Episode 36: What Skills Do You Lack?

In this weeks episode, Crys and JP talk all about what skills they lack in the realm of publishing. From marketing to project managing, they open up about what they need to work on. And of course, they end on a positive note with sharing what they’re really fricking good at.

Show Notes

• Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain 

Transcript

Crys: Hello, friends. This is episode 36 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is Thursday, March 25th as we’re recording, but this will come out on April Fool’s Day. So happy April Fools. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…

JP: JP Rindfleisch.

Crys: I almost forgot my last name there for a minute.

JP: It happens.

Crys: So how was your week?

JP: I’m sure listeners are going to get bored of this, but it was great because it was the same.

Crys: Yay! Consistency.

JP: Yay! I’ve been super consistent about editing. And I’m moving along. Of course I’d love to be faster, but I’m still pretty happy about the speed I’m going. And as a healthy writer’s side note, ever since I’ve gotten my elliptical, I’ve been like 10,000 steps a day, which is amazing since I was like 2000 steps a day before.

Crys: I had a dream last night, you saying this reminded me, that I found those elliptical somewhere here in Costa Rica. And I was like, I should get one. I don’t walk enough. JP loves his. But clearly it was just a dream.

I have the most mundane dreams. I had to ask my roommate’s girlfriend the other day, I was like, Kait did you actually end up bringing gluten-free Oreos back from the States or not? Or was it just a dream?

She like, no, I didn’t. It was just a dream.

Cause I dreamed that you brought back the fake brands, the not Nabisco gluten-free Oreos. And I just was like, no, Kait! I told you to get the real ones!

JP: I rarely remember my dreams, but I remember having one very mundane dream in college, but it lasted for over three months in the dream.

Where I lived, it was snowy when I went to sleep and I had a dream that went well into spring and summer. And then I woke back up into snow and it scarred me so bad. I was so confused for two days as to what actually happened.

Crys: Our brains are wild.

I have consistently written, I think mostly, yeah, I’ve written everyday, and my co-writer and I will wrap our book up tomorrow.

So that’s exciting. Yay money! And yeah, other than that, it’s just been slowly getting things done. I don’t know if I filed my taxes this week or last week, but I got that done. Yeah, just still a lot of picking at little things. It’s been hot. I’ve been tired.

I am technically going on vacation next week. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to work. But I will be more not working than not. Semana Santa, the week before Easter, is absolute insanity in most Latin American countries. Everybody goes to the beach. And I live at the beach. I don’t think that they’re going to put many restrictions on this year with COVID. We’ve been having really good numbers and I think they’ve gotten stupid and they’re just going to be like, yeah, everybody needs a break.

I’m going to leave the beach and go to where everybody left.

JP: Sneak into the mountains.

Crys: Indeed. My nanny and I and my kid are running away. There will be some things that are slightly open, so we’ll do some shopping and hopefully do a nighttime hike looking for frogs with my kiddo if we can schedule that. But it will be a very chill week . So that’s what’s upcoming.

Do we have any comments JP?

JP: We do. It seems like my guilting of people made them reply. We have two replies with the Do You Journal. One from Lon, and he’s just expanding on what kind of intents he has when he journals, which is zero intents. Usually, he just puts in a paragraph or two about what he did during the day. And then a possible plan for the future, if he feels ambitious or those fun inspirations.

And then another one from Janet. I asked her as well, like what kind of process she uses, and when she was living in a small space on the road, she had these questions that she would answer, and I just want to list them quick: it was what made me happy, what tasks did I complete, who did I help, what am I worried about, do I need more time, knowledge or confidence to reach my target, and lastly, do I need help slash who can help me? And she used these as a template, which she then derived a blog from.

So I found that really useful as a way to hash out what kind of questions you would want to ask yourself daily to then formulate some type of blog. And so I thought that was pretty cool.

Crys: Our question today is: what skills do you lack, particularly in the realm of publishing?

We can get into many skills we lack in life, but we’re going to focus on publishing and writing. JP, what comes to top of mind?

JP: The one I texted you when you asked me this question, and that’s focus. But no, more specifically, it’s project management, if you really want to get very specific about what skill it is. I would say that is my biggest downfall is I’m not very good at project management.

Yeah. I just know what’s in front of me and I just try to get what’s in front of me done. And I just don’t like reviewing things. I think that’s part of my ideation slash input self is I’m always forward-thinking and very minisculey backwards thinking. Or I just don’t like looking at pages that I’ve previously written.

