Write Away Podcast

Crys: Hello, welcome to the Write Away Podcast. Things are going to sound a little different this week. My computer is solidly broke, broke. So we’re recording this podcast on JP’s computer one shot. No intro or outro, and you’ll probably hear Smalls & Co. in the background.

This is our book club podcast for the month, and we chose Money Honey by Rachel Richards, which is a book on personal finance. With me for this conversationI have a couple of fellows from last month, JP Rindfleisch and Lon Varnadore. And JP has a special message for us. 

JP: Alright. The information provided in this podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not intended, and under no circumstances should it be construed, as providing personal investment, tax, or legal advice, or recommendation.

Crys: Did you read this straight from the book?

JP: I sure did.

Crys: That’s excellent. Okay. So this is a book on personal finance, and some people might wonder why we’re talking about that on a podcast/book club that’s about growing our author business. I very firmly believe that getting your personal finance in gear is extremely important to getting your writing business in gear. So that’s why we picked this one. Guys, first thoughts?

JP: I absolutely loved the sass of this book. It definitely brought it down to a level that felt like it was your best friend telling you some solid financial advice, and it gave me a little kick in the pants. I liked it.

Lon: I thought it was really good too. And listening to the very beginning—because I listened to the audio—the first part of it was talking about finance was about as much fun as watching paint dry. Yes, it is. Then just getting through that and listening to the rest of the rather sassy information that was given, it was just like, okay, now it’s still dry, but it’s in a much more informal tone and much better really.

Crys: One of the things I really liked about Rachel is that I think she says that she achieved financial independence/retired by age 29. It might’ve even been younger. There’s a lot of coaches, like on Instagram, specifically, who market themselves as six figure business owners by 26. And most of the time I look at them and I’m like, I don’t actually want you to teach me anything because I think you lucked out. Not to judge people or anything, but it could have been because you’re young and cute. It could have just been because you’re a really good social media person. You didn’t tell me why and how you earned six figures at that young age, just that you’re magic for earning it at that young age. 

Rachel does not do that. She’s like I started selling Cutco knives, and then I did this, and then I did that. And now I own 32 rental doors and that’s my main income. Then COVID hit that, but then I have the income from my book. But she lays it all out and that makes me trust her.

JP: Yeah, for sure.

Lon: This isn’t like, oh, hey, I’m internet famous and I get six figures or almost seven figures doing this. And it’s like you are pretty, that’s pretty much it. You became an influencer. Congratulations.

Crys: Yeah, and there are lot’s of people who do work really hard, but it’s really hard to see beyond the facade of the internet. Like you’ve really got to lay it out there if you want to use lessons to teach people how to actually build their own. Another reason I think Rachel is really good for authors to read is because of her focus on passive income. Because she wrote this book, she does use books as one element of passive income, but not the only element.

Lon: Correct.

JP: Yeah. It was really nice being able to see her progression as someone who is not necessarily fully in the author business, as someone who’s just starting out. I still have that average nine to five, so getting that person who was in the same boat as I am and seeing how their path went, it definitely lays the plan ahead for how I could perceive building up that sort of system so that I’m more prepared when I go full time.

Crys: What was the most useful thing for either of you? If there is something that you feel like you can apply right away?

JP: For me, it was the four bucket system because I definitely use like a one and a half bucket system. 

Crys: Can you explain that a little bit?

JP: Yeah, definitely. She has this concept where you should have four buckets of where you’re putting your money away. The first one is emergency. It should be roughly about a thousand dollars and that should be in something you can easily grab. Then you’ve got your short term, so anything that kind of happens within a year as well as about a six month salary. This should be in a high yield savings, but it’s still something you should be able to easily access because it’s within a year. Then you’ve got long-term, so this is bigger events that are about a year away, more life events. This should go in the stock market. And then you’ve got your fourth bucket, which is retirement, and that’s kind of just this big bucket you should be filling everything in. But she has this system where you should almost always be giving money into retirement, but you should be starting at bucket one and kind of dripping down as you continue to fill each one.

Crys: Yeah, and she picks out kind of an arbitrary number of 1000. She says your emergency fund may be lower or higher, whatever you feel like you need to have on hand.  I chose that pretty much as my number as well, and so I had a big personal celebration when I was able to hit that amount in my savings. Other than when I was preparing for having Smalls and having to cover my maternity leave, I don’t think I’ve ever had that much saved. So that feels really amazing.

I think the thing that I took away as my most immediately applicable thing is that I’ve always been intimidated by the stock market. She recommended an app that’s not your best as far as like returns, because I think they charge you like a dollar a month and they’re not very clear about that. But it’s called Acorn. So now I just drop in $25 a month and if you hook up your debit card or credit card, it’ll do roundups based on your purchases and drip a little bit more money on there.  So I started that four or five months ago when I first read the book before she put up the second edition. It makes me feel really powerful. Even though it’s this tiny little bucket, I’m like I’m investing.

JP: I have a really fun workaround for Acorns because I don’t like paying them a dollar a month because I’m that stingy of a person. So she mentioned this other app, Qapital. And that is totally free and you can put a rule on there for round up rules and then it will totally accrue an amount. Now, it doesn’t invest. So then you have to take that bucket of money once you’ve accrued it, and then I use an app called M1 Finance, and there you can create a pie of different stocks and you can buy portions of stocks. So say that you wanted Apple and you don’t have that number, but you could put a couple of dollars towards Apple and this pie will just buy fractions of these stocks. So I really like using those two apps in tandem. Just as a random recommendation.

Crys: Yeah, I love that. I opened a Vanguard account at the same time I opened Acorn and stuck like $40 in there and promptly got overwhelmed by the fact that I couldn’t afford anything with $40.

JP: That’s definitely why I like M1. M1 Finance is really good at doing those little partial stocks.

Crys: Yeah. And you, Lon?

Lon: Unfortunately, just everything. There’s no one single bit. I was listening to it and just letting it flow over. I need to go back and listen to this again. And I do have the actual ebook and I’ll have to go at some point and just drill down onto different things like personal finance, and investing, and retirement, and just everything. I am a financial mess.

Crys: I am part of the financial mess club.

Lon: Awesome.

JP: Me, also.

Crys: I don’t want to say that writers are more financially messy, because I think that’s just creatives in general.  We tend to try and ignore that dirty money thing, but please give us it. We just want to buy our coffees and our computers and books.

Lon: A mound of books, our computer, and printer paper. And for me soda, and for everyone else, coffee, because I’m weird. And yeah, we’d be fine.

Crys: So I would say this book is for people who don’t really have a clue. This is such an amazing beginning book on personal finance. I’m in her class right now and it does feel slightly next level. She’s got a lot more spreadsheets on tracking your total net worth. Surprisingly, I have a net worth that is positive. It’s not highly positive, but it’s positive. So it’s fun to be able to look at that. She has it so that you can track it month over month. So I recommend reading the book first because I feel like that’s the easiest step, and you can pick out your first step or two. Then for people who need more attention or just have more questions and really like her style and her character, then her classes are great.

JP: One thing I think I would recommend to anyone, especially to those working a nine to five, because I’ve switched companies a few times here and there and I’ve had multiple 401Ks that I’ve had to move, is she kind of steers away from the use of a financial advisor, but I just happened to have one. And I personally like him because he’s just able to offer that kind of advice and we have a pretty good deal where he takes based on if my investments actually make money and then he makes a small fraction of that. So it’s a good setup, especially if you need that assistance of figuring out how you can move a 401K from here to here without screwing it up. Because I don’t necessarily have the time to really educate myself a hundred percent on that, and so it’s a good starter. Then once you get more comfortable with it, then you can wean off of them.

Crys: Do you have any advice for finding a good financial advisor or did you just luck into yours?

JP: Mine was a family one, so no.

Crys: Yeah. So ask your family and ask your friends and their parents. Yeah, I’m too old to not know enough about this is. That’s the saddest part. Like we should know this stuff and they don’t teach it to us in school.

JP: That’s very true.

Lon: That was one thing I just kept nodding to at the beginning. It was like, they don’t teach this stuff in school. I was like, no, they don’t. I do remember when I was really young, they taught us how to balance a checkbook for like one class session. That was it. And I still use checks once in a greeeeeaaaat while. 

Crys: I have used them for two people in the last 10 years, and they were my ex’s grandmother and my grandmother because they didn’t trust PayPal.

JP, will you tell us what book we are going to do for next month?

JP: Yes, we are going to do Invisible Ink.

Crys: By Brian McDonald. I think all three of us are Brian McDonald geeks. Yes, Lon? Are you also a McDonald geek?

Lon: Eh.

Crys: Good. We need some ehs in the conversation. Our mentor, Jay thorn, turned us on to his podcast, Are You A Storyteller, a few months ago and a good handful of us promptly tore through everything that man has created on the art of story. So that will be good, especially if Lon is eh, we’ll have a good conversation.

I will see you guys next month.

Hello, friends! I’m your host, Crys Cain, and this is episode 14 of the Write Away podcast, recording October 27th, 2020. I have done a scary thing this week. I booked an editor without knowing for certain if a book will be finished by the due date. Of course I will finish it on time, but I don’t know if I’ll do it with a minimum amount of stress.

I have two reasons for doing this, number one of course is to get the book done. But number two is more strategic. I’ve been really gentle with myself this year. It’s been extremely healthy and necessary as I deal with this ending of my marriage, burnout, COVID, but I’m finally getting to that point where the lack of productivity is frustrating. Not guilt induced, but more like that feeling after you’ve been sick, and all you want to do is get up and move. That feeling, but I’m terrified of throwing myself into burnout again. So I’ve hesitated to push harder, but I am giving myself a higher production and stress trial run.

My ideal goal through about June of next year is to write 60,000 words every six weeks from now until then. That gives me 40,000 on a solo project and 20,000 on a co-writing project. I thought out a few schedules for approaching this. And number one was 60,000 words, six weeks, 10,000 words a week, 2000 words a day. Totally doable unless I miss a day or a week, and I’m not a huge fan of that. So number two idea was 10,000 for two weeks for the co-writing project, and then 15,000 for three weeks for the solo project, and then one week off. And I really like having that wiggle room, but what I decided to go was option number three, which is 10,000 for two weeks, and then one week off, and then 20,000 for two weeks and one week off.

What I like about this is that it accepts that life is inconsistent and it builds that in, and so far so good. My max number per day last week was 4,000 with an average of 2300. Yesterday I wrote a little over 2000, so far today I’ve written 2,600. I don’t know if I’ll get more in today, but my goal is not to get 4,000 words a day right off the bat.

My goal is to ramp up my word counts. Just like if I were ramping up my weights in a physical exercise routine. I need an average around 3,500 per day, Monday through Friday including today. I’m not super stressed if I don’t hit that because the end of a book tends to be like riding a bike downhill down a steep hill at the end.  It tends to be really easy for me to knock out mad word counts the last few days, but I don’t want to have to depend on that so much. I’d rather get the words in earlier. It may be that the book ends up being shorter than I planned.

The first, I don’t know, nine chapters, we’re averaging about 2000 words a chapter, but then we got into a little bit more action. The word counts dropped a bit and so I averaged, I guess, about 56,000 words for this book. It may end up being closer to 50,000, which would be just great because then I’m shooting for more than I need, which means I might even get done early. So I’m working up to those 4k days.

After I finish this particular book, I’ll slide into finishing a co-written book that’s currently in progress. I just realized I won’t be able to slide fully into a real test of the six week schedule until January because of the co-write schedule until then. But step one is simply to test if I can write 4k a day comfortably at this point, or if I think I can work up to it. I have tentatively taken a break from pushing myself on science fiction and fantasy, simply because I need to get some financial stuff in order, and the romance will absolutely get me there. No questions.

My hope is in those off weeks, which are buffer weeks, they are, you know, vacation-available weeks, they are, I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-Iwant weeks, I-can-catch-up-on-admin weeks. My hope is that I will be able to slip some scifi and fantasy in there, starting in January, earlier maybe, but like, I’m not even putting that in my brain right now because I don’t want to build that expectation on myself.

For the interview this week, I have the wonderful rebel, Sacha Black.  We talked a lot about goals, and Sacha has some very, very specific goals and we dug into why do you want these goals? What do these goals mean to you? And I think that is one of the most important things that we need to consider when we listen to people talk about specifically monetary goals, sales goals, any of those. The number themselves are not actually that important. It’s what do those numbers mean? What do they mean for you? And I think if we talk about numbers goals without talking about meaning, then we are hurting ourselves. We’re hurting the people who are listening to those goals and comparing themselves to it, and you know, and everybody is in charge of themselves. We can’t make people not compare themselves, but I do think it’s very useful to draw attention to the whys.

So I hope you enjoy this interview.

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Crys: So I’m going to start with a question that a lot of us writers hate. It came to me right before we got on the call–and it’s not one that I told you ahead of time, so I’m really curious to what your answer is going to be–but what do you tell people you do for a living?

Sacha: I tell them I’m an author. Yeah, no question. But yeah, I do. I usually say I’m an author and an entrepreneur because that’s what I feel like. I love the business side almost as much as I love the creative side. I’m probably like 55/45 or maybe 60/40. I don’t know. I suppose I swing. If it’s loads of admin, then I’m definitely on the creative side. I really feel like if you want to be a successful indie author–and not just on the creative side, but in terms of creating a stable future for yourself–then the most effective way to do that is to embrace the entrepreneur side as well.

Because whilst, you know, I’m sure for most of us, we all want to write eight hours a day. if we only have one income source, even if that’s books and we are independent, you are still not financially safe. So for me, I always say I’m an author and an entrepreneur. And then they raise  eyebrows and ask, “Well, how  can you be both?” And I’m like, “No, darling, come here and I’ll tell you.”

Crys:  Have you defined yourself as that from the beginning? Or was that a process you had to get to saying either of those things?

Sacha: I think that’s a good question. I think, well, I definitely didn’t define myself as an indie to start with. I have only ever published indie and I have never queried. But I didn’t know that when I started, so when I started, I was just like everybody else I knew.

