Write Away Podcast

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording on July 21st, 2020. And this is episode nine of the Write Away podcast. So what has happened in my week, I wrote the opening chapter to a new romance. It’s a co-write. It’s in the same world that my co-writer and I have been writing in for almost two years.

And I worked on utilizing some of the things that I’d been learning in the first half of the month. One is Depth, which is a class that Dean Wesley Smith runs through his WMG publishing teachable, and I’ll put a link in the show notes. And the other is utilizing scene and sequel style plotting scenes.

This comes from a book called Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain and the scene sequel element is the most immediately applicable idea for most writers that comes from that book. It basically is two types of scenes: action and reaction. And it pairs really well with the three-story method idea of scenes with three points of things that happen.

I will put a link in the show notes of a really quick intro to a post about scene and sequel and also the full book. I discovered scene and sequel years ago in some writing advice by Jim Butcher on his website. I completely forgot about it, and then when I was in my learning mode a couple of weeks ago, I looked it up and discovered that it originated from this book.

And the book is so dense, not like hard to read, so full of practical information. I reached a point where I was like, okay, wow. I’ve learned so much, the book must be close to finished. And so I checked on my Kindle, like no, you’re 30% of the way through. Oh my goodness, there’s more good stuff to learn, so I closed it and set it aside.

So I’m like, all right, I’m going to go put what I have learned into practice before I dig deeper. That pattern tends to work really well for me. Learn until I feel a little overwhelmed, put it into practice for awhile, get a really good grip on it and then go back and learn more. So why am I talking so much about this book?

Well, this week’s topic is Permission to Play and I promise it’s going to tie in. This weekend a friend shared with me that they were reading a book that is very highly regarded in a lot of writing circles and they told me the name of the book and I made a face. I’m going to tell you what the book is, and this is not me shitting on the book.

It just doesn’t work for me. And the book is the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Clearly it works for a lot of people. It’s no nonsense, tough Marine style, pull yourself up by your bootstraps advice. But that’s not advice that is terribly helpful for me. I’m really good at pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

I will pull myself up by my bootstraps until I pull myself into a mental breakdown. But like I said, it clearly works for a lot of people. It is a very useful way for many people to get their butts in gear and get over their resistance, which is one of Pressfield’s big ideas is overcoming resistance and it definitely would’ve been helpful at certain periods in my life, but it’s not something that is helpful for me now, in fact, it’s a quite dangerous mindset for me, where I’m at in my life.

And so what I’m about to talk about is not going to be helpful for other kinds of people. No advice is helpful for everyone. What I’m about to say is probably going to be more helpful for chronic overfunctioners, workaholics, and people who find themselves going from burnout to burnout. And I’m going to call out the cult of productivity right now.

Super prevalent in America. I’m sure it’s super prevalent in other places, but that’s where I have my experience, but you’ll see people who worship at the cult of productivity. Whether they know they do or not saying things like,  “I only slept four hours last night,” or “I worked 12 hours yesterday,” or “80 hours this week.”

And they’ll have this like long suffering face, but there’s a badly concealed era of pride that they’re working so hard. I was definitely one of those people once upon a time. And I don’t have patience for that bullshit anymore. That’s not healthy or necessary. And I could rant for a good half hour on that alone, but I’m not going to. So here is what I want to say to us, burned out overfunctioning workaholics.

I am giving you permission to play. I’m giving myself permission to play. On one level that can mean stepping away from work both physically and mentally and relearning how to relax. I can definitely tell you I’ve been through that, but I don’t know how many times I’ve been through the process of relearning how to relax.

Times when I finished up a big project and I don’t have anything on deck. And so I’m like, yeah, yeah, I’m going to take time off. I’m going take a weekend. I’m going to take a week and I’m not going to do anything. And then I sit around twiddling my thumbs going, what do people do when they’re not working?

So that’s a problem I have had multiple times. I have gone through a process of relearning how to relax this year again. And I feel like I’m doing okay right now. I have my gardening and I have my kid and I watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine during dinnertime with my housemates. And I feel like I’m in a good state of recovery at the moment in that realm of play.

But what I’m really interested in right now is bringing play into my work. Between life rolling me from one set of chaos to another, and my growing discontent with romance, writing had become a slog, but the romance, the writing of romance is the thing that puts a roof over my head and food on the table.