So that kind of leads into my lacking of project management.

Crys: Just that’s what makes editing an issue or what?

JP: I would say when…

Crys: With something you’ve written versus something Abe’s written.

JP: I would say its just, if I have multiple projects, I won’t manage them. I will just focus on my one project, and I’ll know that these other projects sit there, but I’ll just let them sit there.

I don’t manage them into my time. I know it’s a problem I have, and so then what I’ll do is until it becomes a pain point for me to know that it’s sitting there, I won’t do anything with it. And then the moment it is, I will immediately turn and I will look at that one and I will focus on that one.

And then this one’s off to the side. So that’s a problem.

Crys: But you have been mitigating that a little bit with your time blocking, yeah?

JP: Yeah. I think that’s what’s been helping. Because I know what time I have available, and then I put what’s most important in that time, but I have other projects I want to do, but they’re over here in the corner, yelling at me.

Crys: I think in some ways that’s part of the problem of just life and being a writer in general.

Like we don’t have enough time to do all the things we want. Mine is tangentially related to that same problem of only being able to have so many plates in front of you. And that is, I don’t prioritize fun and joy. And I think that’s a skill or it’s a habit. I don’t know.

There’s something there lacking and a lot of it, I’m getting better at it, but a lot of it for me stems from… there’s two things. One, the fear of being homeless again, and I’ve worked through a lot of that in the past year and a half. So that’s not as heavy anymore, but the thing that I am unraveling now is some of the toxic consequences of capitalism, particularly American capitalism, where we are subtly taught this belief that if you’re not producing, you’re not valuable. And if you’re not producing things that will bring you monetary value, they don’t have value. And that’s, maybe that’s a belief more than a skill, but I think that this is something that I’m unpacking to bring the skill and the habit of joy back into my work in my writing.

JP: I think that the whole concept is as it relates to me as well, just because when I think about the day job, and then the other time that I have, I put that towards writing and I don’t really focus on fun.

And that’s why I’ve allocated my evenings to time with my partner and time for like fun. Even though I’m aware that I could be using that time to produce. I don’t want to. I think that it’s important to be able to decompress. And I feel like there is this expectation that we have to be producing, like you said, all the time.

And I have the day job, and then I want to do this, and I want to really ramp this up. And if I do both and I have no other time, I’m going to burn out.

Crys: Yeah, I’ve really been working on realigning my priorities. We’re hoping to wrap up the romance stuff about the end of the year. And then there’s about four other books that I have committed to writing into an individual series that I have that I will probably plunk away at over time.

But hopefully I can make them fun again when there is no expectation, or I can train myself out of the expectation that something has monetary value. I have readers, I can think of one particular reader, who loves that series, and if I write that series just to make her happy, as long as it doesn’t hurt me in my own emotions and my financial situation then I think I’ll be able to write it.

JP: Yeah, I’m really curious about how you handle vacations being self-employed because like you just said in the intro, you’re taking a vacation, but you might be working anyway.

Crys: We can have a little sidebar on that. Sometimes I take true vacations, sometimes. Right now, because we have the Podcast, I have a few other set in stone things during the week, I will still be doing those. I do want to plunk away a little bit at my solo, just so I don’t get into another, even though I don’t have a deadline push on this, I still want to finish the book up next month. So I don’t want to trap myself again. So I will plunk away a little bit, but often when I go on vacation, I’m thinking particularly of 2019, December, we went to Mexico for three weeks, and I would get my writing done in about an hour or two hours in the morning. And then we’d go play all day.

And that was basically the only work I did that month. And that’s a really good balance for me. I would like to engineer my life at some point to where I only work a few hours in the morning and then the rest of the day is for life investment. But I’m building that life. We’re getting there.

JP: Very nice.

Crys: Any other lacking skills that come to mind?

JP: Yeah, accounting.

Crys: I love accounting. I’m really bad at the consistency of accounting, but I love playing with the numbers.

JP: I feel like if my mother ever listened to this podcast, she would be screaming at me at the moment. Cause she’s a banker, but not for me.

Crys: Do you have a business account yet for writing?

JP: I do not. But I do want one before we actually publish.

Crys: Yeah, that or a credit card that you only use for writing expenses, just so that you can easily collect them. Those are the things that I definitely recommend as the thing that allowed me to truly separate business and personal.