I knew fuck all about the industry. I knew nothing about traditional publishing. I knew nothing about indie publishing. But as somebody who loves to learn, I was always going to educate myself. And as soon as I saw the numbers, it just made no sense to me to go traditionally published because I had faith in myself that, despite the number of people who want to and fail or whatever, and don’t succeed, I believed I could create a business.

From the start I did publish my first book as indie. Now that’s not to say I won’t try traditional. I do think the next book that I write is much more suited to traditional publishing. It’s a standalone for a start, which is a lot easier to pitch.

I think indie, traditional,  whatever–I think there are reasons to do each of them. And in terms of the entrepreneur, I definitely think that was a name I gained over time. I don’t think I felt confident enough to like embrace it. I don’t think I, yeah, as much as I believed I could be inie. I think that the entrepreneur definitely  came later once I started adding streams of income and learning actively learning about the business side. That’s when I started to embrace the entrepreneur side.

Crys: I love that. I have recently had this kind of realization in my head because I’m not just interested in one element. I’m with you on the writing, the creativity and the business side–love both. And that’s one of the main reasons that I went indie. I was like, well, why not choose the option that allows me to do both and have so much control when that’s something I love?

And recently I realized that I’ve been having trouble approving of my desire to have a bunch of other business, completely unrelated to the writing business. I mean, for instance, one of them is running some real estate property things, which has been a plan for a long time. And then another is, you know, we’ve been talking about possible coaching business, but I don’t know if I want that to be writing specific.

I realized that a block in my mind was simply that I didn’t know that I had permission to be super successful at everything I wanted. I realized just because no one else has done this particular combination of things successfully together doesn’t mean I can’t do it. Look at all the people who’ve been really successful at very disparate things in other realms. That’s really interesting that that’s kind of that same mindset.

Sacha: I love it. I’m going to tell you things. So the first thing is, I have a six year plan to buy a second house because I want to flip properties. So I am all over that with you. My wife is, super, super  amazing at anything DIY. She can fix literally everything. I can do all the painting and all the other stuff. So, that’s our plan because she would love to retire, cause she has chronic fatigue and stuff. I’m like, well, we need another business that will give her an income and she can, you know, redecorate slowly or whatever.

That’s the first thing. The second thing–I have a sticker on my computer, but both sides that says you have permission, because so often I forget that I have the power to do these things and it’s okay to have these desires. I keep those stickers on my computer to remind me that I have permission to do whatever the fuck I desire. So yeah, you, you need to post it as well.

Crys: I used to have, when I worked at my software development job, because I get so distracted, I used to have a post it that just said, “get back to work,” at the top of it.

Sacha: Oh yeah, I’m at work. I should do that. Yeah. I love it. Post-its are awesome.

Crys: So given that you have so many things going on in life, this is probably a complicated answer with many tiers. But what does success look like for you? We’re going to start with just right now, because we’re going to go into like how that might’ve changed. But right now, now, what is your vision of success?

You can pick a timeframe if you need to.

Sacha: So there’s a very easy answer, which I’ll give you first. And then there’s a slightly harder answer. The easy answer is I want a six figure business. And I want to be able to  have the knowledge that I have some kind of retirement pension fund that’s secure and big enough that I can look after my mum as well. And then there’s one other thing wrapped up in that–I would love to be able to take my son somewhere to a different country for six weeks. Every year in the school, summer holidays like that, that is my ideal. And it may be that that comes first because obviously he’s only going to be young for so long.

And then the retirement fund comes–.You know, I’m still pretty young. That’s one definition. The second definition is that I’m an asshole, and I’m very mean to myself, and I move the bloody goalposts constantly. So, I really struggle to ever feel pride or that I’m successful because, despite having, Becca Syme’s Achiever thing, I really, really struggled to acknowledge any success or any achievements.

I will finish a book and then I’ll just move straight on. There’s no stopping to celebrate. There’s no acknowledgement. There’s no, there’s no nothing. I just look to the next thing. I’ve always, since I was 12, I wrote, I remember writing it on my bedroom or I want a six figure business and, It’s completely arbitrary. Like what, who, why, why that figure? I don’t know. So yeah. There’s like, I don’t know how I’m going to feel when I get there. Will I still feel like a failure? You know?

I don’t know, but I spend a lot of time feeling like a failure, which is bizarre. And I don’t think I actually even knew that I felt that until I just said it, but yeah. I don’t know. It’s weird, but  those are my top targets.

Crys: What does a six figure business feel like for you? I think that when we have targets like that, subconsciously there’s a kind of freedom that that particular thing we expect to bring to us.

Sacha: Yeah. So there’s there’s probably three things wrapped up in that in my mind. When I’d reached that level, I will have no issues paying my bills, having a holiday every year and still having significant amounts of money that I can put away for my retirement might to be able to look after my mom. And to ensure that my son has some kind of inheritance.

The caveats are, well, not caveats, but the other sort of milestones on the way is I want to beat my old income. And then I want to beat the asshole who told me that my personality was a risk to my reputation. I know what he earned, and that is on the way to six figures. I am really like part of this fight, revenge. Like I have to beat this person because they crushed me and therefore I will feel righteous in having quit my job. I know it’s terrible. But yeah–

Crys: I had those goals, too! Yes. Okay. A hundred percent. I made just under six figures as a software developer. My first year publishing, I did not make that, clearly, but,my second year I did.

So that was awesome. And then also there is a, there is a person in my life that I can’t get rid of and it’s okay. But they’re a little snooty about like what they make and just… their idea of stability and all this other stuff. And so I definitely had it in the back of my mind–like it’s going to feel really good when I out-earn them and it totally did. It absolutely did.

I am not a big person when it comes to that. I am very petty. Of course I didn’t rub it in their face. All at all. It’s just my own personal accomplishment.

Sacha: I’m not even, I have no way of contacting this person.

Crys: You’re gonna love it. You’re gonna get there. You’re gonna love it.

Sacha: It’s amazing.

Crys: I think that’s hilarious that we both have those really specific goals.

Sacha: It’s so petty and I don’t even care. Like I am fine with it being petty,

Crys: It isn’t hurting us at all to have those goals or anyone else.

When you started writing, did you ever know that you wanted to be a writer? Like as a child?

Sacha: So I think if I had been more self-aware I probably would have known. I was a kid who always carried a notebook, I wrote stories, I read so prolifically that I basically read everything in my very small local library. And so my mom had to start taking me to the bigger town library because, you know, I know they could order stuff, but you know, you wanted to see the selection as a kid. So anyway, we went to the bigger library.

Like I literally, I consumed books.

Crys: Oh, man. I would have destroyed a Kindle Unlimited subscription as a child.

Sacha: I know! Exactly. It was like oh, those were the days when that was all we had to do with our time. And, you know, I was the sort of kid that my mum would be like, okay, you must go outside now. You need to put the book down and go outside. So what I would do is like sneak a book in my pants. I’d take the book outside, read in the tree house. Because then I was still outside, but I was still reading. And like English was always, always my favorite subject too.

Crys: I have a question. Did your mother ever ground you from going to the library or hide your books on you?

Sacha: No. She was a huge supporter. Like we had nothing really when we’re not, when we were growing up and she would spend her last penny on a book for me.

Crys: My mom was the same, but the only way she could punish me that worked was threatening to ban me from going to the library. At which point I would start sequestering spare books between my mattress and the box spring, in my drawers–everywhere. Just so that if she did go through and take my books because like, that was my punishment. I would have spares somewhere.

Sacha: That’s amazing. I love that. That is epic. Yeah. So if I had paid attention, I would have realized that English was my favorite subject. I loved my teacher. My teacher loved my writing. But, very rightly so, my mum told me to get a degree that would be a backup.

So I went off and did psychology. And then, I did a master’s in cognitive neuropsychology, and then I got a scholarship to do a PhD. So I came up with a whole theory around distributed cognition. And I just, I burned myself so low, that I did not go and do the PhD.

Then I fell into a–you know, cause you forget, you forget what your youth was about–I was following this “get a proper job” thing. So that’s what I did. I did like a graduate fast track management scheme, very boring in the public sector, local government. And I knew more or less instantly that I’d made a very big mistake.

Within six months I basically had clinical depression. I was told I didn’t fit in. I would never get very senior because I wouldn’t play the game. The politics–I was told my personality was a risk to my reputation. I remember literally breaking down and sobbing. And what happened was I drank wine and I started a blog under a pseudonym called SachaBblack.

So I basically started vomiting these rants about work, and they were hilarious because some of the things that happened was so ridiculous in this organization that, you know, I gained a following. Anyway, one thing led to another and I found the flash fiction community.

And all of a sudden, I remembered what writing was and how much I loved writing. I heard about NaNoWriMo and I went up in the loft and I got out some of my old notebooks and I was like, right. I’m going to do it. So I did, I did a NaNo and I have literally never looked back.

It’s like one of the only NaNos I actually finished because I didn’t know how to write back then, so I was just vomiting crap out. But, yeah, I just never stopped writing. Love it.

Crys: So how has this, because you have those moving goalposts, how have your goalposts moved? Where did they start? And what are some of the points that you hit along the way before today?

Sacha:  So when I started writing–if I set my mind to something–I always want to do it to the very best I possibly can. When I started the NaNo, I don’t think in my mind there was ever a doubt that I wouldn’t publish the book just because that is the finished– hat is the end. That is the completion. That is the goal achieved. So yeah.

I always knew I was going to publish the book. You know, when you first start writing, you don’t know that the whole indie world exists. You don’t know what it entails. So, you know, I moved the goalposts because I had no clue.

I was like, yeah, you know, I’m going to write a book. And then I’m going to publish a book with no clue the like eye-watering amount of work that goes into actually getting a book published. So, yeah, like originally I knew no better, so I wanted it traditionally published. Then I moved the goalpost because I listened to the likes of Joanna Penn and Mark Dawson and all of those guys and learned about indie.

So then I moved to the goalposts to being indie. Very rapidly after I finished the first book, I learned about the indie world. I knew that’s what I wanted. I knew I wanted to live a free life. I wanted nobody to be able to tell me what time I had to do stuff. And that correlated very directly with how much I didn’t enjoy my work.

So the more I hated my day job, the harder I pushed towards this in terms of moving goalposts. Though, like for me, it’s more that  I will achieve a goal that I’ve set myself and then I will tell myself some things are not good enough, or I could have done better or, I dunno. Yeah.

An example of where that’s not the case is a very black and white thing.  I just told you before we came on about me grading,  doing my martial arts, I either get an A-pass or I don’t. So, you know, like an A-pass is basically the full marks that you can get. And so every single exam I’ve got an A-pass, you know, and in my brain,  I’m like,tThat’s fantastic.

And then the other part of me is like, well, you did make a mistake, though, didn’t you? Like, you know, just like, Oh, shut up. You’re so boring, Sacha. But yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of how I moved my goalposts.

Crys: Yeah. And as you’ve talked I’ve heard you say a few goals, like finishing NaNo, publishing that first book, quitting the day job. And now it’s six-figure multiple streams of income. The goals grow for most of us.

Sacha: I think that’s okay.

Crys: A hundred percent. I think I’ve told you this story before, but in the StrengthsFinders, Sasha’s achiever is in her top five, which means it controls her.

Right.

It effects all of her life. Every single part. Mine is I think, down to six, seven, eight–it’s somewhere down there. So it still hits my life pretty strongly. And I didn’t realize when I started that I had the goal to be a fiction writer 100%. Like, I was going to make my money from fiction and fiction alone and nothing else. I wasn’t going to offer services or anything else–I was going to make it on fiction.

And I didn’t know that there was an invisible point when my brain might go, “Ding, ding, ding. You have achieved your goal!” But there was. And when I hit that point, I was like, “Oh, okay. Now what?” And I’ve been floundering hard.

I’ve had a couple episodes talking about figuring goals out for longterm, about what replaces that. Because that does drive you forward and just a higher number doesn’t necessarily do it. It has to mean something. Right? And that’s why I asked,  what does that six-figure mean to you?

Cause it means a lot of really good things.

Sacha: Yeah. So, okay. Now I understand. So, I have a slightly different answer because I really hugely relate to exactly what you’re saying about having achieved a goal. So my big goal was to quit my job. Okay. I’ve always wanted to earn  six figures. And I have genuinely, always wanted to earn six figures, but that was so distant and far off, the big goal was to quit my job.

And especially because I literally cried every day at work for weeks and weeks and weeks. I remember like where I very nearly had a nervous breakdown and I was crying in a tree. In the middle of winter and it was raining and I was just, I was absolutely hysterical. Like I couldn’t be talked down and, I just couldn’t stop crying and, sorry.

Crys: It is a very writer thing to do.

Sacha: Right? Like who does that?

Crys: Not in your room, you have to cry at a tree in the middle of winter.

Sacha: I know, right? I was literally in the middle of this tree. I think it was like maybe three trees that had sort of made it into what it is–irrelevant. And so when I quit my job, I spiralled so hard.

I shot up and I was hysterical with elation and joy… and then I realized I’d quit my job. And I was like, “Oh, goal achieved. “Now, I worked very hard, but there was something missing inside of me and I worked out–it was funny, on the podcast, I think with Damon Suede, and he was talking about character verbs and how everybody has a verb and it wasn’t until I chatted with him that I realized that my verb is to defy. Then I worked out what the problem was.

Whilst I was still in my day job, I was defying authority. I was defying the organization by writing, by building this business. And they were the big, bad monster. I used to talk about the organization like it was this big, bad monster, and then I defeated it.

And then what? There is nothing. So I really relate hard to that. And I think it was a process of time and a process of rebuilding myself to want more and finding something else to defy. So now it’s I want to defy the odds, and that’s what drives me now. And a little bit defying that asshole with his salary.

Crys: It can be hard when you accomplish that goal. You kinda gotta defy somebody else. Who can we get to be mean to you?

Sacha: Right. Someone be horrible, so I can defy you. Yeah. So I dunno. I guess I’ll probably have another mini collapse after I hit six figures and then I’ll have to find something else to do. Yeah.

So have you found your thing?

Crys: Which thing? Oh, maybe. Maybe. We’re seeing.

Sacha: Do you know your verb?