So I had to do it. I still have to do it, but the more I disliked it, the longer it took me to write. That meant more time doing a thing I was already starting to hate, which meant I worked even less efficiently. We needed more time. It was a vicious cycle and I’ve been doing better these last few months, as other areas of my life have calmed down, but I still didn’t like writing this.

I was resentful of it. I wanted to get away from it, but at the same time, I didn’t want to make my other writing need to stand on its own two feet yet. I just want to enjoy my writing of scifi fantasy. I don’t want it to have to make money yet, because once I count on something to make money, it becomes a thing I have to do.

And this is one of those playful things. I want to keep it play for a while, but I think I can bring the play into the romance writing as well. And this is brand new discovery as of this week. So I wrote that first chapter this week. It took me a couple of days because I had gone two, maybe close to three weeks without writing.

And I sat down and I wrote this chapter and found it joyful. So what was different? I’ve mentioned a few times that I basically took the first two weeks of this month off from writing, not off from work. I took it off from productivity. I wasn’t producing, but I read and I learned, and learning is play for me.

I have full intentions of going back to university some day. Just for fun. I want to get a history degree. I think I might’ve mentioned that in my goals episode. So I learned: The Techniques of the Selling Writer, the Depth class, the W Plot, just kind of packing all these things into my brain and loving it.

And when I sat down to write this opening scene for this brand new book, I applied what I had learned, and I played with it. The writing was way slower than my average, and that’s without even counting the pre-writing. So if we count that, then it’s crazy slow for me. But it wasn’t painful. It was so joyful.

I felt so much pressure just to get things done. I’ve left my kind of play out of my process because my process was getting shit done, until it wasn’t. I’ve wanted to slow down in my work for awhile. Previously, I thought that meant less time working, more time doing other things. And I’m still interested in that. I’d love to have enough income or income streams that mean I only have to work half the year, whatever. But I realized that maybe slowing down is just that I write slower and enjoy it more. And now, instead of being in a vicious cycle of slowing down, I hope to be in a positive cycle. I hate to put an expectation that I will get faster at writing, though I suspect that that will be a positive outcome.

I don’t want to put that expectation on it, but I do want the work to become continually more fun. I want to build that level of fun into my work, because this is literally the best job in the world for me. I am so grateful, even on the days where I have hated what I was writing.

I am so grateful to be doing the job. I am doing the job I dreamed of since I was a kid and I don’t want to make it a thing I hate. So I’m giving myself permission to be slow, I’m giving myself permission to be patient, and I’m giving myself permission to play. My question for you this week is do you have trouble giving yourself permission to play? And what does play look like in your life? You can leave your comment at www.writeawaypodcast.com

Good morning, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And this podcast will be coming to you a little late. I’m recording it Wednesday, the 15th of July, 2020. And I was supposed to record yesterday, but our electricity went out for most of the day, and that kind of changed things around for me.

But update on my week. I didn’t write last week. I actually haven’t written this month at all. I have one day on my calendar that says I’ve written and that’s okay. I’ve been working, still. I just haven’t been writing. So, last week ended up being a learning week. I read a lot for fun and in my genres, I finally finished some courses that I had purchased a while ago and just sat there.

One of them was The “W” Plot by Karen Docter. I know that there’s a free YouTube video on The W-Plot, I think by the woman who kind of developed it, but Karen has a really good course on how to use it. And I will put the link in the show notes below. Other news, next year I will be speaking at the Career Author Summit. Yay!

It’s the second one. This year was supposed to be the first one and then COVID happened, so it ended up all being virtual. So now next year they’ve pushed it to September. So hopefully travel will be safe by then and gathering in large groups will be safe by then. But they are offering both an in-person and a virtual ticket. And if things are still wonky by then, they’ll go all virtual again. The dates for those are September 18th and 19th in Franklin, Tennessee, and they will have early bird pricing until the end of this month. So that’s July 31st, 2020, early bird pricing until then, and you can find that at www.careerauthor.com/events.

Also with that crew, the Career Author crew, which is Jay Thorn and Zach Bohannan, I am going to be participating in their Witches of Salem event in July 2021. And they still have tickets available for that. And what that is, is a world building weekend. So as a group, you world build throughout the weekend, you learn about co-writing, which is something that they are very experienced with, and at the end of it everybody kind of has an idea for a short story that they’re going to write for an anthology. And then the anthology is published. All proceeds go to a charity, it’s a really good experience from everything I’ve heard about it.

