Episode 6: The “Right” Way vs the Healthy Way

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. I’m going to apologize first off if the audio is a little weird. I’m recording in the middle of the day, which I try not to do because houses in Costa Rica don’t have insulation. All we have are windows with screens in them. Because air flow is more important than sound proofing.

We don’t have AC or heating, and my neighbors can be rather loud. Lawn work and yelling and talking, dropping things. So I am using Krisp.ai, which I totally signed up as an affiliate for because I planned on mentioning it today. It’s really good for phone calls, Zoom calls, anything you do from your computer.

It does some voodoo magic on the back end between your microphone and your recording system and kind of filters out some of that background noise, but it does also kind of mute the voice a little. So this may sound a little different from other weeks.

I have skipped—I have purposely not looked to see how many weeks I have skipped a few weeks. And the reasons for that were… I did really good. I recorded a few interviews ahead of time, and then I slacked off and I got to a week where I didn’t have an interview and I meant to record a solo episode, but then my electricity went out and there was a storm. And by time the electricity came back on so that I could possibly record, I was exhausted.

Next week ended up having my kid unexpectedly. I let a lot of things get in the way by putting off recording until the last minute. And then I just let it go several weeks. I think it’s been over a month. And I was starting to feel down on myself. Because the longer you let something go, the more guilty you feel about it, the less you want to think about it.

And then I realized that part of my resistance was that I didn’t have social energy. I was being quiet in my Slack groups. I wasn’t WhatsApping my friends as often, and I just did not want to expend what little energy I had on scheduling interviews and then having the interviews.

Well, if that’s the problem, I have to change the format of the podcast if I want to continue it. So I had three choices, three options.

1. I could force myself to get back on the wagon. I could continue the format, but risk burning out, spending energy I didn’t have.
2. I could change the format and continue my personal momentum, but risk weakening what I was trying to build with the podcast originally.
3. I could just stop podcasting.

None of these would be terrible choices. The common knowledge best choice would be to, buck up buttercup, get some interviews in, keep on keeping on. But that didn’t feel like the right choice for me.

By changing up what I was doing in each podcast episode, I am trading the consistency of my time for the consistency of the content. I still want to do interviews, but I’m not going to pressure myself to make them happen.

There’s a lot of things going on in my personal life separation, divorce—that is a giant mental and emotional drain, whether you are thinking on it or not actively, The COVID second wave is hitting Costa Rica, and so there’s a lot of concerns with that. We started to open up quite a bit. We’ve been able to go out and eat at restaurants. My little area has had zero cases of COVID. We’ve been very lucky, but a lot of out-of-towners have been coming in from the city. And there’s some areas that are getting really bad. There’s this uncertainty about when it will stop being safe down here. All of that is filling my subconscious.

I made the choice to do a solo episode. And then of course I have procrastinated probably over a week on that, because timing wasn’t right. I like to record early in the morning—or late at night if I have to. They’re the quietest times right now. I don’t think you can hear it, but my neighbor is banging out the heck on something over at his house, another neighbor was yelling about somebody having no morals or something. It’s not the best time and I’m distracted, but sit down, get it done.

I wanted to talk a bit about that idea of doing things the “right” way. Becca Symes calls this Questioning The Premise. Is it actually the “right” way? Is it the right way for you? I thought of a few things that are commonly talked about as the right way in different publishing circles. For me, the “right” way would be to keep on with the starting format of the podcast, and as I said, that wasn’t the right way for me right now.

Some other ways that I have decided aren’t the “right” way for me (from popular knowledge or popular agreement):

Rapid release. I love the power of rapid release. I have done it as a romance author to great success. It’s given me some of the best earnings months I’ve ever had, but it also put me into severe burnout.

So that’s not the right way for me. I possibly someday might do it if I can hold back enough stories to release them quickly, but I don’t think that that’s a right way for me either. I like the feedback. I like putting something out, getting feedback, getting the success, boost. I think James Clear talks—no, this was… there’s a book that I read that talked about this. I’m going to put it in the show notes, but it talks about how momentum and motivation—oh! The Motivation Myth. That’s the title, The Motivation Myth.

The key topic I took, or the key phrase I took away from that was you don’t have motivation and then do something. You don’t have motivation and then success, you do something and then you have motivation. You have success, and then you have motivation. Motivation doesn’t breed success, success breeds, motivation.

So that was a lot of words to say the same thing. and that’s what I get from publishing a book when it’s done.

I do like to have lead time. I have finished a book, edited it in one day, and published it. That’s not ideal for me. One, it’s rushed and it’s not as clear as I want it to be, and clean. Two, it doesn’t give me any time to set up any kind of automated marketing.

I love doing preorders because it means I can set everything up and not have to think about it in the moment. I can prepare it ahead of time. And then I don’t feel stressed because I just know everything is going to go out when it should in the manner it should. And that would be the bonus also of doing a rapid release where I stock up books ahead of time.

I know that they’re all going to go out and the pattern is going to happen as it should 0151emails or the marketing. And I don’t have to do anything right now. I don’t have to remember to do something at two o’clock on Tuesday, the 16th. I just know that everything’s going to go out as it should, which is super ideal for me.

I love that. I love setting everything up ahead of time and then just letting it go. Way less stressful for me.

Another thing I’ve decided is not the right thing for me, even though it is the smart thing, is niching down to one genre or even one sub-genre. I have done that for three years and it again has burned me out.