Crys: I don’t. if I had to answer like off the fly, it’s simply to create, because I do that in every way, shape and form in my life. I garden like a crazy person. I create order and I create chaos  and I get bored and then I go create something new. I joke with  my friends, that my spiritual gift is making money, because I can literally make money out of anything.

I look at everything and I’m like, well, these are the five different ways that you could create money out of this thing, like going in and finding seeds from the ylang ylang tree–cause everyone wants a ylang ylang tree in this town–sprouting them and then selling them for four bucks each after they’re these tiny trees out of $0 investment. Except, you know, maybe whatever container you put it in. Just to start.

It’s really hard, I think, right now between Corona and going through the end of a 15 year relationship to really know what my future is going–what I’m going to want my future to look like. So part of it is just accepting that I don’t really know right now, and that’s okay.

I’ve been setting smaller achievements. I haven’t  had a car for the majority of the last seven years because we have bicycles. Taxis are really cheap here. Cause you’re not going to go more than, like, four kilometers, okay? That’s how big our town is. I’ve realized–and this was actually in the Becca Syme’s intellection intensive class–that I really miss the car time.

I rented a car last month for the first time and then had the Becca Symes’ intellection class. And one of the questions was “Where’s your thinking time?”

I had one day in the car where I drove for nine hours by myself and I came up with the best ideas. I was like, I’m ready to go back to car life.

So one of my mini goals is make enough money to buy a car –and not a crappy car that I’m going to have to repair every month. It’s going to add more stress to my life, but a decent car.

I have that goal in my mind, and that is going to push me forward into some new writing projects specifically. There’s other things that are just kind of in that murky mess of amoebic ideas that have not yet crawled out onto land to become creatures.

Sacha: Creations. 

Crys: Yes, indeed. So that’s where I’m at. That’s where I’m at on the achievers-slash-goal thing right now. Today was interesting because I had a deadline for a book last week, and I don’t like having really intense deadlines where like, you start ten days before the thing is due when it’s a big project like this, but that’s what circumstances required.

And we did it. I kinda laid low Saturday, Sunday, and then today was my, okay, back to real life. I started organizing, and I took a really ugly mirror I have and I redecorated it to just create, and we’re going to put these plants in these pots. And just went into other creation mode hardcore this morning, which was cool.

And it’s interesting to see that pattern happen a lot.

You have, kind of a leg up from most writer businesses in that you have a really strong, example in your life of entrepreneurialship and building successful businesses in your father. So obviously that is has had an effect on you.

What would you say that you’re most grateful? For having had that relationship in your life and you’re in your businesses now.

Sacha: So the interesting thing is I didn’t have a relationship with my father until I was like 18. Yeah. So I lived with my dad until I was two. And then, my mom and dad split up and it was just my mom until well, forever.

And, so I didn’t see him. I don’t, well, I don’t recall seeing him until I was about nine and then I asked to see him. And so I’d spend, you know, the odd weekend with him, but we had a very fraught relationship. And I was a very fussy eater as a child, and that caused a lot of problems because my dad eats incredibly healthily and always has apart from his sugar addiction.

Yeah, so like we didn’t get on. And then he had a partner who I actually came to physical blows with. So then I didn’t talk to him for a couple of years. And then, I met my partner. Or, oh, I had a partner before and anyway, so there was like a very sort of loose relationship there, and then I met my wife and she is so family orientated.  It’s insane. They’re all off in each other’s businesses, but like literally as close of a family as you can get. And she pushed and encouraged me to rekindle with my dad. So I did, and we had a couple of sit down meals and we just got everything out in the open. I basically said everything that I needed to say, and that was it.

I’m a firm believer in moving on and letting go because I think when you don’t let go, you poison yourself. The only person those feelings and that anger was hurting was me. So I literally, I said what I had to say, and then I moved on and it was only in letting go that I was then able to develop a very close relationship with my dad. The crazy thing is I am so much like my dad it is un-fucking-believable for, for a girl who didn’t grow up with her father and did not spend a lot of time with her father, it’s actually a bit weird how similar we are. So just shows you sometimes how strong genes can be.

So, but with all that said, I am most grateful for my dad because he, of everybody, he was the person who said, “you need to quit your job. You need to quit your job.” He, two years out before I quit, he was telling me, every time I called him, “quit your fucking job. Quit your job, quit your job.” And I couldn’t, and I couldn’t do it and I couldn’t let go.  And he was like, “you will find a way.” And he was, and don’t get me wrong, my wife also believed in me and you know, but of everybody, he had a way of talking to me that would give me faith in myself because he has this way with words, this way of describing things and giving you your own power. He was so resolute, and just when he believes something it is truth and that’s it.

He gave that to me, and, you know, it took a while for me to believe it. A while, you know, I had to pay off debt and stuff. So there were genuine financial blockages, that I would not quit my job until I paid off my debt. But, you know, he was the person that I called when I was crying in a tree, you know, he was the person and, I feel so sorry for him because the number of phone calls he had to deal with, with me, same shit over and over again, because I just hadn’t quit my job, you know?

But yeah, he was a pinnacle of strength and support, so I would say, you know, during the worst times in my day job. And you know, my mom also for other reasons, but if you’re asking about my dad, so yeah.

Crys:  He seems like a person who sees multiple paths all at once and positive possibility in all of them, where I feel like a lot of people will see, like this is the path I’m supposed to follow and feel like they have to stick to that. And I think that comes in with your rebellion against everything, your defiance, possibly inherited from him. And that’s one of the viewpoints that I have learned throughout life is one that that faith that he gave you, that you will find a way that, paths are all around us and we need to look for them because they’re not going to say, “Hey, I’m the right way,” because none of them are the right way. They’re just ways. And we make of them what we will.

Sacha: Yeah, absolutely. And he always, you know, he does not allow me to give him problems. He will turn it around very rapidly and ask me how I’m going to handle that situation. And I’ll tell you what, it is the most frustrating and fantastic conversation to have with somebody who will just not accept your bullshit.

And, yeah, so again, there’s that empowerment and because also he knows I will figure it out, whatever. You know, he doesn’t necessarily have the answer and he wouldn’t give it to me, even if he did have the answer, he’s very much no, go and research it yourself or go and, you know, whatever.  But I think it’s a fantastic way to be because you enable a person, and it’s, yes, we can help everybody, but it’s so much better to enable somebody to help themselves. And that’s what he does.

Crys: Awesome.

All right. Well, we have to wrap up, but I asked you to share something with the listeners, a fun resource for them.

So what do you have for us?

Sacha: So does it need to be a resource that I have created or a resource that other people? Like what should the resource–?

Crys: Anything, anything that you think is super helpful and that you love.

Sacha: Okay. There’s so many though.

Crys: That’s the learner problem.

Sacha: I know, right. I’m like, literally there’s so many things. Okay. So this one is, just a small thing, but it can open so many things. So if you are a podcast listener, which I’m assuming you all are if you’re listening to this podcast, then I have started to do a lot of listening to random podcasts. I say random, we’ll get to the point, but what I mean is like topical episodes.

There is a website called Listen Notes. And you can type in, like, let’s say you want to learn about writing dialogue, and you can type it in writing dialogue, and it will spring up a load of podcasts that are podcast episodes. Not podcasts to subscribe to, but podcasts, individual podcast episodes on that very topic. So actually it’s a bit like a Wikipedia encyclopedia, because there are so many bloody podcasts on all different types of topics. Let’s say you want to research Victorian murders, you know, whatever. You type in Victorian murders and there’s  eleventy billion individual podcast episodes from 5,000 different podcasts on that topic. So, yeah, I really like that because I love consuming audio for research. So that’s my resource for you.

Crys: I love that. And I have just recently, after Joanna Penn mentioned that she’d switched to Spotify as her podcast provider, I was like, okay, like my podcast provider, which is Podcast Addict on Android is literally taking up 75% of the memory on my phone, because I have so many podcasts I haven’t listened to. And I was like, I like that streaming aspect better. And it’s just too much work to make this podcast default to not downloading and it’s streaming sucks, so I’ll go to Spotify. And one of the things that’s been driving me nuts is that it doesn’t notify you with, “Hey, these podcasts have new podcasts,” like every morning. So I’m figuring out how to get around that. But what you just said was like, “Oh, I can create Spotify playlists on writing dialogue? What?” That’d be amazing.

So like, just when I’m like, I’m going to go on a learning binge on this specific topic, I’ve already got it put together.

Sacha: Yeah. I don’t know if it syncs directly to Spotify, but you could.

Crys: Of course do it manually for sure.

Sacha: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and I do do that, like when there is a topic, you know, sometimes like when you’re listening to podcasts and then you just, you go in a bit of a lull. It’s just like reading, like mood reading, and then I’m like, “Oh, I need something new, but I just, I don’t know what.” And anyway, yeah. So that’s when I’ll often do it then as well. I love it.

Crys: Okay. So where can people find you online?

Sacha: So, sachablack.co.uk, which is Sacha with a C, so S-A-C-H-A  Black.co.uk. And the other two places where you can find me most is in my Facebook group, so Rebel Authors. And, last, but by no means least, I’m most active on Instagram, so @sachablackauthor. Yeah, I mean, I do have all the other social medias, but yeah, they’re the best places to get me.

Crys: A hundred percent. All right. Thank you, Sacha.

Sacha: Thank you for having me. I absolutely loved talking to you.

Hello, friends! It is the 12th of October, 2020, and this is Episode 13 of the Write Away Podcast.

I got a good bit of writing done last week, but it feels like I haven’t written in forever because Thursday I left at 2am to drive to the airport, which is generally four and a half to five hours away. That’s given that there’s no traffic, which there almost always is, but we’ve been having roadblocks lately from some protests going on. So I left really early to make sure that I avoided all of those.

I picked my friend up at the airport and it looked like we were going to have as easy a trip back as I had out there, taking about five hours going a bit of a different route than I normally do because of construction on the main road. We were less than an hour from my house when we hit our first roadblock and we were there for over three hours. Then we were at our next roadblock for another hour. So it was past 10 o’clock by the time we got home.

So Friday I felt a bit hungover from the 20 plus hour trip, and then my weekend was spent hanging out with Smalls. But now I have my new iPad and I’m having a delightful time setting it up and enjoying the freedom of not being at my desk. I’ve spent entirely too much time creating a digital planner, that I don’t think I need half of the little features I added in, so now I’m planning for my 2021 planner. But I do love using GoodNotes for my PDF writing things. It’s delightful.

So today is our first book club. I chose Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain, which was a doozy for a first book, as you’ll hear in our conversation. I’ve decided to switch between craft and business books going forward. So next month we’ll be reading Money Honey by Rachel Richards. And don’t forget to join us in the conversation over at www.writeawaypodcast.com.

So confession time: who managed to finish this crazy dense book? Anyone one?

Lon: I was so close, I was so close!

Crys: I promise I skimmed the last 40% but there’s a good reason for that. Like the first 33% is literally Motivation Reaction Units and Scene Sequel. And I got to the end of that point and was like, “Oh, this book must be done. That was so much.” And then I’m like, “I am only a third of the way through this book.” And then the second-third, pretty much it’s still craft, but it’s more high-level overview characters. And then the third is more the business of being a writer, I would say, and a really long appendances.

Lon: Yeah. And our one really, really short chapter it’s the best one. It’s like a chapter and it’s like two pages and so it’s really do this, do this. Boom, boom. Done.

Crys: Okay. Yeah. What was that about? Was that the one about age?

Marianne: Selling your stories, chapter nine.

Lon: Right. Always just keep nailing stuff out. Okay. And also like, do you need an agent?

Crys: Maybe after you sell a few things? Like you could tell it was written a while ago. Yeah. Okay. But first, I forgot to introduce everyone. So we’re going to do that. I know you guys just want to be floating voices. Alright, so we have Lon Varnadore.

Lon: Hello.

Crys: JP Rindfleisch.

JP: Hello.

Crys: And then Marianne Hansen.

Marianne: Yep. Hello.

Crys: Excellent. And we’ve all met through the Author Success Mastermind and I have captured them for this discussion, and Lawn has notes so he’s ahead of the game. So first impressions, other than awesome, super short chapter.

Lon: It was just a massive slog and I actually looked up how long it was on a paperback and it was like 350 pages essentially. I collect books on writing and most of them are like 150, 200 pages, maybe. And it’s good, but it’s also sort of just so dense, and I could easily see scaring off a lot of people who want to be writers who are very much not ready for that.

Crys: I would definitely agree that this is not a beginner book.

JP: Yeah. I felt like it was very academic, and so the academic side of me was like, Ooh, this is fun. But it had so many examples, so it definitely panders to a certain group of people and it will scare off a different group of people. Even though it was a slog, it was still very useful, even though it’s 40 years old.

Marianne: Well, I thought it was interesting because my initial response was, whenever I read a writer’s books, it seems like they say the same things with different words. So I just finished one that is called like Goal, Motive, Conflict. Then you have the Choice, Conflict,  Consequence, and I just wonder if you need to read so many brighter technique books, or if you just really need to pick one that’s highly recommended and learn it like nobody’s business.

Crys: So the interesting thing about that, I’m going to go to Becca Syme’s strengths here. There’s definitely a certain personality that will feel that way. I just want one or two that cover the basics for me. I’m a number one learner. Like I can never have too many books. I will read a bunch of things that say the same thing in a little bit different way, and one of them will ping for me and the others won’t. And so this one pinged for me really well in some really specific instances. Particularly with the Scene Sequel, which is why I started reading it, and then the Motivation Reaction Unit, which is the worst name ever.

It also makes sense why this particular thing, the Motivation Reaction Unit, may not matter at all to Marianne specifically, because I know some of her strengths, one of them being empathy.

What I found it super useful for, the Motivation Reaction Unit, is simply that every story is a sequence of motivations and reactions. So motivation and action happens, reaction. How do you react? How does the character react to that thing? And the example he used was, a tiger jumps out of the bush. (He used better words than this, and I probably should have found it to read.) Tiger jumps out of the bush, Jack’s adrenaline shot up, he lifted the gun to his shoulder, then he fired and said die. What he talks about is there’s three steps to that reaction and it was kind of your physiological response, then your knee-jerk response, like how does your body react after that, and then your logical response.