I’ve wanted to go to one of these for a while and next year is just probably going to be a good year. So I just pulled the trigger and said, I’m gonna go. Tickets for that are also available, though probably not a ton because that’s very limited at www.thecareerauthor.com/events.

But what I want to talk about this week is goals. What are my goals? That has been a question I have been wrestling with for a couple of months now, if not longer.

I know that I’m not fully money-driven. I’m slightly money-driven. I love money and there’s nothing wrong with that.  I definitely do want savings. That is definitely a money drive for me, like one year of expenses in the bank, and an unspecified amount in investments, but beyond my monthly needs, my savings net for safety and a lack of debt, I’m cool with money. I don’t have to reach any specific sales goals to feel accomplished. I hate smart goals though. And that’s one of the things that always gets thrown around when you’re making goals. And what are smart goals? They are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time based.

Why do I hate them? They feel so constrictive. I do like parts of the smart process though. I like specific and measurable. And then I know that when I get it done, I have an achievement unlocked point. I really like thinking of goals as achievements, like Xbox achievements, I unlocked them versus like success failure.

I think the thing I struggle against most with the smart goals is the time based. And don’t get me wrong, I have been amazing at meeting deadlines, but I sacrifice my sleep, my health, my relationships. It’s not ideal. In Atomic Habits, I feel like a priest for the religion of Atomic Habits, I mention this book so much. But James Clear suggests making a goal with a specific date, for example, completing a book in three months and then taking that, figuring out what that date is and backing up to figure out what system will get you there.

So that might be writing 550 words a day every single day, or 1000 words if you take weekends off and then a week of vacation. I really like this process, but for me, I then like to erase the goal date. It’s a suggestion, not a requirement, basically like the Pirate’s code. And if you listened to the last episode, episode seven, where I discussed the personality profiles, you might recognize that this is a very J from the Myers-Briggs.

The judging trait, you focus on the process, not the deadline. And that works really well for specific projects. But what about the terrible job interview question? Where do you see yourself in five to 10 years? UGH. This is hard for me because I can imagine multiple delightful futures, but I have a terrible time judging what is realistic in five to 10 years. 10 years ago, I could barely imagine living full time in Costa Rica, making my living writing stories, and being divorced. That wasn’t a goal. But I dreamed of living in Costa Rica or somewhere else and absolutely writing stories, but I didn’t have any belief in it.

I’m getting better at figuring out where I would want to go and believing anything is possible, but I don’t live at the 50,000 foot view. I do know people like that, they live in big picture land. I live on the balance of big picture and day to day details. That’s the balance of the sensing vs. intuitive in the Myers-Briggs.

So also in last episode I mentioned that my number six Clifton strengths is achiever, which means that I tend to operate really well when I have one big goal I’m pushing hard toward even if I don’t consciously know it’s a goal. And flounder when I don’t. And I’ve been floundering for a bit. There’s no coincidence on this show’s topic.

I need to figure this out for myself. So here we are. And I can’t just pick a random goal. It has to be important and mean something to me. My goal when I started, the goal I didn’t realize was the goal, was to make my living as an author only from book sales. I also had a point where I unlocked that achievement, three, five figure months in a row.

The craziest part to me is that I didn’t consciously set these goals. I didn’t understand this element of my mental makeup, but now I am aware of it, and I want to utilize it to get better, faster. But I have to do some work to dig out these big goals. I have two tools I use to do this and I haven’t used them in awhile.

Actually one i have, and the other it has been four years. So the first is a writing exercise, and the second is a brainstorming exercise. So number one, this is the one I haven’t done in four years is to describe your ideal day and get as specific as you’re comfortable with. Roll out of bed by X-amount of time, here’s your morning routine times, whatever. Or tell yourself a story about how the day goes, whatever it looks like for you. I’m going to share mine in just a minute. And the second one I get from my planner, it’s called a passion planner, and they have an exercise at the beginning of the year and at the midpoint and they call it a passion roadmap.

So we’re going to make a passion roadmap starting with a wishlist. And I will go through that in a minute, but first I am going to read my ideal day. And this was actually really hard for me. This is why I like doing these two specific plans together because they approach the problem in two different ways.