JP: Yeah. That’s really smart. I should do that. Thanks, Crys.

Crys: It’ll help it. It won’t fix you, but it’ll help.

JP: No, it will. I know that because I have been creating a bubble within my own account as to like usable funds and et cetera, but it’s all blended into my account and I know it is. It’s just I’m the slow turtle that will eventually get there.

Crys: Yeah.

Having a separate place where all of your transactions are recorded really helps when it comes to tax time or just, and then again, if you ever get audited, then they’re completely separate, but having a separate bank account allowed me to, after ignoring it the entire 2020 and not doing monthly, I have January for 2021 done.

I haven’t done February or anything yet, but it allowed me to organize my taxes in about, I don’t know, less than three or four hours, like with a complete financial report. Now I do have a giant spreadsheet tool that I purchased from Donna Cook that is a a financial accounting, like month by month, category by category spreadsheet that I use.

And you can use Mint or something else like that does it a bit more automatically. I don’t like those. They get too finicky. I want to be in more control. And so I like Excel.

JP: That’s fair.

Crys: My other failing… of course I only have two. The other big failing that comes to my mind is I’m really bad at marketing.

I have been blessed in that I have never truly had to do it, so I don’t have a system. I haven’t spent the time to learn it. It’s a skill I lack. And the first social media platform that I’ve ever found that makes me excited to tell stories to people has been TikTok. And so I do have some ideas for using TikTok as a marketing platform. But just like with publishing, you can’t put all your eggs in one basket. So I won’t be able to just be like, Hey, I TikTok and that’s how you make my money. First of all, it’s unlikely. Second of all, it’s stupid. So when I get to the point where I am not writing romance, where I am publishing other things, I will have to up my marketing game.

And thankfully there are a lot of books out there written by really smart people. Mal Cooper, Brian Meeks. And it’ll be an adventure, but I do think it is possible to build a platform without paid marketing. But you have to get knowledge about your book out there somehow. So it’s like you choose money or time.

Even better if you’re able to put both in, like mentally and financially. I don’t know. It’s a painful thing for a lot of us because we don’t like selling ourselves. We feel very awkward about it. Yeah, we have hangups.

I dunno. It’s common.

JP: Yeah. And I think it’s a really major common thing in the US system, just because people like to argue. Your creative work is somehow devalued, but yet we go to movies, we go to all these other pieces of media. Why can’t your media cost something? But yet there’s just this weird stigma that people have.

Yeah, no, I need to get better at marketing because here’s the thing, I don’t want to be poor and I want to be able to make more creative things. So that’s the that’s got to happen.

Crys: And we would not be rescued from marketing if we went trad-pub. These days, unless you’re able to negotiate a very large advance, which is extremely unusual these days and becoming more unusual all the time, the publishing company is just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And if you stick on your own, then they will put more money into you. But if they put a lot of money into you in a large advance, then they’re like, Oh shit, we got to earn that back. And so they will put money into you.

So all of my friends were like, I’m going to go trad-pub bec ause then I won’t have to do all these things. I try really hard, not to jump up on my soap box with them because most of the time they’re not going to hear me, but the information is out there. We are here in our Podcast telling you trad-pub is not the end all be all.

And I will say here, because people who are coming here, come here to hear what we have to say, that I think that going trad-pub is stupid 99% of the time.

We have a lot of friends who are doing it. And all of them might have different reasons. I haven’t talked to everyone who’s choosing to do it, and I’m not judging their particular reasons because I don’t know them, but for anyone who is going after it for support, prestige, depending on your contract, it’s a stupid idea.

Most contracts right now are absolutely horrendous. And I cannot imagine signing one of those, but I’m extremely protective of my IP. Some people are not, and I still think that’s stupid, but that is my own realm of what’s acceptable.

JP: To each their own.

Crys: Just because I think what you’re doing is stupid doesn’t mean I think you’re stupid, friends who are trad publishing.

Just saying. Cover my ass, right? Yeah.

JP: No, I think you’re fine. It sounds very questionable because of how I think we both are approaching it. Because we’re both, we hold very tightly to our IP and we want to be able to experience all of the pieces of it. And it’s almost like a piece of that gets taken away through trad-pub.

And there may be benefits that we may be missing, but this is what we want over here. And so it just seems very foreign or it just seems not a wise choice at the moment.