I have a really hard time writing emotion, and I have found that particular little snippet so useful in writing emotion that is natural but yet not overdone. Because I have so much trouble writing emotion, when I put it in I feel like it’s extremely overblown, because I’m like, I need to make it clear, but I don’t know what other people think is clear. So I put too much in to make sure they get the point. Here’s my sledgehammer of emotion. You will understand what this is.

The Motivation Reaction, he says in the book, that you don’t need to use all three, but whatever ones you use need to be used in that order. That I have found so useful when I don’t know how to display the emotion I want right here. And so I’m like, alright, Motivation Reaction, just focusing on that reaction unit. That was probably the most useful thing for me.

Lon: Yeah. I definitely noticed that right away and I changed some of the scenes I was working on for Jay’s master class within the day I read that. Just because there’s such a fluidity or a natural sense to it that I just wasn’t thinking of. But you know, once you hit the, how do people respond to things, you should reorganize how people should be responding to those things, it makes so much more sense. So I definitely took that away immediately.

Marianne: Same here. Because I have a problem with exposition and I realized I just need to start writing reactions. I mean, not just reactions, but if I added reactions, and if I added some goals, I don’t think I would have as much problem with that. Do you think you have to start with feeling? The first chapter he talks about you have to start with feeling and I wonder about that.

Crys: Not everyone, because I would say that like hard Sci-fi is way less feeling. Well, I mean, maybe adrenaline and like we’re gonna win, like victorious feeling. Like there is a particular feeling that you’re looking for there. I do think that all fiction is driven by some kind of feeling. Whether it’s hard Sci-fi and it’s, we are going to have the satisfaction of unpacking this scientific puzzle, but we’re not going to deal with all of those other emotions, those lesser emotions, as the brainy types might think. But, yeah, I always go looking for a specific emotion from a story for sure. But that is very true of me, I know other people get really upset when there’s too much emotion in their books, the way they see it. But I do still think that they are looking for a particular emotion.

Lon: I mean, I would say when you’re starting to write something, you don’t necessarily need to start with an emotion. You just need to start with something. You know, character, setting, whatever, what have you. And I think that you will find whatever that emotion is as you go through your piece, as you’re working. If you don’t find it, then maybe you’re going to have to go back and say, okay, what emotion am I going to look for? But I mean, for me personally, I don’t ever really start with an emotion. I don’t really start with a feeling. I just going to start with: someone’s doing something, okay, we’re going to go from there.

Crys: Do you think that you pull that emotion through in editing though, Lon?

Lon: Yes. I mean, my first drafts are always just like word vomit, and I mean second drafts and later on that’s, you know– I always say, first draft, just get the story out. The second is when you can find the emotion if you haven’t already, sort of in the back of your head, sort of feel like that’s where it is. He even talks about there was a writer that he met, one of the hundreds of writers he talks about in the book, writes something four times. The first time is to get it out, the second time is to put everything in that wasn’t in in the first place, third was to take out the stuff that is extraneous, and then the fourth time is for polish, I think essentially.

Crys: It’s really interesting. He also is a real fan it seems of like old-school pulp writers, and I think was an old-school pulp writer himself. And it’s very interesting because we tend to, or current culture tends to, dismiss that as lesser writing. And yet he has, like you said, it’s very dense. It’s a slog to get through because there’s so much. For me, it was just so much information. You may have had a different experience, but there’s so much information and so little space, that it was not an easy read, but I found it a very good read.

JP: Yeah, I definitely felt like it’s one of those books that you read through and then you keep coming back to it. I definitely view this one as more of one of the reference books that I would have. Because I’m a lot like you Crys, where I read multiple books and I try to find the little connections between them. This one I find is almost like an anchor point that will then reach out to the other ones, so I definitely will be going back to this one and I can see it being used through phases of writing.

Marianne: In my defense, I do read a lot on one topic. Like Watergate, I read everything on Watergate, but for some reason, something on writing, I think with this book started to overwhelm me. This is one of my issues I have because I write commercial fiction, and so probably my book will be able to be read in six to eight hours, faster if you speed up audible kind-of-a-thing. It frustrates me that I’m going to put all of this energy into this. I’m going to go through chapter by chapter and find the reactions, and find all of these things for my characters, and then someone’s going to pick it up and read it in six hours.

Crys: And then ask why you don’t have more books done already.

Marianne: So when I read books like this, I’m just like, I get it, It’s hard. It’s hard. It doesn’t matter what you write, it is hard, but man, I want it easier than what this book says.

Crys: I definitely want to reiterate that I would have just laid on my bed for a whole week if I’d tried to read this two, three years ago. I would have just been overwhelmed. Like I can’t do it like drama. The have hand over forehead, collapsing. I found that very true with a lot of craft books, that there’s a lot of craft books that a lot of people love. Like Story Architect, is one that I haven’t gone back to, but at the time that I tried read it, it was so far above what I was able to comprehend at that time because I hadn’t finished anything longer than like 5,000 words. I didn’t have the experience to even start to process most of the information in that book. but it’s one that people talk about all the time, and there are other writers early on in their career who have a brain who connect with that book, particularly who are going to do it fine, but not every book is going to work for every writer at every stage for sure.

Marianne: Yeah. Maybe that’s why they tell us to keep reading different ones. Just to drive us slowly insane, or to find the one that reaches us best. One of the two.

Crys: Was there anything particularly useful for you, Lon?

Lon: I’m very much actually in your camp and JP’s, like I actually want to get a hardbound copy of this. I want a paperback copy because I want to go back and underline different segments, because there’s some great material in there. There’s some great stuff in there. And the thing is that I do know that I can go back and I can look at it, you know, go back and I’ll underline the Motivation Reaction thing, and eventually that might get internalized. And that’s something that happens with just all of these different craft books, you just sort of like read them and eventually you sort of internalize what they have, or you don’t, and you just kind of toss the ones that you don’t internalize. You just have to keep going when it comes to writing and it comes to churning out more and more work. I think we’re all sort of more commercial fiction writers and we want to put out books that are good, but at the same time people are going to crank out, like the series that I’m working on, they’re going to crank out that in like five hours, you know, or, or less with Audible.

So I mean, yeah, I’m trying to make it a better book. I’m going to try every time to get a little bit more craft in there, a little bit better, a little bit better, but I mean, that’s more for myself. Because I know that a lot of readers are just going to be, “Oh, it’s a good book! Okay, cool.” You know, throw it away and move on to the next one. So the problem with being a writer is you want to put in a bunch of crap. You want to  show like, “See what I did in this book! I did this and this and this and all the other things!” And like the readers are going to be like, “It was good. Yeah. Congrats, buddy.”

Crys: There’s five people out there who get it.

Lon: And most of them are probably writers and they’re like, “Oh, Hey, this is a really good, Oh my God.” And they’re going to underline that passage because it was really great. It was perfectly written, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they’re going to be like, this is an example of how a good book is written.

Crys: I’m half joking when I tell people, like the reason I write is so that I can talk to other writers, but it’s only half joking.

JP: Accurate, very, very accurate.

Crys: I wanted to read an excerpt that comes in the first chapter, kind of talking about what Lon was just going over and it pins off that first idea where we were talking about with feeling, should it be the first thing? So he says that feeling should be the first thing, and then:

“After you find your feeling, rules come in handy . . . help you to figure out the best way to capture in words whatever it is that so excites you. But the feeling itself must always remain dominant. Though rules may shape your story, you yourself must shape the rules.

Beware, too, of the other man’s rule. He sees the world through different eyes.

Thus, George Abercroft is an action writer. “Start with a fight!” is his motto. And for him, it works.

But Fred Friggenheimer’s witch-cult yarn, as he conceives it, puts heavy emphasis on atmosphere. The fight he tries to stick in like a clove in a ham at the beginning, following George’s rule, destroys the mood—and the story.

Even with your own rules, indeed, you must be careful. Because somehow, subtly, they may not apply to this explicit situation.

“There is really no such thing as the novel,” observes novelist Vincent McHugh. “The novel is always a novel—the specific problem, the particular case, the concrete instance.“

And again: “The novel is not a form. It is a medium capable of accommodating a great variety of forms.“

Feelings differ. So do the stories that spring from them.

General rules imply that all are the same.

Be very wary, therefore, of anything that says, “Reject this feeling.” Search instead for the kind of guidance that tells you, “Here’s a way to do the thing you already want to do . . . to use effectively the impossible situation, the outlandish incident, the offbeat character.”

How do you tell whether a rule is good or not, in terms of a specific problem? Answer: Find out the reason the rule came into being. What idea or principle stands behind it?

“The man who knows how will always find a place in life,” says the adage, “but the man who knows why will be the boss.”

Arbitrary rules restrict and inhibit you.

Knowing why sets you free.

Take George’s rule about starting every story with a fight. It’s born of George’s markets—men’s magazines in which the emphasis is on fast, violent action, with blood on page one an absolute must.

If Fred only realized that fact, he’d ignore George’s rule when he himself writes a mood-geared story.

Projected, this principle means that a writer should have theories on every phase of writing—how to get ideas, how to plot, how to build conflict, how to bring characters to life, how to create the right feelings in a given reader. And, he should think through and take note of the why behind each and every how.

Otherwise, how can he discover the procedures most effective for and best suited to him, in terms of his own temperament and tastes? Nor does it matter whether these theories are right or wrong in the view of objectivity or the critics. Their purpose is only to provide one particular writer with working tools and orientation.

Universality is no issue. If an approach works for you, that’s all that counts.”

And I highlighted like 6% of the book out of my allowed 10%, by the time I got to 33%, and then had to start being very sparing with my highlights so that I could still export them into an email. So there’s a lot of highlighted in here. But it makes me trust someone more when they’re like, rules, I’m going to give you a bunch of rules, but if they don’t work for you, then they’re not your rules.

Marianne: I think it’s an odd way to start a book on rules.

Crys: I think my favorites all start that way though. The Secrets of Story by Matt Bird is another one of my favorites, another one that I would have been completely overwhelmed by two, three years ago.

JP: Yeah, but I think, especially with how this comes off so academic, it’s very much a, this is my perspective and here’s how much I’m going to repeat this. But then at the beginning he says, but I want you to take my perspective, and I want you to turn it into something that’s for you. So I feel like this is a good way to reiterate it at the beginning, because I feel like that’s important, especially when it comes to things like writing because there is no one right way. I killed the room.

Crys: I don’t want to be the one who’s always talking. I know that I can overwhelm in talking.

Marianne: No. What I thought was really interesting though, too, is throughout the book with all of these rules, he also says, but learn by doing, okay. Well now go write. And so even though, and it’s throughout the book, so it’s not at the very end of the book where he says, okay, take this, decide what you want to use and go write. He’s mentioning that throughout the whole entire thing. It’s like, he wants you to keep writing, and then if you find that maybe you need to apply one of these rules, that can easily be done during I revision. But if you try to buy it a hard copy, I’m not sure if they’re still in print because I had to get mine second hand, and the most fascinating part is to see what this other person highlighted. There’s a chapter coming up where like the whole chapter is highlighted.

Crys: Which chapter is that?

Marianne: It’s the Beginning Middle End, but it’s the section on the ending. So this person, I think has problems ending their story, because they have just highlighted the whole ending section.

Lon: Oh, that’s amazing.

Crys: Is there anything else you guys had in your notes that you wanted to bring up?

JP: So I personally liked a quote, it was actually just a couple of pages after your excerpt, and it’s:

“The day you mute yourself or moderate yourself or repress your proneness to get excited or ecstatic or angry or emotionally involved, that day you die as a writer.”

And for me, I think the reason why I like that quote so much is there is this focus to try and get everyone to like your work. I also do art, and realistically, art is not for everyone. And if you make it to pander to everyone, it almost becomes this dead piece of, you know, store bought art. So I feel like it’s kind of a reminder to yourself and to others that what you write may not resonate with everyone, but who it resonates with, as long as it resonates strongly, even if that’s just yourself, that’s good writing. And so that’s kind of what I took out of it.

Crys: I have that quote highlighted as well.

Marianne: I think he says that throughout the book to, to remember that, and to remember your audience. He talks about his audience and how you’re kind of writing to yourself because you should be the type of person who would read your own book. I’ve had a really good friend of mine, I’m like, “Will you read this?” She goes, “I don’t like that subject matter, like that’s not the type of a book I read.” She goes, “Oh, I’ll read it, but I’m not going to like it.” And when she gave it back, she’s just like, “You’re a decent writer, but I don’t like this. I don’t like this genre. What can I tell ya?” And I’m like, okay, I’m going to go find someone else.

Crys: I find homeless people in the street, throw books at them. “I’ll be back in a week, you better have finished it!”

Marianne: “And then we’re going to discuss it, and you’re going to like it!”

Crys: “I’ll take you out to lunch.”

Marianne: And then just, you know, randomly have an Amazon open for review. Oh, wait, we’re not supposed to do that.

Crys: Lon, anything for you?

Lon: Not that I can think of, but I didn’t, quote anything, so I just reiterate what you guys have all said.

Crys: Thank you for joining me on this adventurous first book for this book club. We will decide soon what the next book will be.

Marianne: Can it have pictures?

Lon: Illustrations, please.

Crys: I think Dr. Seuss is up, right? Excellent.

Hello, friends.!I’m your host,  Crys Cain, and this is Episode 12. I am recording this intro September 30th, 2020.

It’s really hard to believe we’re three quarters done with the year. Even more so than other years with how much the pandemic has changed  our lives, and yet also put them on pause. It’s one of those times it seemed to last forever and disappear in a blink at the same time.

My personal update for the last two weeks: I’ve definitely committed to writing the solo romance series. Two things are really helping me focus and feel joyful in the process.

The first is my goal to buy a car that I mentioned in the last episode. So this is my “car series” and every word I write, I envision as a Lego piece of my car. That I’m building it with my words.

The second thing that is helping me is focusing on my enjoyment and writing neurodivergent and differently abled characters. One of my main characters in this first book has a sister who has cerebral palsy. I introduce her in the second chapter of the book ,and I just found myself grinning as I wrote it. I’ve really missed that feeling, that joy. It’s wonderful to find it again.