I’ve burned out at least three times. I may be in a fourth burnout. That is something that in my one-on-one with Becca Symes, I just finished the Write Better Faster 1.0 course, and I will talk about that in another episode, but that’s one thing we talked about. It sounded like I was in burnout. And just before we had our one-on-one, I had come to the conclusion, and this kind of ties in with my feelings about how I kind of burned out on the podcast already one month in, is that I don’t have—and this is kind of interesting—I don’t have the energy to write solo work. So it’s kind of the opposite of what I’m doing with the podcast. I only have the energy for my cowrites right now. And part of that is I don’t have the focus or the energy to do the deep work of plotting and seeing down the road where I’m at.

I have two projects I’m working on actively, and one is in romance and it’s a series that has been very popular. It is my main moneymaker. It’s what pays my bills, with my dear friend and co-writer. We sit down, we have a one to two hour call where we hash out the plot together. I type it and then we have it. We trade chapters back and forth. She takes one character. I take another, and then we have it right ahead of us. I don’t have to think about the grand story. I just have to think about my scene. Just what I’m capable of right now.

My other project is a space opera with my dear friend, Tami Veldura, and the way we’re doing it, she is doing the plot. We did brainstorming together, and then she did the majority of the world building with me jumping in and being like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool if So she finished the plot, and now I have the plot and I just get to go write the prose, which I just love. Especially in scfi. I don’t have to think as much about, “Oh, what are the world implications of this world building thing?” Especially in the first book, it’s already been done for the most part. And I get to add nuance and I get to depth and I get to play with the words.

For the last couple chapters, I’ve taken a leaf out of J Thorn’s book, and I have been writing dialogue only. It’s not as difficult as I feared it would be, but I also get kind of these itchy fingers to go back and expand it. So I don’t know that I’m going to go through the entire book doing dialogue only. I really just want to do what I enjoy writing with this particular project. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go back and I’m going to play and expand and deepen the scenes I have, just for my own enjoyment.

Because that’s really important. I’ve realized in the last year how important it is to get back to the enjoyment of the work. The romance for me definitely became a day job. I had to get in, clock in clock out, and I had just stopped enjoying it. It stopped being as much of a challenge because I had reached a level of proficiency that I was happy with in the romance genre.

Not the top at all, because my heart isn’t also there, but making my money. So that’s good. And then another, “right” way versus—I’m calling in my mind, the right way versus the healthy way. And the healthy way is different for every person.

So “way” number three. There’s two different sides to this one. A lot of people would say that going KDP exclusive is the right way. You get in, you make a bunch of money and then maybe you get out. And other people will say, “Oh, wide is the right version. Start as you mean to go.”

For me, picking one or the other is not healthy, I really want the “safety” of being wide. I know that it’s a slower buildup. I know that. It will not get me as much money in the beginning, but I want to have things more spread out.

I want to be on the forefront of the international ebook revolution. And so there are definitely some projects I have that will be wide, but I’m very comfortable in the Kindle KDP exclusivity. That’s what I know. It’s what most of my books are in. Romance does really well there, particularly my subgenre.

It’s a different kind of safety in that it’s known. I know basically how much I’m going to make for a new release, depending on how long it is, which series it’s in. And so that’s its own kind of safety. I will have other books that will continue to release into and stay in KU for the foreseeable future.

It’s healthy for me to have both. What my original intention this year was to have, I mean, we’re halfway through the year. I meant to have a couple books out as me, as Crys Cain, in KU by now and taking the wide stuff slow and steady and enjoyably. And that has not happened. The only books I’ve released this year have been on the romance pen name.

And part of me hates that. I feel as if I’ve disappointed myself, I didn’t meet my goals, but I also recognize, and this is the healthy thing, I recognize the “right” way would have been to power through, get books, done, get them published. But the healthy way has been to step back, write less, read more, relax more, cry a lot.

And recognize that this is a period of my life that I will never have this particular experience again. I will go through other times that are personally hard, that are globally difficult, and they will affect me in different ways because of the knowledge I will have gained from this session, this part of my life, from the energy or lack thereof, my health or lack thereof, and just recognize that at some point I will have another high activity period.

Again, this is something that Becca and I talked about—and I will go into deeper, information on that when I do my episode on Write Better Faster—but at some point, the lack of doing things will become a new pain point.

Right now, the pain point is writing certain things or trying to plot is difficult because so much energy is expended in other areas of my life. At some point, those will more or less resolve or be integrated and the pain point will become “I really want to write.” And my current routine or my pattern doesn’t support that.

So I need to change my routine or my pattern. That’s really hard for me to accept. I really want to be active, high active all the time, and I recognize that that’s not healthy or even possible. And it’s really hard for me to integrate that acceptance with the belief that if I have a routine and I stick to the routine, that I’ll always be able to produce the same level or keep the same momentum. Because the fact is that our systems can be disrupted. Our routines can be disrupted by external circumstances that we have no control over. And we have to shift. I will never be able to hold to the same routine year in and year out. My son is going to get older. His needs are going to change. I’m going to get older. My needs are going to change. The things I want are going to change.

I have a hard time accepting that my routine is going to need to change, even though it’s been forced to change multiple times in my life. It’s really hard for me to accept that I don’t control everything—I’m a little bit of a control freak, but learning to process that. And also just learning that the “right” way to do things is not necessarily my healthy way to do things.

So that’s the thing I wanted to kind of push forward and share—the struggles I’ve been having with this. And I’m really curious what you listeners have struggled with. What is something you’ve been told is the “right” way to do things? And if you’re either struggling with that now, or you’ve already rejected it as not for you.

You can go to www.writeawaypodcast.com to leave a comment. And if this podcast is helping you in any way, you can go to www.kofi.com/cryscain. I will have links in the show notes and I appreciate any support that you can throw my way for the production of this podcast, the transcriptions. They are not free.

And I hope to be here in one week talking about my experience with Becca Symes’ Write Better Faster 1.0 class.