When I did this exercise, the ideal day exercise for five years ago, I had just purchased property here in Costa Rica, I didn’t have a kid yet. I had a very clear vision of what I wanted my days to look like 10 years down the road. I knew what my land looked like. I had that basis. That’s all gone. Selling the property, clearing out debts, all that good stuff, but we have coronavirus.

So it’s really hard for me to think what is even possible 10 years down the road for my days right now. And my kid, he’s going to change so much. He’s going to be 13, 14 by then. So I focused this one on kind of my next year. What does my ideal day look like for my next year? You can do this either way. Whichever one is more feasible for you.

So my ideal day right now is around 5:00 AM I roll out of bed. I meditate, which I’m not currently doing. I check on my garden, which I do do every morning. Water what needs water, get a little bit of exercise in, just something to wake up. And then I write for an hour, hopefully before the kid wakes up and then about 6:30 I get coffee and breakfast with the kid, read or listen to my podcasts, and then we hang out for an hour and a half. Eight o’clock I hand the kiddo over to nanny or school, and then I write for another hour. And actually as I was going through this, because this was like a several day project for me of figuring this out. I would actually want to replace those writes, because I wrote down write originally, with work.

So it doesn’t have to just be writing. It could be doing a class. It could be, I don’t know, working on developing an idea, brainstorming, plotting. It could be anything: work. We’re going to place those with work. Then ideally, this is where the ideal comes in because Coronavirus. 9:30 I go to a coffee shop.

And that can be either I meet a friend or I read, or I think, or I work. That is open. So 11:30. So two hours there, I go home for lunch. 12:30 I give myself an hour and a half for hobbies, nap, or hitting up the beach. Three o’clock kiddos home. We get snack. We play, we read, we watch TV. In that time we also shop for groceries, prep dinner, whatever needs to be done that day. About 5:30 I start dinner. 6:30 we eat. Seven o’clock kid bath, while I read or listen to podcasts. 7:30 we have snuggles and books. And eight o’clock bedtime. And then if I’m still awake after that, I read. This looks so much different than when I did this last and that’s okay. That is actually healthy.

What you want now is not going to be the same as what you’re going to want in a year or two, two years, three years, four years. That’s totally natural. Totally normal. I don’t have a lot of visions for the house, the home I’m building, because I don’t have a route right now in what that could look like.

So I tried to write that whole, in 10 years what does my ideal day look like? And I just don’t have a clue. So this was very helpful for me. And I’m like, okay, this is kind of what I need to gear myself towards for this year. Now, the passion planner was a lot more useful in kind of figuring out my longterm goals.

So how this works, and I’m going to link to an example they have on their website. So for this one you’re going to need a blank piece of paper. I recommend one that’s not lined, but you can absolutely use lines. It’s just a little more free forming and brainstorming if you don’t use lined paper or turn it sideways so the lines or up and down instead of horizontal.

What you’re going to do with this piece of paper is draw a line down the middle vertically and then draw a line across horizontally, so that you’ve got four, mostly equal quadrants. And let me pull up my planner here. So I’m just going to read their instructions.

Okay. So what you’re going to do in this quadrant is you are going to label the top left corner Lifetime. You’re going to label the top right corner Three Years, and you’re going to put that date. So three years from now, what is the date? In the bottom left corner you’re going to write One Year and put that date, and in the bottom right corner, you’re going to put Three Months and what that date is.

Now you’re going to make your wishlist. Set a timer for five minutes. This is really important because otherwise you’re going to think too much about this and debate on whether something should be put down or not. Set a timer for five minutes. Write everything. You’re going to imagine that whatever you write on this piece of paper will come true within the designated timeframe.

Think of it as a wishlist describing your ideal life. Ask yourself: if I could be anything, do anything or have anything, what would it be? Write every single thing that comes to mind and be as specific as possible. Lastly, do not feel the need to be realistic or justify your dreams. Just write. So once that is done, you prioritize. Set the timer for one minute.

Go back to each of the four sections and circle one goal that would have the most positive impact on your life. So these are the four goals that you are going to prioritize. Now you’re going to move from your wishlist to your passion plan. You’ll need another clean sheet of paper. You’re going to take one of those goals. Your game changer is the goal that would have the most positive impact on your life right now.