I’m also working on another co-writing project, the third in a series that my co-writer and I have been putting off for nearly two years. Readers have been consistently asking for it, or we probably never would have come back to it because writing the first two books was an example of a co-writing horror story.

There were three of us co writing those first two books, and we had major conflicts with the third person. I was having panic attacks, working on those two books with that person. That’s how bad it was. And I don’t recommend the experience. I like to think that I’ve clear enough boundaries now, that I’d walk away from a project like that in the future. But I’m not certain, because there’s always those feelings of expectation responsibility. But hopefully, hopefully I’ve learned my lesson.

We bought out that third writer, so we own all the rights to this series, and now two years later, we finally have enough space to approach the project with emotional neutrality that is growing into excitement.

Onto the episode! My friend Janet Kitto and I have been talking a lot about communities and our place in them lately.

Honestly, this conversation may not be that interesting to people who find relationship building extremely natural, but for those who often feel like they’re on the outside, who feel like it’s hard to belong to a group. I hope that this conversation is both informative and helpful.

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Crys:  Janet and I met in a mastermind run by J Thorn, called The Author Success Mastermind, and we were talking about community today. This is a conversation Janet and I have been having, I dunno for months now, And I thought it was a really good one to share because a lot of people are aware for their yearning for community, but may not have the word for it,  may think they don’t actually need it. And we’re just going to talk about communities and why they’re useful for us, what we look for, how we work in them. And so Janet, would you describe real quick what The Author Success Mastermind what was, or is, still going on?

Janet:  What it is? It’s a unique community because somehow we all know about J Thorn, whether we’ve listened to him on a podcast or you’ve read his book or, we’ve heard about him in some way. And so what it is, is people coming from different levels of experience. They’re coming from different lifestyles and we all meet together and we learn how to write scenes and, and it can be intimidating.

It can be way out of your comfort zone. That’s what I think about it as The Author Success Mastermind. it’s a place where we all have, at some point, have to be vulnerable  and look at how other people are doing their writing.

Crys: Is that the first writing or creativity community you’ve been a part of?

Janet: No, and it’s interesting because I’d been in a couple of others. It was someone that I knew from one of those other groups that said, “You know, I know how you feel about the work J Thorn is doing, and he’s starting up this mastermind and you should look into that.” And it was a really nice way for the two of us, because our relationship, we had sort of gone the course and we went in different directions, and it was really a lovely way of her recognizing what I needed.

Crys: That’s really cool. We enter and leave communities a lot. That’s just the way of life, and whether it was you both left the community that you two were in together because that community no longer fit you. And then you entered in The Author Success Mastermind community for awhile, then left it because this is a paid community, The Author Success Mastermind,  and it has to fit financially as well as time wise.  A lot of people come for a session or two and then leave, which is exactly as it should be.

So the community you are in no longer fit you ,and your friend recognize that and you entered it in a new community. What was the difference? What did you need from each community? And then why did you no longer need that particular answer?

Janet: T he group I was with before we were, we were all Canadians, but we were at one end on one coast and the other coast, and so it was hard for all of us to meet in person. Also, we were just really heading in different directions, not even location wise, the writing that we were doing, we were heading in a much different direction. When I joined a J Thorn{s group, there was an invite where we actually all met in person.

This was during the second session that I did with The Author Success Mastermind. I got to go to Cleveland–and the exciting part of that was that was the first official trip I took identifying as an author. I had to fill out  the little form when I went through customs: and why are you taking this trip? It’s a business trip.

That was  a huge thing for me.  Not only what was I going to be meeting in person and hanging out and having all kinds of conversations face to face with other authors, it was  the first time that I had told myself, “You can do this. You are doing this.”

I think another difference, too, was that I was being held accountable with other members when I had been in groups.  It’s very easy to say, “This is what I want to do, this is what I’m going to do, or this is what I’ve done.” And there was a whole different approach whe, I entered into a paid mastermind.

There was not only homework that we’re doing, we were put on the hot seat and asking questions and getting answers from the other members. I think it’s, it’s really easy not to do that. You can put together a group and everyone wants to just show up, but I don’t know that you’re going to be put in the same hot seat. I think that I was pushed so much farther because there were more of us, we were all in different places. And for me, that’s really important that I be able to see different perspectives.  I don’t want to be with someone who is doing the same thing as me.

Crys:  That makes a lot of sense.  Right now, what communities are you a part of that are supporting your creative journey? Because we all have communities that we’re a part of, just in life, which is where we live. If you go to church, any kind of organizations, you’re usually involved in family, whether you like them or not–you’ll have these communities. But what communities are you in that are specifically supporting your creative journey right now?

Janet:  I think that’s an important distinction, because you can be part of a group and you can be part of a community.  It is about who is supporting you, who has the mutual concern for you and you have for the others.  I’ve sort of gone out of my way this year with any opportunity that came my way, by being in a writing room and inviting other authors to come and join me.

So, doing sprints together. I’m a Patreon supporter of Mark McGuinness for his 21st Century Creative podcast. And within that group, there’s a number of us who are showing up and being accountable for goals. I’m a member of  Brian Clark and Jared Morris’s  Unemployable Initiative- -that is a network where I’ve been able to, it’s on the Mighty Network, and within that we’ve been able to create our own little network of novelists.

So again, I show up by posting. Every week, we have a topic that we follow for the month,  it’s really important that we get to know each other and for me, I’ve put myself in that community because it’s so easy  to join these groups and be like–either you’re doing like a, a broadcasting where you’re just talking about yourself or you’re just listening.

 I’ve been trying to put myself in all of these communities where I’m responsible for something. And even with the membership site for J Thorn,  I’m making sure that I’m participating at the broad level . There’s a group of us that meet on Saturdays and we give ourselves homework and we talk about story.  To me, it’s any of those communities where I can be an author. That’s where I’ve tried to push myself in the last couple of months.

Crys: I have never thought about the difference between group and communities in the way that you just expressed. But I love that. Because I think that a lot of times when we go to a group, we are thinking that we will find or join a readymade community and that is not the case. You can absolutely build a community out of the members of a group, but it doesn’t just appear before the people are there, if that makes sense.

Janet: Yeah. If you don’t invest yourself emotionally,  if you don’t show up, if you’re not afraid  to show what you know and what you don’t know, that’s not a community.

Crys:  I think that’s what so much of us experience  when we find a writer’s group. We’d go and watch because we’re scared , and that’s fine for a time or two as you get to know what the flow of the group is, what the energy is–whether they’re negative, critical, or supportive and insightful,- -but it doesn’t turn into a community until, as you said, you show up. You’re vulnerable to risk.

Janet:  I guess the one thing we haven’t talked about is, a community has to have a leader. A leader has to be invested in the same level that everyone else’s. Again, because then it’s just more like a broadcast. To me, a leader is someone who  is on the same path. You’re both going in the same direction.

Crys: That’s interesting. Because our communities in real life don’t always have –I’m thinking about  where you live, your family–they don’t always have a leader. Is it something that is more necessary for online communities than in person communities? I’m just really curious. I haven’t thought about the necessity of leaders in the community before.

Janet: I wonder if we have to look at the meaning. Everyone has to look at what a leader means to them, because in a community, are we not there so that we can be who we really want to be? And is that the role of the leader? Because the leader recognizes that. You’re there for a purpose.

Crys: So this leadership isn’t necessarily a triangle leadership style of structure that you’re thinking–it’s not how you see it –where there’s a boss at the top of the company kind of leader?

Janet:  If I think about who I would want as a leader, I’m thinking about someone who is just as curious as I am. Someone who wants to see things unfold in the same way as I do. We’ve had this conversation just recently where we were talking about whether we should jump in and give advice, or at what point we should.  Should we be asking more questions? 

I guess that’s what I’m thinking of when I say I want someone who is as curious as I am. If that person has a chance to share some of their experience with me… you know , I’m really struggling with this one.

Crys: No, this is great. I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, what you seem to be describing as a leader is not necessarily a leader of the group. Not someone who is taking organizational charge of a group. What you are talking about is more like a trailblazer, someone who is willing to take risks and teach and lead people through the wilderness, but not boss them kind of thing.

Janet: Yeah, I agree with that.  I’m very much about the space being there for whoever comes into the community. That space has to be there so that that person can do the work that they need to do. And if we don’t give them that space, this isn’t the kind of leader that I want to have at the forefront. If there’s not space for me, if there’s not space for everyone else , even that leader, if there’s not space for them to go that route that they’re going to go…

That’s another thing that happens with communities. They shift, they change. We go from place to place. But the ones that stay with us, the ones that we want to stay apart of, I think that happens when we feel like we are in a relationship and we don’t just feel like we’re watching.

 I think a lot about relationships because my expectations of relationships that I had earlier in my life have changed how I think about relationships that I want to have now in my life. I always thought of family as being someone that you are related to by blood, and the more I’ve become invested in the author community, the more I’ve seen that that’s a whole other level of family.

Those are the people that have helped me become the person that I was always going to be. We all come to the page in the same way and creative goals are going to vary from person to person and what they have the space for in their life.

It’s interesting, once you start pushing past the barriers that you had up for yourself, when you get to that place where you do find a community that allows you to grow…  I didn’t realize how much of myself I had put away. Once I let go of a lot of  the things that they had just kept around me, it was comfortable once I let go of those things. I started experiencing a larger creative life. That’s where it was very clear to me how important it was to be in an author community, to be in the right author community.

Crys: Can you describe one of those things that you’ve had to let go of?

Janet:  What I had to let go of, what I had to unpack, was that I wasn’t this person that I thought I was. That I had kept quiet because I had to. How could I find a voice if I couldn’t say what I really wanted to say? What I had to let go of was that I had to just let go and think what I have to say, it doesn’t matter too who I was. That I could let go of being this person that was trying to protect everyone else. I was really only trying to protect myself.

It’s a very safe place to think that you’re small. That’s another thing I had to let go of. I still do it to this day, that I don’t think that I’m belong where I am and yet, I know what I get up and I do each day. I know that I’m doing the work. It’s been the biggest thing to let go of and it helps being in the community of authors every day. It just gets easier and easier. 

Crys: In the Unemployable Initiative with the novelist group, I know that you have been very conscientious in your approach, and that’s about how to create the possibility for a community to develop. That’s been one of the central applications and things you’ve been talking about. Now, you and another author started this group, right?

Janet: That’s correct.

Crys: What have been your goals and thoughts on how to create the kind of community you’re looking for? What did you want to get out of breeding this group?

Janet: It was an interesting thing deciding to become a novelist cohost. I just wanted to be part of a private accountability group, and then I found out, no, that’s not what it was going to be. Okay, this is my big fear. I’m facing it. I went with it. Within the larger community, a lot of us wanted to get into smaller groups. I had to say, yes, I’m willing to help you out with this, the other cohost. I’m willing to throw ideas out there. And it’s really interesting when you do that kind of collaboration. Cause it was so new, both of us we’re in one way, wanting to run in different directions and in another way, wanting to just leave it and let other people  have the conversations.

So it’s, it has been every week it’s been having to remind our, both of, you know, I had to remind myself she had to remind herself. This is a strange year. There’s a lot of people that just aren’t doing a lot of talking. So it’s not us. If you’re going to be in that position in a community, you can never take it personally. If people aren’t talking, then  you ask a question. You think about it as just a, we’re not having a conversation, the eight hundred people that are listening, we’re having a conversation, just you and me. And that’s been really helpful for me. I’ve met a lot of people by just forgetting about who else is in the room.

Crys: I want to take that thought and connect it with your comments about relationships. The difference between a community and new group, is in the group, you are building up relationships one-on-one with other people and that coalesces into a community through some kind of alchemy, that–and the reason we’re talking about this–these things are not necessarily natural to either of us.

We’re not outgoing, relationship-building racers, like some people I know who just, they breathe relationships. They look at someone and they make a relationship. It’s not how I work at all. And I don’t think that’s how you work, because we’re looking and we see the threads of where relationships could be.  We see the threads of where relationships are. Just like we do in our writing. And we think clearly, how do I build these threads stronger?

I do like the idea of a community being like a web, because it’s all these individual points connecting to other individual points.

 There are people, bless them, I’m so glad they are in our lives, who just live on in those connections. They don’t have to think about it.  Their thinking on relationships happen so fast that they don’t even realize they’ve had thoughts. And that is just not where I am with the relationship building it all.

I like having this kind of conversation, because this is such a learning process.  I like knowing, how do we build our individual connections stronger? How do we build our community connections stronger? Because it doesn’t happen naturally for me. I have to consciously put this effort in and know where it’s going.

 And the better sense I have of what a community is, the more tools that I can consciously employ in being a good community member, enriching my communities, accepting from my community. It’s actually the hardest part for me. I can give, give, give,  and get to know people. But accepting help,  accepting offers of, I dunno, gifts, anything, whether it’s just a kind word– that can be incredibly difficult for me. But those are necessary parts of the community building web. You have to be able to accept as a well as give.

Janet: That’s so true. I think  what I’ve learned over the past couple of months, my expectation was that I had to know so much  to be a cohost or to be a member of a community. And  that’s the wrong place to enter into this kind of relationship. It’s knowing that everyone supports you for where you’re standing.

And as long as you’re just having the conversation… I’m thinking about my role as a cohost for the novelist, and I realized,  so appeals to me, I can just ask questions. I don’t have to have the answers. It doesn’t have to be a new question every week. It’s continual, you know. We’re taking layer by layer. I want to get to know you. I’m going to ask this question. Then next week, we’re going to talk about something else and we’re going to go a couple of weeks and then I’m going to come back and I’m going to ask you a question cause I want to get to know you.

It’s a wonderful circle. How things go around and different people are then jumping into the conversation. It’s so easy. Like when, whenever you think that it’s going to be hard, that’s where you’re gonna have a struggle with community because that’s, we should be able to just sit around and, Charles Bogle talks about campfire events, you know, just sitting around–

Crys: Before you said that, that’s the exact image I had in my head. Like during summer, when you have a campfire every day of the week. The topics you talk about aren’t necessarily going to change every day. It’s not like you’re going to talk about opera one day and no, no gardening the next, though you might, and chances are, you’re going to mash those conversations together and you’re going to build on them.

