In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Chariot to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to finish their first drafts and final drafts and the steps they take along the way.
Question of the week: Do you struggle with getting to the finish line? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Fast-Draft Your Memoir: Write Your Life Story in 45 Hours by Rachael Herron
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends. And welcome to episode 93 of the Write Away Podcast. Today is Friday, April 29th, 2022, as we are recording. I am your host, Crys Cain, with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: Yay. We’ve had a day of it. My internet is top notch, so we completely switched programs so we’re using recorder audio. JP is on vampire hours at the day job, so that’s fun.
JP: good. is fine.
Crys: Everything’s fine.
How has your week been, JP?
JP: So it’s actually been decent, I think. So you are correct, I am on vampire hours, which is 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Today I don’t have to go in which is nice cause I’ve been working five-ish days on this schedule and I’m flipping it for next week. But the pleasant thing about it is it’s one of those times that I’m in a hotel and productive. Yay.
So our short story has been sent to the proofreader and returned, and it’s ready to publish ideally next week. Book one, I’ve gone through all of the copy edits and that’s been sent to the proofreader. We’ll just get whatever we need back from them, and that will be ready for July. And I also worked on some client work and I should be able to meet with them either today or tomorrow because I just had to finish up some stuff. So it’s been like highly productive which has been pretty nice.
Crys: Yay. I’ve also had a productive week. One of the things I think that’s been interrupting my productivity is that because we are fairly close to the airport, It feels like at least once a month we have guests come through, and my office also serves as a guest room so that disrupts my routine, right? Absolutely I can take my laptop and work from the table or my bedroom, but I like having a routine. I like having consistency. If I choose to step out of my consistency, that’s fine. But being forced out of my consistency isn’t super good for me.
So this week I moved my desk downstairs. It is now right next to the living room which should be fine because during the day my roommate and I both work. She’s generally upstairs in her room working, I’m downstairs here.
And I’ve actually been able to get a little extra work done when the kiddo is home because he’ll sit and play some video games, and I can actually sit at my desk and not feel uncomfortable that he’s not in my sight because he’s right there next to me. I can do some stuff that doesn’t take a lot of brainwork. So that’s been super interesting. I’m really curious to see how that plays out long-term.
And since I’m like really into shaking things up right now, I also completely switched my main writing app as a trial and I’m really liking it. I’ve mentioned before, I think, that I really liked the app obsidian, which is a text-only mark-down app. It’s just very simple, very Wikipedia-like, you can link things to each other. That’s very nice. But I wasn’t consistently using it. I don’t know that the organization system is ideal for me for storing Just connections and data. It might be for some projects, but I just wasn’t using it consistently, and that’s kinda my sign that something doesn’t work for me.
I also don’t really like Scribner cause it’s too overpowered and it distracts the hell out of me. So I saw it in a forum of writers on a really old message thread, I think it was started like, I don’t know, two or three years ago, but people talking about Ulysses, which I think is Mac only, but it’s this middle ground between Obsidian and Scribner. It has an organizational system. Unlike Scribner, I can keep all of my projects in one view without it being confusing. Scribner, You have to like open and close projects. And it also uses markdown, like Obsidian does, so very simple formatting. And so far, I really like it. I’ve been working on some non-fiction projects and some fiction projects. I moved one of each into this program and it’s working really well for me. I’m really liking it.
JP: Nice is Ulysses only Mac?
Crys: I think it’s only Mac. I’m completely in the Mac ecosystem right now. And even though I hate having an iPhone and want to move to a pixel whenever I purchased my next phone, it is really nice to have everything synced so easily. I’ve been using my notes app heavily and Ulysses is definitely an upgrade from that.
JP: Nice.
Crys: So our question this week is inspired by The Chariot card from the major content of the Tarot. JP, would you mind giving us a description of this card?
JP: Absolutely. The Chariot tarot card is a brave warrior standing inside of a chariot. He’s wearing armor decorated with Crescent moons which will represent what is coming into being. And he has a Laurel and star crown that signals victory, success, and spiritual evolution. Ultimately this card is representing success. It’s control, willpower, and determination. If any card were to represent the yes card in the tarot deck, it would be this one because this is taking action, moving forward, and doing the shit you need to do.
Crys: Excellent. And the question that we generated out of this card for craft was: how do you get to the finish line of your draft? Either first draft or final drafts because some people are fine getting to the end of that first draft, but then they have a really hard time getting to what they can call a final draft. So what are your thoughts, JP?
JP: Okay, that’s twofold.
Crys: It is two-fold. It’s like two different questions.