So you’re going to write that in the middle of the paper. Draw a circle around it, whatever you need to do to make it your brainstorming thing. Now you’re going to set your timer again for five minutes and write down all the necessary steps needed to achieve your goal.

The more detailed, the better. Connect each step to the middle circle or box, whatever you need, with a line. The next step they suggest is to assign due dates to each of the tasks. I won’t do this. Most of my goals don’t need this necessarily to get me going. That’s my personality. It may be helpful for you to set the due dates. And then similar to this, create a timeline, number all the tasks in the order in which they must be completed, and then make a date.

And that’s where you use their planner to go through and, you know, find those dates when things are due and put them on your calendar. So these are steps that I don’t do. And then you repeat this step for as many goals as you’d like. I’m going to read through some of mine. So in my lifetime goals, I want five developed properties, real estate properties, houses, rentals, at least five developed properties.

I really want more than that, but I probably should have written like 30 or something. The whole, don’t worry about being realistic, but whatever. I would like a million dollars in stocks and bonds. I would like to own a permaculture farm/community. I’d like to write a world with 30 books in it.

I want to go back to University for a history degree. I want to live three or more months in 10 different countries. And I would love to provide for my parents’ retirement. Under three years I have: I want to run a yearly writing retreat. I want to renovate a schooly, so a school bus that you turn into a home.

I want to build a tiny house on my property in upstate New York. I want this podcast to have 130 episodes. I want to write and illustrate a children’s book with my son. I want one year of my base income in savings. And I want a writing cabin. In one year: I have a weight loss goal, just to healthy weight.

I want, this is my fun stuff, I want eyeliner tattoo. Save me time and keep that joy of face painting. I would like to finish book one in the next year with my friend, Tammy. And I would like five books under my name published that are aren’t romance. And in the next three months: I would like one book published as Crys Cain. I want plants in my bedroom and I would like to develop three mini-classes for a project that I’m a part of. So what I circled as the thing that will give me the most benefit in the immediate is getting one book published as Crys Cain. And so I created my little brainstorm about that.

I have two options, one fiction, one nonfiction. So I did plans for both of them. They’re both things I think I can work on simultaneously. I still need to prioritize which one I get done first and I know the nonfiction is most likely to get done first if I just sit down and do it, and that’s been a problem I’ve been having. Part of that, I think is a bit of an emotional burnout.

I just haven’t been able to reach a deep thinking level very easily. That is going away. I’m coming out of that. So. I’m going to give myself kind of another week to mull over which of these I really need to like sit down and run at while working on both of them right now. But that is how I set my goals.

So my big goal, then the big goal I need to work towards. I still don’t know that. Like what is going to be my achiever goal? What’s going to be my big goal. I do think that that is probably more in the realm of nonfiction because repeating a goal I’ve already reached with the romance, with the sci-fi and fantasy, doesn’t feel as meaningful to me.

I also don’t want to pressure myself to hurry up and get X number of books done. I want these books to be more joyful. Not that the romance isn’t joyful, but that I just get to play more instead of produce. So I don’t think that my achiever goal, like the thing that I’m going to push hard to get done, is going to be fiction oriented.

I think that it’ll be in the nonfiction realm. And that’s the podcast, that’s some teaching projects. That’s the nonfiction book. I think that actually is more my goal. And I’m thinking this through right now, live with you. But that’s still something I’m going to sit with for a little bit, figure out what my big goal is to get done.

And probably not just the book or not just one project. I don’t think that’s my big goal. I think I need to have a larger goal because with the goal of making it as a full time author on only my books, that was the goal. The achievement marker was something different. It was that money achievement marker.

So I think that there is a goal I haven’t put into words yet, as far as nonfiction goes, whether it’s just to be recognized as an expert in this field and then the marker for that goal is something different. Whether it’s like I get to keynote at an event or it might be that I make X amount from nonfiction versus fiction.

I’m not sure. So that’s something that I need to work on a bit more. If you decide to go through these exercises, I’d love to hear what your results were, what you’re willing to share. So feel free to head over to www.writeawaypodcast.com and tell me what your goals are.