Janet:  Any time in my mind that I can bring it down to that level of, there’s just a few of us here and we’re going to talk, there’s just so much more that comes out of that conversation. I’ve been witness to that. That’s been the greatest gift I’ve received this year.

There’s so many places where we as authors can have conversations. It can be about craft. It can be about mindset. It can be about just the times that we are living through.  It’s very interesting how as authors, a lot of things during self isolation hasn’t changed for us. But it’s those relationships that are outside of being an author with our family and friends, how that has had some kind of impact on how we’re creative.

 That’s kind of a nice thing to be able to have a community where you just come in and it’s okay if you talk about those outside things, but for the main part, you’re just going to talk about, how do you make sure that your theme is present in every scene? How do you get up in the morning and have something to do when you sit at the desk?

Crys: For people who are new to writing and wants to find new unity, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them?

Janet: I think you have to stay away from social media because I don’t know that you’re going to find authentic relationships that way as an author.

Crys:  Why is that?

Janet: Well, it’s definitely an entry point, but, it’s very easy for people to ask for things and not even understand what they need. And so that’s why I think social media is it’s too broad. It’s too muddy.

Crys: It sounds impossible to start finding community there, but it’s harder to get possibly group aspect into the community aspect.

Janet: Yeah. I’m just wondering if that’s how I feel or if I’ve just heard other authors say that so much, that’s my canned answer. The thing about online relationships for authors, it’s much easier for us as introverts to just try and find something online. Do I want to go down to my library and ask at the front desk, is there any writing groups that meet? No. No, because for one thing, and this may be because I live in a small town,  I’m going to meet a lot of people who are hobbyists. Am I going to find the relationships that I need to find?

Crys: I will say that the percentage of crazies goes up significantly with in real life groups, or at least it did for Nashville. I do have a hesitancy of sourcing groups in real life. Then that’s that whole introvert thing. That’s me personally. I love meeting my groups in real life, but after I’ve vetted them on

Janet: very true, very true.

Crys:  When you have sought new communities, how have they come to you? Has someone introduced you, have you gone and found them?

Janet: All the ones that have took me anywhere– it’s this is an interesting question because when I started out writing, I wasn’t ready to invest in myself. And the only way I made progress was when I invested in myself, when I invested in a course, when I paid for a mastermind  it was through the people that were also in those courses and in those groups, that’s where I made.

That’s where that’s how I got to where I am today.  It’s really interesting when you ask that question because I could have got stuck for a long time thinking, well, I’m not making any money writing, so I can’t invest anything in myself. I can’t invest in my writing. So I’ll try and meet someone online through social media.

I’ll try and meet with local groups and do write-ins and I never did.

Crys: It sounds like you not only invested  money, on of courses and in paid mastermind, but, when you finally made the choice to invest your time, not only in being in those groups, but,  invest the time in finding the other groups as well.

So what I think I hear you saying is you sacrifice to the gods of writing. You did make a sacrifice and then you wanted to make the sacrifice worse then. There was something hate, whether that’s money or something else, there was something paid that gave you an external reason to show up and make it worth it.

How does someone go about finding a community that supports them?

Janet: Well, they have to first make sure that they’re going to come into the community and have something to share. I think that’s really important.

Crys: You know, brand new beginners who are thinking , I don’t have anything to share. I don’t know anything. How do they get to the point where they do have something to share or recognize what they already have that they can share?

Janet: It’s a combination of education and connection and you have to come into it knowing you don’t have to know what you’re capable of. You have to be there for those people. It’s also about what they’re there for and how are you going to know that when you’re going in?

Crys: I want to come back to that idea of groups versus communities. I think you can enter a group at any point, unless they have strict stipulations of accolades or education that you need. But that’s not the kind of group that we’re generally talking about here. There are plenty of author groups on Facebook and they’re super easy to enter. That will get you a lot of knowledge, by joining those groups and listening, but you’re not going to become a part of the community or make a community until you start giving back.  And that is often a smaller subset of groups.

I’m thinking mostly of the 20BooksTo50k group. I can’t think of any author Facebook group that rivals or even hopes to rival its size. I know there’s at least over 20,000 members.

But a community cannot be, in the way that we are talking about it, can not be that large, because you can not individually connect with them. But you might find a community of people within that group who all match the same way.

And oftentimes when that happens, that community steps outside the bigger group for a smaller, more intimate experience. Not that they leave the group necessarily, but that they add that little community to their community bubble. They’re like bubbles. 

Maybe step one is to just look for groups that are about whatever you’re wishing to connect with, that seem to have the same kind of ideals as you do, and that are pretty active, where there is giving you teaching already going on in the group. And then educate yourself as much as you can from the information you’re getting there, and start giving in return to the group.

 It can be as simple as–one of the things that they do in the 20BooksTo50k group–is posting whenever you finish a book so that people can celebrate review. That is sharing something. Another of theirs is income markers. When they’ve hit a new milestone.

And those are all giving something to the community. They’re giving the story that this is possible. They’re giving the story that if you keep working hard and you will keep moving forward. Even the failures are, “Here are the lessons I’ve learned.”

You have to have something to give. We don’t mean you have to be the best at anything. We don’t mean that you have to have a giant pot of knowledge that you can sprinkle down on the peons who know nothing. That’s not it at all. There are so many ways that you can share and contribute to a community,  without spending any money–

Janet: Without being faced by those limitations, because a lot of times people will think, well, you write in a different genre. So that’s a limitation. You’ve been writing longer than me. You write full time and I don’t. All those limitations.  That’s not the kind of barrier you want to have if you want to be part of a community.

We were talking about these larger groups. It’s okay to experience them to learn something from them, but  when it gets to a point where, okay, it’s just all noise… I don’t think you should just step back and not try and look for something else. Just recognize that that’s a point where you’ve now discovered the things that are important to you, and you’re just trying to find someone from that larger community who you can step away with. Or even if you can have a good friend that says, you know, there’s this group of people over here. They could be your community.  Maybe that’s another thing to recognize too, is for some of us, it’s going to be a group, and for some of us is going to be a community.

Crys:  I think that any time that you are building up one on one relationships, you are building the potential for community. I had, an acquaintance, another author and teacher who I’ve been following for a while. And we’ve only recently started chatting, on Instagram.

A couple of weeks ago, she’s like, I never do this, but  I think you’ll get along really well. She put us in a little Instagram group chat and yeah. We’ve had this slow conversation going on ever since.  She was very insightful. We do all have some really good connections, even though we’re not all writing the same thing. Not even publishing the same way. None of us live anywhere close to each other in three different countries. and yet we have that seed of a community in that we are all in the same realm, wanting similar goals.

Janet: That’s a great way to sum it up.

Crys: I’ve seen this happen a few times. What happens when a community falls apart? whether it’s from drama or if it was just a time based community, like with The Author Success Mastermind. That’s not a falling part, but what happens when the community dissolves? How do you handle really dissolving whether it is drama and you’re just like, nope, this has changed from what it is. I’m gone. I’m out of this or. It’s “Hey, like this was the time we had together.” And, you know, I still have all these individual relationships, but they’re not nearly as strong when we don’t have the framework of the community that we had joined, because that has ended.

How do you handle the dissolution of one of your communities?

Janet: Yeah, not well. Because it’s very easy to feel like an island unto yourself. If you’re not ready to move forward on your own, but something has ended, what do you do? And then there’s the relief of all that’s ended. Now I can stop and I don’t have to stand as tall.

 I say it never ends well for me because The constant void that I’m trying to fill is,  I need this to keep going. And as you say, there’s a natural end to all groups and communities.

Because if I have to answer that for myself, I know that it means there’s another investment I have to make.  I don’t think it means you have to go searching for something new. I think it just means that you have to figure out how you fit into the next opportunity. 

Crys: Another thing to think of is that most of us are in multiple communities simultaneously. And so sometimes we shift our energy. So when community ends, for whatever reason, good or bad, that does indicate a shift in our energy. We do shift our energy from one community to the other, whether it is because the other one is serving us more or we can serve it more. I don’t think you have to do both equally all the time.. Sometimes you’re going to be in seasons of helping and sometimes you’re going to be in seasons of receiving. Lesson I’m learning all my life.

 The ending of a community. What came to mind after I asked that question was that lost feeling that I, and I think a lot of people have, when you leave university. Because you’ve been in this very intensely driven community for at least four years, for most people, I don’t know, Britain might be three. Anyways, a bunch of years.

 Then you all go off to do completely different things. And some of those people will stay in your community for a long time or, well, forever and most of them will go away. And that is one of the, the clearest points of switching communities that I think most of us go through.

Janet: Maybe it’s how you use the freedom. Like once a community comes to it’s natural end, do you fly with that freedom that you now have? Or is that freedom so scary that you try and find another fit, because you still have some growth to do ? Yeah. Within author community, just because you’ve learned your craft and now it’s time to write, does that mean you’re really comfortable with all that freedom? No.

Crys: That’s a lesson I have been learning on many levels, and it’s really interesting to see it applied to the community. Though when you think about it, your relationship with the community entity is another relationship. It isn’t just all these individual relationships. The same lessons we have learned about interacting with your former partner or your sister or your current partner or your best friend, a lot of those lessons can also be applied to how you relate to community.

Well, this has been wonderful. Normally we have these kinds of conversations over a period of days and link the WhatsApp voice messages.

Janet: This has really hurt my brain to do it in an hour.

Crys: Yeah. Cause normally we have, what? A half hour to ten hours to think about our response. For those of you who are CliftonStrengths, people, that is Intellection at its most intense. But it’s a good exercise for us.

Janet: Yeah. Yeah, we will both walk away and wonder what the heck we said, but we probably said something of value at some point.

Crys: There have been times where I’ve been, you know, having deep talks with friends and wishing I just had a recorder on us because I said something that I felt like was just groundbreaking, and next day, I can’t remember it at all. So clearly it wasn’t that important, but it sure felt like it at the time. And I would love to rewind and know what I said.

Janet: It’s more… it’s probably how you emotionally connected to the thought, because it’s more disappointing when you do write it down and you look at the next day and you go, “Oh, that’s nothing brilliant at all.”

Crys: I feel like wine made that one seem more brilliant.

Well, thank you, Janet, for braving, the recording process and having this conversation with me.

Janet: Thank you for, yeah, having this space for me to just talk and explore all of this. Thank you.

Good morning friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And this is episode 11 of the Write Away podcast. It is September 15th, 2020 as I record this and I believe has been three weeks since my last episode. I fully intended to have one available for you last week, this actual episode.

It was ready to go, but I couldn’t even spare the time to record this intro. I was in deep deadline mode, but I’m happy to report that I completed a romance book with my writing partner. And it’s in editing now.

What is new in my life? Lots of thinking as always. And I am considering writing a solo series in this co-written romance world. One of the things I have realized, and this was in a deep dive class on intellection through Becca Symes, is that I really miss having my old ways of thinking time. And that’s been hard for all of us as we’re still in the midst of COVID and I’m used to going out to cafes. I’m used to having places to bike to, I don’t really care to bike for no reason, but I used to have more places to bike to and from.

And even further back than that, I really miss having a car. I have had a car twice in the last seven years, both of those times when I was in the States and never more than six months of car time in my life. And I borrow cars from family and friends, all that good stuff, but I have never owned a car in Costa Rica.

And for the first time ever last month I rented a car and then I rented a car again for my birthday, so I could zoom, zoom up and down the beach and go to different beaches and have quiet time. So I have a new little mini goal to buy a car, which means money. And I have some savings schools. There’s a lot of life that would settle down with a little bit of extra income.

So as much as I really want to focus on joy writing instead of work writing, I am making the choice to continue to focus on work writing and actually go a little harder into it, rather than trying to split my time. So we’ll see how that goes. What else have I done? I actually recorded a couple of other episodes of interviews.

So I have three episodes recorded, showing I have absolutely no consistent plan for this podcast, but I am enjoying myself and I hope you are too. Exciting news for me, I ordered an iPad Pro this week. I have really started to chafe at being stuck at a desktop, and it’s been hurting my productivity in ways that surprised me.

I thought I would actually be more productive having a place to come to and being like, this is where I work every day. And it just hasn’t, I don’t know if it’s just the ergonomics of my particular situation, which are difficult to change right now, or I just don’t like being stuck. And so I have been wanting to order an iPad Pro for a while.

And with the difficulties, normally I go back to the States to visit family. And while I’m there, I make all my big purchases, because particularly with electronics in Costa Rica, there is a 30% import tax. So instead of paying a thousand dollars for an iPad, you’re paying $1300. Which is not awesome, but I was willing to do it if I had to, thankfully I did not have to. There’s a person who is coming from the States now that he borders have opened up to air travel from certain states in the U.S. So I’m having them bring down a good bit of stuff for me.

So some of the things that surprised me why I hated being stuck at the desk was I still have pain days from inflammation and sitting at a desk chair, a proper desk chair helps a lot, but it does not keep me from being in pain. And I am used to being able to lay on my back in bed and type without seeing the screen.

I have tried to replicate that with dictating into my phone. And that does work occasionally, but I need to practice dictation more. It is a really good tool to have in your pocket in case of injury, in case of repetitive strain, in case of just body pain. And I have not been practicing it. So that’s my fault.

The other thing is, since they cut my poor little tree down in front of my house. Well, I mean, granted, half of it fell, the other half they cut down for safety. That was my shade. And that happened not quite a year ago, but now it’s really hot where my desk is, and the last few days have been ridiculous.

The temperature’s only been in the eighties and nineties, which is kind of normal, but the heat index, the degree has been 114 F, 104 F, and I just have not wanted to be anywhere near any extra heat. My upstairs turns into a little cooker. I realized how much freedom I felt having a portable writing device again when a dear friend allowed me to borrow her Microsoft Surface so that I could finish this book because I couldn’t sit at my desk unless it was really late at night. And I pass out between eight and ten every night. So that was quite difficult finding that time and being awake.