JP: It very much is. So for me it’s all about consistency. And when I say that I don’t mean the type of consistency where you’re at a hundred percent all of the time, or even more, trying to just get to this finish line because that to me is not a good practice. It will lead to burnout. So it is consistency in small bits, in time that you’re able to dedicate to get to that finish line. And then I have another opinion, but I’m curious about yours, and then I will state my other opinion.
Crys: Yeah. For me, consistency is hard. Like having a consistent output every day is hard unless I have some kind of Damocles hanging over my head. And what I mean by that is that I am very motivated by feeling like something terrible is going to go wrong if I don’t do X, Y, Z.
The problem is that’s not a super healthy way to operate. I’ve been trying not to do that. And the problem is that my consistency than Deteriorates, but my mental health is far better. So what I’ve been trying to do instead to generate the consistency is really focusing on one of the other things that gives me energy to get things done, and that’s, what am I super excited about in this project and in this thing?
So I’m trying to focus on writing more of the things that make me really excited, which listeners will know has been a project that I’ve been working on for a long time, is moving away from the romance, and moving into the of fantasy queer fiction. So just focusing on what am I excited about. If I get bored with a project, Is it missing exciting things? What exciting things could I put into the scene that would make me excited to write this scene?
The other thing is loosely held deadlines. So we’re still writing the romance. My co-writer has A bunch of like personal issues that are interrupting her writing even more than they have over the past two years. And then I have all of the new challenges of having a kid in school for the first time and figuring that life out. So we’ve been holding loose deadlines, in that we do have a pre-order up on Amazon, so we do have a date that we have to be done by, but our real date that we want to get done by is earlier than that.
So we have the sort of Damocles in that it does need to be done by that date, but we can push it back one month if we need to, but we really don’t want to cause that affects reader’s view of you as a consistent author, it affects the readers experience. But we also want to get it out before then. So it’s we have three deadlines in increasing severity, and having that, knowing like what the consequences are of each missing each one, and being able to know that missing one isn’t the end of everything, but it does increase the consequences lit slightly, that helps me a bit. It sounds really complicated when I lay it out like that.
JP: But it makes sense. Like you have a soft deadline, a medium deadline, and then a hard deadline. That’s what I gathered from that. Yeah. That’s like a good practice to have as an overall, like big overview.
And then for me, I know that I like the consistency, but of course I live very inconsistent life where the day job will shift my schedule 180 degrees. But it’s ultimately like that finding time for me makes me get across the finish line.
And then the other bit that I had, or my opinion about that is the letting go of perfectionism which has been an interesting thing for me to get past. Because I think for a while I was holding onto drafts and whatnot because I wanted to make them as polished as I possibly could get them, and that was too higher up. And then when we’re talking about like how we move down the chain through the process, we hand it off to editors, we hand it off to proofreaders, like we send it to these other people, so it doesn’t need to be at a hundred percent. And I think I’ve had to figure out where that level is so that things continue to progress.
Crys: Yeah I find that with the romance, because I’ve published so many books into them, I don’t have much hang up about perfectionism there at all. I do worry that I will encounter it more as I get ready to publish under my real-life name, like tying my face to my work, publishing stuff I really care about. I do worry that I’m going to wrestle a bit more with perfectionism there.
Now you get to the first draft pretty easy, but you can’t get to the final draft, that kind of plays into that perfectionism a bit more. People can deal with perfection at every level, even on your first draft, but I find that the thing that holds people up from first draft to final draft is the perfectionism.
JP: Yeah, definitely. And I think I’ve said this here thousands of times, but I always view writing in the same way that I view art. That if art is a hundred percent perfect, then everyone will love it. But then it’s boring art. It’s the imperfections of art that make people have opinions about it, that make people incite emotion about it.
So I think it’s the same for writing. And I think that if your writing is absolutely perfect, then you’re probably making something that could be bland, if that makes sense.
Crys: Yeah.
JP: If you’re trying to write for everybody, then you may be making something that’s too generic.
Crys: and then no one wants it.
JP: Absolutely.
Crys: To wrap up, the question I would like to ask is: do you struggle with getting to the finish line? And if so, how so?
JP: Absolutely.
Crys: Thank you so much for joining us this week. We’re a little bit behind on having decided our book for next month, which we will record in less than two weeks. But we picked up a book that several folks in the book club really wanted to read. I have read it previously and it is a lovely, easy read with so much good information. And that is Fast-Draft Your Memoir: Write Your Life Story in 45 Hours by Rachael Herron. Even if you do not intend to write a memoir, there’s this good section Rachel has on self-editing and I think that section is great for any writer.
JP and I are about to go record our Patreon episode which is our business episode. And today’s question is: how do you define success and what are you doing to achieve it? If you would like access to that episode, you can join us at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast.
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