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording this July 7th, 2020. So what have I done in the last week? Well, I published a romance book with my co-writer and it went sub-200 in the Amazon store, which is wonderful. We also put up our first preorder in surprisingly a year. We were at a point where we were doing preorders with every book, but then between health issues and family issues, we stopped, and I was shocked to see it was a full year.

I’m a huge fan of preorders. I like knowing exactly when things are going to go out. I’ve also had really good luck with them with rank in the Amazon store. The books that we’ve done in our popular series with preorder have gone below 100 in the Amazon store. And the books in the same world where we haven’t done preorders, haven’t gone that low. They’ve stayed maybe more in like the 200 or 300 range for a little bit longer. And that’s just an interesting piece of information. The sales are virtually the same every book and that is what really matters to me.

So this week I want to talk about Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster 1.0 class, which I took in May. A lot of people are familiar with it. It’s become really popular in this last year, but if you’re not, it’s basically a class on personal productivity.

And what makes it different from reading a book on productivity, is that Becca is a Clifton strengths certified coach, and she uses that training and a combination of personality tests to help students pick apart their personal productivity makeup. She does personal coaching, but the Write Better-Faster course is a series of lessons that help you understand how the elements of the personality test results interact in different realms.

So you start by taking three different tests. And for my session, it was a form of Myers-Briggs, a form of the D.I.S.C (the DISC test) and the Clifton strengths profile. And then she starts digging into an overview of those results and what they mean generally, and then specific realms and topics that writers deal with and how their results influence that.

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into detail about my personal results and what I’ve learned about me and how I work. I find specific accounts of, these kinds of classes or experiences super interesting for one, but it also helps me decide when I’m trying to figure out if a class works just to hear how other people’s experiences went in detail.

Some of the topics that Becca goes over once you’ve got a general handle on your personality profile are goals, time management, energy management, your environment, story creation, the process of writing, editing, and habits. She starts the class out by asking the students to identify what their essential pain is. Like what’s the thing that either keeps them from writing or is making writing feel difficult or whatever is the thing that keeps bothering them.

And when I started the class, April had been my least stressful and most productive month in, I don’t know, a year, two years. And so I was just like, well, I’m just going to try and maximize my ability, but then May took a horrible, just downward turn emotionally. And I only wrote a third of what I’d written the previous month and I was kind of flailing, but I couldn’t pinpoint an essential pain, but we did get some really good things out of our one-on-one. But what I’m going to do now is go over the personality profiles and then the Clifton strengths.

And in between, I’ll talk about kind of the things I learned throughout the class and also in the one-on-one. So the first test was the D.I.S.C. or DISC. And that stands for drive, influence, and when I took this in college, S stood for steadiness and C for consciousness, but Becca defines them as stability and compliance.

The way the DISC works you don’t have a balance between the different traits. It’s not that if you’re high on D that means you’re going to be low on I, like the way that it is with the Myers-Briggs where if you’re high on I you’re going to be low on E. Each one is its own kind of continuum. So you could be middle in all of them. You could be really high in one and super low in three.

I was really high in S, steadiness, and C, compliance, middling in drive, and low in influence, which surprised me because when I took it in college, I was extremely high drive and influence and extremely low steadiness and compliance. Honestly, I think what that has to do with is a lot of personal healing on my half, I came from pretty tumultuous childhood, so studying this was not a thing I really understood at all. And chaos was my life and I did not feel very compliant in like being compliant. And what Becca defines as compliance is more that you care about standards and you hate when details are wrong. And I think that when I was younger, the rebelliousness of just figuring myself out, put that on a really low level.

And now I really, really enjoy being compliant. I like knowing what the expectations are. I like knowing what the rules are. I don’t necessarily have to meet them if I don’t agree with them, but I like knowing what they are. And often I’ll choose to meet it in some fashion. Anyways, my highest was stability and this was something we actually talked about quite a bit in my one-on-one because my divorce has been, honestly, my essential pain point in the last, you know, six months this year.

And one of the things that was in the lesson on what the different pieces of this personality test meant was this, there’s something negative for all people in unstable environments. It’s just that stability is particularly impacted by it. No matter what. And other people can often power through with much less of an issue.

And I find that a hundred percent true for me and something Becca said in the one on one was that for high stability people, divorce is often worse than death. And again, a hundred percent agree with that. I accept death pretty calmly. Like, yes, it saddens me. There are emotions. But it doesn’t stop me from working.