But with borrowing her little Surface, I could write downstairs and it was lovely. And moving from place to place is a tool that I have used in the past to reset my mental focus, and it’s going to be really nice to have that back again when I’m having difficulty thinking in one space, can move to another, whether it’s in my house and I moved to my bed or I moved downstairs or simply to my couch, which is three feet behind me. I just really lik that I’m going to have more options.

I have some really good expectations of this enhancing my productivity. And I plan on using it to get back in art. I’m pretty minimalist. And so I’ve resisted adding a lot of art supplies to my inventory, and I used to paint and draw so much. So I’m hoping this helps scratch that art itch in some really healthy ways.

So my last item on my update is Amazon has come up with a new feature for book clubs. And I don’t know if some of you’ve seen this, but they just kind of popped it up and haven’t really done anything with it. The implementation is pretty terrible to be honest, but I really love the idea. I’ve actually never been part of a book club, but that hasn’t stopped me from starting my own.

My plan is to pick a book every month, and finishing our first book, which is Techniques of the Selling Writer, mostly is an encouragement to myself to finish this book by November 4th. That’s a little extra time because this particular book is really dense, it has so much information. How I envision it working is, we’ll pick a book every month after this, finishing that first book by November 6th, I’ll grab a few friends and we’ll record our discussion and share it on the podcast, and then you listeners will be able to join in on the conversation in the comments.

That’s a work in progress. If anyone has suggestions for managing it better, please do put it in the comments of this episode. And if you’d like more information, check the show notes, I’m going to have an email list and you can sign up.

So this week on the podcast, I did things a little differently. It is an interview, but I’m the one being interviewed. I realized a few weeks ago that I haven’t shared my getting started story in full, and I wondered why that was, because normally in person I very happily and easily share my story with no problem.

I think that my story of how I got started and how I became successful is not normal, but it is proof that you can do anything even in some pretty crappy circumstances. And I realized the fact that I wasn’t telling my story to an individual was part of the thing that was holding me back. It was really hard to just talk into a microphone all about myself and how I accomplished this.

Because it felt too much like just bragging. So I asked my friend, JP, who is in the beginning stages of his writing career, who would have the most useful questions as we’re talking about the beginning stages of my career, to interview me. So that’s what you’re getting today. JP Douglas is interviewing me about how I got started when I was next to homeless, less than $0 in the bank, and had just lost my job, had just had a baby, had moved in with my parents, with my husband, dogs, and child, and succeeded in self-publishing. So I hope this is useful. I hope you enjoy it. And I plan on putting together some resources for self-publishing when broke. It may be just a podcast and a checklist, but we’ll see.

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JP: Alright, so your origin story is crazy, and I would like to hear a little more of it. So from what I know, at the time that you decided to self-publish you were homeless and you didn’t have a penny to your name. So what made you decide to pursue self-publishing over getting a nine to five at the time?

Crys: Well, I was pursuing nine to five, but I’m pretty sure I was self-sabotaging, because I didn’t want to go back. Let’s see, there wasn’t any question in my mind whether I was going to self-publish or not. I’d been pursuing self-publishing, or been studying self-publishing not actively pursuing as a fringer, wanting but not doing for years.

I mean, since the Kindle came out, since that was a thing. I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, and just always very aware and studying the market constantly, even before self-publishing was a thing. Thankfully, I wasn’t actually homeless. I was next to homeless. What had happened was, we had a crazy year. I was still with my ex-husband at the time, and we got pregnant. Two months later, we decided for him to take a job in the States to see if he wanted to get back into his old line of work. And from decision to moving was about 19 days, which is kind of how we roll. So we went back to the States from January to September. No, my months are wrong. It was beginning of July. And anyway, sometime in July, doesn’t matter. Details.

So I came back, had my son, which was its own crazy story, and then I had mostly off for three months. I’d saved up for my own maternity. I was a freelance software developer at the time.

Three days after I started back full time, they’re like, and we’re letting you go. I was a contract worker, so they could do that. And then two months later, they let go of all their remote workers, which I knew was coming, but they had to line up severance for all of them. Still a little bitter that I got cut out of that loop.

And so we tried to make things work. I was applying, but I had a new baby. And I was exhausted and alone most of the day going crazy. I can remember my most miserable day of my life, one hundred percent. Well, maybe until like the whole relationship falling apart, but the most miserable day until that, my kid was like six or seven months old and he just was only happy if he was interacting with me,. Like I couldn’t set him down. He had to be touching me.

I was exhausted, hadn’t slept that night, and so I let him lay on me, kicking my face because it was the only thing he was happy doing that didn’t involve some participation from me.

I was having a really hard time trying to apply for jobs, trying to build up new skills to be really attractive to new jobs. But I also had formatted my resume in a unique way, because I was like, I don’t want to get hired by the same kind of miserable company I just left. I’m trying to attract the perfect employer. And, you know, most employers didn’t want unique, which is fine because four months later, still no job.

We had exhausted our savings, maxed out our credit cards, and I’m like, we literally have enough money to get back to the States if we go now and move in with my family. If we don’t go now, we’re stuck. Then we will be living underneath a beach palm tree eating coconuts, which isn’t terrible. You totally survive on that, but it’s kind of like not awesome with a baby and mosquitoes and all that fun stuff.

So we did, we flew back to the States and I’d written this little novella two years before, and it was terrible. Of course at the time ,I thought it was fine.  I got to New York, and this is the very end of March, and a friend of mine was like, “Hey, I just discovered this new little genre, little niche genre on Amazon. Have you ever read it?” And I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ve actually read a lot of that, and my little story will fit if I just change a couple of things. We’ve talked about co-writing before, why don’t we publish that and then write some other stuff and just kind of see where that goes?”

I’d been following self-publishing for forever so I knew, and still this is even more true, that you don’t make any money on your first book, generally. A hundred percent there are exceptions, and I turned out to be one. So I published this book.

I had done my own cover. It was terribly, terribly edited because I edited it, and so I spent $0 on it other than whatever resources I had at the time, which were Photoshop and a giant stockpile of Depositphoto credits, which is a stock photo site.

I created this all on my own, and I published it, and then just left it. And we were like, yeah, once we get like three books out or something, then we’ll start promoting.

But when I went and looked at the KDP Dashboard. I’d sold about $20 worth in 24 hours. And I knew that was not normal at all.

So I called my friend, and I was like, yo, this is insane. Look at this. And she’s like, yeah. Wow. We need to jump on this. So we did, we wrote two more books, very short books, that month. One was 16k and the next one might have been 40k. I actually looked it up, and I published that first book on the 5th of April, and it made $1,300 that month.

I did everything wrong. The title on the cover had just been some made up title that I had made when I had created the cover months before, and then I forgot to change it to the actual title . We didn’t research the author name that we decided to use, and it turned out that already existed and we couldn’t claim the Amazon author page. So we threw in an initial to make it different. I didn’t have any kind of mailing list. So I quick hurried to fix all of that, and I told my husband, “This is so not normal. If I run at this a hundred percent, this is my new career. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And I’m done with programming, which I still love programming, but I don’t like programming for other people.”

Our baseline, at that point, of what we need to make to pay our debts and survive with a baby was $3,000 He was like, “We need to be able to get to $3,000 in a month before we can stop looking for jobs.”

And, yeah, it’s fair, but I really don’t want to do that because I know that this is a hundred percent the right way to go. So I was very resentful. And I did still have some interviews, but again, I was kind of self-sabotaging because I just didn’t want to do it.

I was throwing just hours and hours into writing. The second month I hit $3,000 of income. And I don’t think I’ve dropped below that since. The price of that has been a lot of books published really fast. So I have had burnout a lot, and I’m working on fixing that as we’re going forth into the future.

JP: From what you’ve told me, you’re kind of switching gears and changing into different genres. What made you decide to make that switch and what are you learning as you’re making those switches?

Crys: Yeah, the switches are aligning with what I really, really love.  Romance has taught me a lot. I was not an emotionally focused writer, to a detrimental level. I think that people can be non-emotional writers like Isaac Asimov and be successful, but they max out on a different quality. Which for Isaac Asimov is: his prose is forgettable, but his ideas are magical.

I didn’t necessarily have the magical ideas, so I a hundred percent appreciate fulfilling or expanding my skills, and the thing that I respond with in books is emotion, what they make me feel. I think that the majority of readers relate to books on an emotional level.

Not everyone clearly, but the majority. Part of my alignment is getting into genres that more align with the emotions that I’m super, super interested in. Which is adventure, betrayal. One of the hardest things about romance on many levels is that it has extremely strong emotional expectations, and you have to meet those expectations for the readers to feel satisfied. A lot of people dismiss it as formulaic, but the reality is that it’s insanely hard to write an emotionally satisfying story, or to learn to write an emotionally satisfying story, that matches the extremely strict expectations that the readers have.

There’s a lot more emotions that I want to explore that romance doesn’t really leave as much room for. You can absolutely do it. There are authors who do it, but that’s less my interest. Science fiction, fantasy–I can’t write contemporary, I’ve tried. I’ve done it with co-writers. That’s the only way I can do it. It makes me feel so boring. So if I’m writing contemporary, then it needs to at least be explosions. But I like any aliens. I need magic. I need other kinds of creatures, just… everything that does not exist and I wish it did. That’s my wish fulfillment. So science fiction, fantasy.

I’m working on a cozy right now, which is another really strict genre expectation. It is really interesting stepping into that. I think that has been a helpful segue into the brand or world of sci-fi and fantasy because I’ve kind of felt overwhelmed by choices as I’ve approached the one project I have. It’s a solo project, science fiction. This can literally go anywhere, and that is overwhelming.

So cozy–I am struggling through learning that those genre expectations, but enjoying that there are the expectations so that I can know whether I meet them or not, which is a good segue. My original thought when I started writing it was that, because I’m all in KU pretty much with the romance, and my more strict science fiction and fantasy I intend on being fully wide. My original thought when I approached cozy mystery was, well, this will give me a non-romance genre that amplifies the things I do want to write about and minimizes the things I don’t want to write about that does really well in KU and so I can pump them out quickly.

I have failed to pump them out quickly, failed to realize how much learning I have to do for the genre. How burned out I really have been. As I’ve come to a understanding with my romance side of my business, like, okay, this is what your purpose is, and this is how we’re going to interact, I felt less of a need to push it into KU so I’m not really sure what I will do with that. I really do want to move away from pumping out books. I have published over 50 books in not quite three and a half years, and that’s a lot with co-writers, but that’s been over an average of a book a month.

And that’s too much for me. My ideal is about four books a year, which to some people sounds like a lot and some people sound so small. That would make me so happy to know that I have time to work on my books, time to deepen my books in a way that I like. And part of that understanding has come from Becca Syme’s class and just understanding what’s my ideal way of interacting with my work versus what’s my capacity. My capacity can be pretty high for a while, but then I hit burnout more often.

JP: You’ve mentioned a few times that you work with co-writers. What does that process look like and how does that kind of work with your process and how have you kind of learned from that as well?

Crys: Yeah, it’s different with every co-writer. My first co-writing relationship we didn’t plot My co-writer didn’t never plot. She doesn’t like it and it makes her feel stifled. And that did cause some problems in our relationship, not the problems that ended the co-writing relationship, but that was definitely problematic. The one thing I learned is that when I do work with a co-writer, I want an outline. I won’t work with a co-writer without an outline. It just helps manage both of our expectations. My second co-writer who has turned out to be one of my best writing friends and dearest life friends.

I think we did write our first few books without outlines. We were both in really dark, emotional places at the time. I had just lost my dog that I had adopted like two months after I got married. She had some health stuff and deaths in her family, and I was like, let’s just write something to distract ourselves.

It was a different tone from any of the stuff either of us had written. We didn’t have any expectations of it, so we were completely ridiculous over the top. The format was kind of like, a military team doing missions and saving people and falling in love.

Talk about formula! We’ve got that formula down. We have written over 20 books in that series, or in that world, we have several series. So our pattern is pretty solid. We’ll pick a number of chapters, generally between 12 and 16. Just kind of like, what do we have time for?

It takes each of us a day to turn a chapter around, so we can get two chapters done a day between the two of us. And we have done faster, but we don’t prefer it because that means that we’re working asynchronously, where if she’s working on a chapter, I’m also working on chapter, and we haven’t read how they connect yet and then we have to fix it, but we have the outline so it’s possible.

We’ll sit down, we’ll have a call. Generally takes us about two hours. We sit down and we’re like, okay, this is what happens in chapter one. This is what happens in chapter two. This last time was actually the first time we jumped around, I’m like, wait, I’m having trouble seeing what’s going to happen here in the middle, so let’s jump to the end. We know what happens in the end. There’s very specific things that we have in this series that happen. There’s a ceremony that the family does every time. And then we jumped around to the middle, but that’s the first time we’ve done that.

With another friend, we hired somebody to write us an outline. We’re like, here’s our basic world building of the kind of world that we want to write in, can you flesh this out in a world and an outline? And that was a lot of fun, because we got to focus on deepening in the text more, because the person we hired is actually my friend, Tami Veldura, who I have a different co-writing project going on in science fiction and fantasy. There’s sci-fi with dragons. We’re very excited. I feel like proud mama. Tami is just one of those deep, deep world-building people who–that’s the part they love. And I love the drafting, the deepening of the prose.

So we’re hoping that we’re a really good match as we go through this project together. One of the most interesting parts for me in the co-writing relationships is not necessarily what happens with the plotting and the writing itself, but with the editing, because that’s where egos come into play and you learn what your partner finds acceptable.

One of my co-writers, and she expects the same from me, she will only make a comment if she has a big enough problem with it that she thinks it absolutely needs to be changed. And it’s actually taken me like a year or two to suss that out. I would reject some of her suggestions sometimes because my approach was like, we’re just throwing all our best stuff in there, but it’s up to the other person to agree or disagree and that’s totally fine.

And for me, that comes from a code review background with software development. Like, you get over your ego pretty quickly when everybody’s tearing your stuff apart, or you don’t survive. And so now I do extremely minimal editing on her chapters and just trust that our editor will catch anything that needs to be handled.