Crys: Yeah, and I am very open with people when they ask me, should I go trad-pub or indie? I tell them I’m extremely biased. I am so hardcore indie. I cannot be balanced. I can’t be unbiased about trad pub. I just can’t. Any more feelings you’d like to– not feelings?

JP: Oh, I have so many feelings.

Crys: Any more skills that you feel like you’re lacking in?

JP: You actually mentioned that the marketing one, because I’m looking, I wrote five down and three of them are literally just marketing, but with different words.

Crys: I love it.

JP: One thing that I was thinking of is how do we get better at these skills? Part of it is reading. Part of it is maybe doing some online courses. But here I am again on my soap box: Find your author community, because more than likely someone else’s running into the same issue as you, or they may be a couple steps ahead of you, and they may either be able to mentor you or provide insight.

Because I see that a lot in my author community. That’s my soapbox moment.

Crys: Yeah, absolutely. We have people who have so many different areas of expertise. We have a Pinterest guru. We had Alicia on the podcast and she is working on content marketing, particularly with her blog, but also having the interplay between her written works and her merchandise.

There’s so many people doing so many cool things and I’m constantly learning from them.

JP: So now do you want to switch gears?

Crys: Yeah. Let’s end this on an up note. How you fix them is a pretty good up note, but what are you really fricking good at?

JP: Yeah. How about you start since I started last time.

What is your excellent skill?

Crys: I am really fricking good at… Well, I’ve been good at pumping words out.

I’m really good at learning. I have so many plotting tools in my head and when I was first starting out writing, basically until I started publishing, it was really difficult for me because I was a high learner.

And so I wanted to learn all the things, but sometimes I wasn’t ready for those. And so they would jumble up and they would stop me from writing because I didn’t understand them. And I would get really frustrated. But once I had a good enough experience, like several books completed under my belt, the books that I had trouble with, the tools that I had trouble, with often became more accessible to me.

I still don’t get the seven point plot structure. I come back to it every two years or so, and try and figure it out. Maybe someday I’ll get it. Anyways. Regardless of that particular one, I’m really good at finding tools to help me through my prose problems. I was very weak in writing emotion. When I first started writing romance, which is problematic because romance is about emotion far more than any other genre, even though I think most genres are about emotion, and I learned how to write it better.

And I’m still learning how to write it better. I’ve talked several times about The Techniques of the Selling Writer. And there’s particular tools in that book that I was like, Oh, this unlocks that particular problem for me where I’m like, am I being too maudlin, giving too much away, or if I’m not giving enough.

So I pulled tools from there. I’m really good at learning things to fill in my writing skill gaps. And I am really good at just getting shit done.

JP: Nice.

Crys: How about you?

JP: I guess I’m gonna say I’m really good at research, which is a really broad topic. But when I say that, one, I’m really good at finding like journal articles and then finding out conclusions about them, finding things that tie together, create a whole huge mental mind map and be able to pull back on that later on in life.

To the point where like I’ve helped others perform this kind of research to get information they need for things that they’ve written. And then also in my own writing, like it can be anything from scientific to stranger cult knowledge, but I just love absorbing information and then just spitting it out.

I’m not like the people who are capable of quoting, like where exactly it came from, but I’m enough to retain like the headline information that I can find it again if I need to. It’s come in so handy so much that I find it a skill. And then, yeah. Oh, I’ll stop there so you can list your next skill.

Crys: I did two in a row, so I said I was really good at getting shit done.

JP: My next one ties in really closely to that one. And that is ideation. You threw me on this podcast and asked me for topics and I came up with 50, on the spot almost. And that’s just, it’s not that my brain runs a million miles a minute, but when people talk, all of a sudden, like new ideas keep bubbling up. And I just formed this list in my head. My only capability of managing a list is apparently with ideas. And so I would say that kind of capability of coming up with ideas for things. Ideation.

Crys: Yeah, when I asked you that I was like, yeah, just come up with a few ideas.

And I was like, maybe he’ll come up with five or six and so we’ll have a month planned out or so, and then I looked and I was like, excellent.

JP: Oh no.

Crys: It was good. All right. So our question for our listeners this week is clearly: what skills do you lack in your writing and publishing journey? And also, what are you really fricking good at?

JP: Yes. I want to hear it all. Give us your secrets.

Crys: We will see you guys next week.

JP: See you later.

Do you notice that I say see you later every time and it’s always the same inflection.

Crys: Yup.