, I get a buzz off of seeing someone realize something for themselves from a question I have asked.
I have done almost zero of the work. I have literally done zero of the work of figuring out the answer. But just being able to be a conduit for realization that’s the kind of high I’m going after. So ask.
Start. One of the things that I’ve held back from this year, for a very good reason, is starting things. Except that I’ve started a lot of things, I guess I’ve just started a lot less than I have in previous years, and I’ve just been really intentional and focused on them.
Because I’m like, Hey, I started a podcast and I’ve started this and I’ve started that. I don’t know.
Anyways, I’ve been very focused on my starting this year. And so yes to big projects ,starting them, but also just on the daily, sit down and start.
One of the things I’ve been having trouble with since my energy has gotten back is that I’ve gotten really fractured. And when I sit down, my brain tries to work on five things at once, and that’s not very helpful. I need to start working on one. So that’s what start means to me.
And then connect. This is communication, community, really big focuses of mine for this year, particularly this podcast, with The Author Success Mastermind and building one-on-one connections, building group connections. Really connecting with people that I meet in real life. If I can meet people in real life, again in 2021, please! That would be delightful.
So that’s my overall plan slash themes for the year. And then I have some other specific fun things, but I want to give you a chance to rattle off some things first.
JP: So I don’t know if I like goals or not, but I did it anyway.
If I had to say what I want to accomplish next year and what I feel is accomplishable, as long as I create the methods to do so would be to publish books one, two, and three of the series within my co-writer.
I would love to publish all six, but I think realistically giving it three and then giving the opportunity for the other three to either naturally be published or give it time is more realistic, but to complete the six book series with the co-writer, that would be the first goal.
The next one would be to complete and then get as far as I possibly can with the novel that I’m working on with The Author Success Mastermind. The intent for the novel is for it to be written throughout the course of the year, but I don’t want to adhere to that. I want to get it done earlier and then try to get it as close to publishable as I can by the end of the year. That would be like the dream ideal.
And then I really want to bring awesome and excellent content to this podcast. I want to I want to get more interviews if we can. And I want to talk to awesome people and hear their perspective on life. So that’s one of my potential goals is to network and connect more with those people.
And then personally I need to improve my webpage and marketing abilities skills because they are not super great. That’s what I have in mind for 2020. If I were to put three words to it I guess it would be something along the lines of create, publish, and network. I don’t know if those are good enough words or not.
Crys: They work. My more like tangible things that I could say, “Hey, I accomplished this!” If they’re done, but they’re not even that. The one is I need to publish something as Crys Cain. That just needs to happen. I’ve been meaning to do that for two fucking years. And I’m not going to guilt trip myself because the last two years have been miserable.
But I’ve actually committed. The Next Level Author Podcast has a challenge right now, what thing are you going to do by the end of January to level up? And I don’t know, two, three weeks ago I was like, Oh yeah, I’m going like write two short stories as Crys Cain and finish them. I now have four weeks to do that.
So I need to get on that. Every year I’ve said, okay, by the end of the year, I’m going to publish something. And I think that is giving myself way too much leeway. The January deadline is great. Even if I write two short stories in the last two days of January, we’re going to be solid.
And the other goal slash hope is a massive road trip through the US in the last half of next year. And this is so dependent on finances and vaccines and all that. But we have our fingers crossed that Witch Camp’s going to happen. That’s the Witches of Salem with Jack–that’s wrong.
JP: Hey Jack.
Crys: That’s J and Zach. They have a name. There’s their shipper name. J is going to kill me. J and Zach, J Thorn and Zach Bohannon, now known as Jack. They do these great world building events. And they have Witches of Salem–which is no longer its official name in my book, it’s Witch Camp –in July, it’s over the 4th of July weekend. And then they have The Career Author Summit in September.
And then I have two weddings, one in September, one in the end of October. I would love to rent or buy an RV. And either from July or August, just have me, the kiddo, the nanny going from New York where my family is out to the west coast, bothering all of our friends, including JP, on the way out to California. And then coming back through Vegas where my co-writer lives, and to Nashville where the Career Author Summit will be. And then through Kentucky and wherever else for weddings.
Not just weddings, I know. Whatever, there’s not that many weddings. I should just go wedding crashing.
JP: You should find every location you can and just show up in the RV and then just be like, “RV party!”
Crys: As long as the vaccine’s a thing, right? Otherwise my wedding crashing will have to wait a year. Life goals. On the list, for sure. Crash a wedding, preferably one that’s really high end.
JP: Yeah.
Crys: But not high-end enough that you have to have invitations.
JP: Yeah, no. So more or less, most weddings they have a little name placards. Just take one. It’s fine. Hi, my name’s Aunt Julia. Like, it’s fine.
Crys: Fun fact, because I went to Christian college and I was still in college when I got married and most of my friends had really conservative families, I did not go to a single wedding that had booze at it, except for my sisters, until I was in my late twenties. But we always had a car trunk full of something somewhere.
JP: Oh, so you did, it just, it was–
Crys: Oh yeah. At the wedding, it wasn’t wedding provided. We just had to tailgate the wedding.
JP: Madness.
Crys: Hashtag Christian life.
So there’s 2020. Farewell. Don’t miss you. And hello, 2021. We know that you’re not–
JP: You have a lot to potentially provide, but you have a low bar.
Crys: It’s such a low bar.
JP: You have a very low bar, but just please.
Crys: We’re not asking you to be a diamond. We’re just asking you to not be a shit show.
JP: Yeah. I’m fine with some food that fell on the floor.
Crys: As long as you picked it up within five seconds. Yeah. Yeah.
JP: Five second rule. Fine. I’m fine with that. You don’t have to be a diamond.
Crys: Excellent. All right. For those listening, if you are participating in our book club, we have another couple of weeks until that episode, and we are reading Becca Syme’s Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? And I hope you will join us in the comments on that episode.
And we will see you next week.
JP: Yeah, I think our questions are–
Crys: Oh, yeah, we have a question!
JP: I think our questions for the listeners are what are your challenges, accomplishments and media of 2020? And then what are your goals for 2021?
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