But, yeah, she had just a lot of hidden resentment that she wasn’t expressing because we were operating on completely different paths and expectations. So I’ve adapted a lot to her expectations just because I don’t have the smaller ego, to be honest. And I’ll fight for the things that I feel strongly about. But other than that, I’m just like, hey, commas and missed quotation marks? We’ll let that go.

And then another co-writer and I would tear each other scenes apart, and I loved that. I was very cautious going into that, and we had that conversation beforehand to set the expectations because of what I’d learned. Like where are you on this? How comfortable are you? What kind of invasiveness are you comfortable with me having on your chapters? I’m very comfortable with invasiveness. Especially because we have both been reading each other’s stuff for a while, just being in the same genre together.

So we had that comfort there, and it was like our styles match fairly well, and she had a very strong emotional skill. And I had a very strong action scene skill. And so there were definitely scenes where one or the other of us would almost nearly rewrite the other scene just because we were working in our lesser skill.

We had so much comfortableness with going deep and going rough, and that was awesome. I really appreciate that too, but it’s just that expectation between individual writers.

I mentioned my co-writing project with Tami Veldura, and she has written a very extensive outline with world building, and I’m doing the first draft. I messaged her a few weeks ago, and I was like, “Hey, I realized that I’m having a block as I’m going to write this draft. I don’t know what your pass through is going to look like. And with every other co-writer we’ve exchanged chapters. This is the first time where I’m doing the full first draft. Can you hit up that first scene I’ve done and give it an edit pass so that I can see what it’s going to look like? Because if I have a weakness in my writing and I know that you’re really strong in it, I will push myself less hard to get that part right because I know you’ve got my back on it.”

And she did it. I haven’t had a chance to sit down and go through it, but part of that learning process is analyzing what you need from your co-writer and communicating it. I mean, communication is key with co-writing. If you can’t communicate with someone you’re in for a lot of pain, possible panic attacks, and ends of friendships. It’s only happened once, but it was rough.

JP: How was the self-publishing industry when you started and how have you noticed it changed now that you’re kind of going into these other genres?

Crys: So three years (ago). On my end, it doesn’t feel like it’s changed very much. The niche I’m in seems…it is definitely harder for newbies in any genre to pop up with a terribly edited book and succeed, which I think is a good thing, but people are still popping up and making $500 their first month. Particularly in my little niche. I actually did write a book in another genre. I wrote a book in another genre with someone just to see if it would take off, because it was a hot new genre. I was like, hey, it has a lot of elements that you and I both enjoy. Let’s explore it.  And with a brand-new name, good editing, we had the whole nine yards, we made $400 that month on that book. Which was right within my expectations, but not my hopes. And we haven’t been able to finish the second book in that series because of my burnouts. But there’s just still so much opportunity.

I have tried advertising a couple of times, and I’ve never spent more than $50 on a book. So there’s probably a part of the reason it hasn’t worked for me, but my niche is also just so small that most readers have heard of the top 20 authors at some point. And I would say that my co-writer in that genre is the top author.

So people have absolutely heard of me because they’ve read our books together. The advertising hasn’t been necessary. We have really strong mailing lists. Readers respond really well to freebie giveaways, and those have been just as interactive in my mailing list as organic additions.

I think that what I see is more and more viability for wide, and more and more difficulty to get noticed in KU. I think KU caters to writers and readers who work fast, whether they publish fast, they read fast. And while I am in that game, I want to get out of that game. And so that’s why a wide methodology is appealing a lot more and more to me.

And that doesn’t mean that I won’t ever go into KU, but I would really like to get away from the dependence on one company. One month, right after I moved back to Costa Rica, it was my biggest payment from Amazon ever, but I had just changed over to a business bank account and I’d done it right when they were issuing payments.

Half of my payments got lost in the ether, and I was counting on that money to live on. Thankfully, it only took ten days of me harassing them to get it back, but that’s terrifying. That one payment doesn’t come through, and I’m screwed. I really want to get away from that.

JP: I’ve heard this on a few podcasts, and I’d like to get your take. With you going into sci-fi, fantasy, and cozy mystery, are you going to keep your author name for all three of those genres, or are you going to have a different author name for each of those?

Crys: I’m going all in on one name, á la Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. I have attempted to manage a couple of email lists simultaneously, and I can’t even manage one email list, honestly. Right now I have an assistant who does it. I’m like, “Yo, this is the thing we have to promote this week,” and then she just ninjas it all together and she saves my life. She saves my life in a lot of realms. (If anybody needs a good VA, I have one, contact me. I’ll get you her info.)

I plan on doing some serious segmentation of my list. I know that that doesn’t necessarily mean that I will be able to control my also boughts using that segmentation. I know that Lindsay Buroker has had a lot of issues with all of her books showing up in all of her also boughts because her fans love her. Good problem to have.

And that’s another reason for going wide, because the other storefronts don’t have that recommendation engine the same way. Theirs are more managed. Yes, Amazon comprises most of the e-book industry currently, and that’s where most authors get the majority of their income even when they’re wide. I’m not gonna worry about working towards Amazon’s algorithm, because that could change at any moment, too.

I want to build a steady and consistent business that doesn’t require constant pivots. We all have to make changes to adjust to the industry. That’s inevitable, but I want a business that’s steadier and requires less of me so that I can focus on the creative part of it. And I think that one name, wide will do that.

JP: Completely selfishly, what does a day in the life of Crys look like? I’m curious to know what kind of schedule do you have or don’t have?

Crys: I don’t have, lately. I used to be extremely scheduled. I had to be with my ex and my kiddo. I do have this basic schedule in that I wake up somewhere between four-thirty and seven, seven is sleeping in for me. I actually set an alarm for this (the interview), because I don’t normally have anything that happens before eight, and because I don’t have a consistent time that I wake up. I was like, well, I need to make sure that I wake up before six, because it’s six my time that we’re meeting, and not six-thirty. But I woke up at five. So we’re fine.

I hate setting alarms. It’s the worst. Alarms are the worst. No alarms unless you have a meeting because somebody is crazy and further East than I am, or a flight to catch. Those are literally the only times I set an alarm.

My kiddo goes with the nanny at between eight and nine. It depends on the day, whether his dad has him or I have him. So Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings, I have no kiddo. I tend to roll out of bed and work. And I work until, I don’t know, seven, eight, get breakfast. The kiddo comes to my house, the nanny comes to my house, and I hang out with them for about an hour.

And then I try and get myself into working. I didn’t have to use to get myself into working. I’m kind of a workaholic. Right now, I have been struggling with setting a schedule because I have a lot of openness. I have a lot of free time. I’m trying to recover from burnout, so I’m trying not to just push myself straight into work a hundred percent of the time.

I have been considering whether I just need to be like, okay, these are your two hours to write, and then you have to go to the beach or something. You have to go do something! Terrible, right? And as we’ve been loosening up with Corona down here, setting coffee dates with friends I need to be like, okay, you have to get work done before you go do that.

I’m trying to set up external things that purposefully crunch in my writing time so that I prioritize it. I’ve only just started doing that, so I can’t tell you how effective it is.

JP: Well, I’d like to hear more eventually when you get around to setting that in. I think as a last question, can you kind of give us a peek behind the curtain, tell us what you’re working on and what kind of projects you have coming out?

Crys: Yeah. I will keep the romance to the side, super-secret, all that fun stuff. For science fiction and fantasy I have the cozy mystery, which is paranormal with a witch with a sarcastic cat who doesn’t like her as a familiar as my little twist on it. And that’s set on an Island in Georgia, the state, not the country. Then there’s my solo sci-fi project, which I’ve kind of set aside indefinitely.

I actually was just talking to a life coach the other day, and I realized that most of the progress I made when I was working on that, I was writing by hand because I was able to take it outside of my work environment and make it a one hundred percent creative thing. So I may need to print all that out, staple it into a notebook, and go back to writing by hand so that that becomes just the creative thing again. And then my sci-fi with dragons with Tami Veldura, that is epic space opera, multiple POV, and very different from anything that I have published. I’ve written in that style plenty as a younger teen, twenties, and never finished anything. So it’s exciting to get back into that expansive style of story. And it’s very, very different because I’ve been writing in first person for the most part with the romance. I like being able to jump into so many other people’s heads and motivations. It’s a new challenge and I’m really am enjoying it.

JP: I’m super excited to see these when they come out. Thank you for having me come on and ask these questions. I definitely jumped at it when you asked me because I’m very interested to kind of learn where you are headed and where you’ve been, because I’m kind of in the similar boat to where you started.

Crys: Now can you tell people where they can find anything about you? Because I know that you have some stories and some anthologies, so how would they find that? And do you have a website yet?

JP: Yeah. I’ve got a website. You can check me out at jpdouglas.org. You can join the newsletter, which will hopefully have some free content coming up soon. So, I’ve got a, post-apocalyptic, a sci-fi, and an upcoming horror short out.

Crys: Excellent. And those are the J Thorn anthologies for the most part.

JP: Yep.

Crys: Cool. So you should be able to search JP Douglas on Amazon and the anthologies will pop up. Thank you so much, JP.

JP: Yup. Thank you.

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. It is August 20th, 2020 as I record this. And thank you so much for inviting me into your ears again. It’s been exactly one month since my last episode. And what have I done in the last month? I’ve discovered that doing solo episodes takes a lot of time for me. I don’t feel comfortable sitting down and freestyling, and I’m just much more comfortable with a script. Without one I tend to go on incomprehensible bunny trails.

What does that mean for the podcast? I’m still figuring that out. I’m committed to showing up, even if inconsistently at first, and accepting imperfection. So, I’ll still be doing this for a while, at least a year. I’ve got to have some commitment. But, in the last three weeks I’ve written a grand total of 794 words, all of which happened today, not counting what I’ve written for this podcast, and I will absolutely include that as soon as the transcription is complete.

Now, one of those weeks I took off for my son’s birthday. Big old four years old. The next was wrecked by shoulder pain so ridiculous I felt like I had a migraine in my shoulder, which leaves a handful of days before and after that I have absolutely no excuse for it, but I was probably doing some admin work, so that’s all right.

If you can’t tell, I’m trying to convince my inner critic to bugger off nicely. So this week, I wanted to talk about managing chaos, and I have this theory, this analogy that I’ve been using for a while called chaos buckets. I also call my four-year-old a chaos bucket, but that’s something a little bit different.

So this idea grew out of a study that Susan Cain referenced in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. All my introverts love that title, and my extroverts are probably amused or slightly offended. This study was performed and was ongoing when the book was published by Professor Jerome Kagan of the laboratory for child development at Harvard, and it started in 1989.

He took 500 four-month-old infants and predicted that he’d be able to tell in 45 minutes which babies were more likely to turn into introverts or extroverts. Spoiler, He was pretty spot on. Here’s how the test went: he exposed the babies to a bunch of new, mildly stressful experiences and recorded their reactions. About 20% got loud and moved a bunch, but about 40% were pretty chill, and the remaining 40% were somewhere in the middle.

So which group do you think correlated to the extroverts? Is it the loud ones or the chill ones? If you guessed loud, you’re wrong. Now Kagan’s team wasn’t just watching the babies. They were measuring heart rate, blood pressure, finger temperature, and some other things related to the nervous system, trying to measure the reactivity of the amygdala.

The amygdala is often referred to as the lizard brain, that instinctive sense of self preservation that nudges our emotions along. It’s what triggers the fight or flight instinct, though it’s not its only purpose. Kagan’s hypothesis was that infants who are born with a highly reactive amygdala would a wiggle and howl, when exposed to new things, chaos, and grow up to be children who are more likely to feel wary of meeting new people. One last note about the study is that the correlations weren’t a hundred percent, but there were surprisingly accurate. And introversion and extroversion are on a spectrum with most people falling somewhere in the middle. But if you’d like to learn more, I’ll link to the book in the notes. I really enjoyed it.

So chaos buckets! All that backstory to get to the main topic. So my completely nonscientific theory is this: we all have a chaos bucket. The capacity of which we have to deal with chaos. Some are larger, some are smaller, and they all have a hole in the bottom.

The hole also varies in size. The size of the bucket is our capacity for chaos, for new information that can be anywhere. That can be anything from a song playing in your house or your neighbor’s house, as long as you can hear it. It can be your kid screaming. It can be watching a video of a class, processing new information. Everything you do adds a little bit of chaos to your bucket. The hole in the bucket is how quickly you process and clear the chaos.

So everything that happens around us adds a stream of chaos pouring into our bucket. None of us want an empty bucket, but neither do we want a too full bucket. The empty bucket equals unfulfillment, boredom and ennui, which is a way of saying utterly, and warily and bored, and I use it every possible chance I get. Overflowing buckets lead to emotional breakdowns, outbursts, running away, etc. I think that generally, the more extroverted you are, the larger your bucket and the larger the hole in it, the quicker you process chaos. Which means that you need to pour a lot of chaos into it to maintain a comfortable level.

The more introverted you are, the smaller your bucket, the smaller, the hole in it, the less chaos you want in your life. And the more easily you get overwhelmed. What I like about this analogy is that it’s flexible, and it does kind of encompass all the complexity of the amygdala and everything it does.

Someone who has a large chaos bucket with a smaller hole, might be able to spend their entire spring break partying hard, but then feel really comfortable taking a week’s break while their chaos buckets drains to a point where they feel uncomfortable and need to add more. Someone who has a small bucket with a large hole, might be able to process decently large amounts of chaos regularly, as long as nothing upsets the balance.

So how is this useful? Having an understanding of your capacity for chaos, the size of your bucket, and how quickly chaos flows through it, gives you a tool to manage overwhelm or boredom. Since explaining my theory to my nanny, one of the most extroverted people I know other than my son, she regularly jumps to her feet after too long sitting, chilling, and talking, and grabs the kid and runs to the beach shouting, “I need to fill my chaos bucket!” I am far more prone to overwhelm. I have a relatively small chaos bucket and its rate of flow varies. But when I get overwhelmed, I now know that I need to eliminate as many sources of chaos as possible and wait as my bucket empties.

So how about you? What does your chaos bucket look like? Do you tend toward too empty or too full? Are you pretty good at managing it? Let me know in the comments at www.writeawaypodcast.com.

If you want to help support this podcast, you can buy me a coffee at www.ko-fi.com/cryscain