I’m able to move forward. I’m able to do my life, whatever that currently entails. But the instability of the ending or expiration of this relationship is extremely disconcerting and upsetting and has caused me the most problems in approaching my work in a steady manner.

And this is something I found really interesting and had not really heard anybody describe these before, but the DISC test, she defines it as what motivates you. So stability motivates me, knowing what the standards are motivates me, and meeting them or exceeding them, overachievers.

But the Myers Briggs test is how you process information. So what the letters are, most people are going to be familiar with this, but I’m going to go over Becca’s interpretation of them.

So introvert extrovert. I versus E. The introvert processes through thoughts while the extrovert processes through words. So a lot of times this will mean that the extrovert has to speak their thoughts externally to process them whether it is to someone or just to the air, depending on the level of extroverted personality or whatever. And I’m a hard, hard I. I always have been. Every version of this test I’ve ever taken hard introvert.

The next one is S versus N, sensing vs. Intuitive. And I’ve always kind of balanced in the middle on this one, but on every test except for this one, I have been just over the edge into intuitive, which I find interesting, but I do feel I’m more of a 50:50 on that. Sensing likes to process the concrete, likes details. If you ask them to describe a cup, they’re going to tell you what it looks like. They’re going to tell you its abilities, that it holds water, probably about this much, whether it can hold hot or cold water.

And intuitive is more abstract, big picture. They might describe the cup as, you know, a tool for carrying things. If it’s styrofoam, you know, how it affects the environment when it is thrown away, kind of where the cup sits in the picture of the world. And I honestly do think that I sit more on the sensing a lot of the times. I like the concrete, I like the details, but I like that I’ve got my foot enough into the intuitive, in the big picture, that I am not only looking at the details. Like I don’t miss the forest for the trees all the time, sometimes, a lot of times, but I like being in the middle on that. It makes me feel happy. You should feel happy about your personality.

So the next is feeling versus thinking. This is another one where I’ve been 50:50. And this one I’ve tested as both at different points in time. So feeling processes and prioritizes subjective things, often emotions. While thinking processes objectively. And the way I think about this is if a feeling person and a thinking person are planning a vacation, a feeling person going to be like, Oh, I want to go to Italy because it’s so romantic, and I just like that feeling of, you know, old world and adventurousness. And they’ll talk a lot about how the vacation will make them feel and why they want to go into that place. A thinking person will say, okay, here’s my budget, here’s what I am able to afford, here are the destinations that I can afford here are the kinds of things that I want to do in these locations. And they’ll kind of do a pros cons list and narrow it down. And I’m in the middle. I’ll do both.

One thing I think I’ve seen a pattern of though, is that when I am more depressed, I fall back on thinking versus feeling because I don’t trust my emotions. And when I’m in a more centered, healthy, and stable place, I will lean more on that feeling. But again, I am a pretty middle person here.

And then the last one is J versus P, judging versus perceiving. And this one, no questions, hard J every test I’ve ever taken. And so judging doesn’t mean judgy. It means that you like to process the data by controlling it, by making plans. And perceiving means that you like to process, you like to respond to the data. And you respond well to pressure, deadlines. So the way I think of this is judging likes to know the information before deciding anything, while perceiving says, let’s take a step forward and we’ll respond as the data comes in.

And yeah, I’m a hard J. I like to plan. I actually hate planning every step of the way, but I like to have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen for whatever’s coming forward. Whether it’s travel, whether it’s getting ready to publish a book, and then I like to plan things out.

I think this is a large reason that I love preorders. I don’t need that deadline to motivate me to get it done, actually, I tend to create my preorders after the book is done. I like to get the book done and then I’ll set a preorder up because that means I can automate every step of the way. I can put on my calendar, here are the Facebook posts I’m going to make If I’m doing that. I write them out ahead of time. If I can schedule them, I do. I schedule my emails ahead of time. Everything is just set up without pressure, and then it goes and does its thing and doesn’t require my input.

I think for a perceiving person that would drive them crazy. One thing I did want to note for anyone who is going to take the class after listening to this, Becca noted in ours that she’s not going to use these two profiles in the future. She’s going to be moving to the Enneagram and the Big Five in her next sessions, which of course I took because I am a personality profile junkie.

I have taken every personality profile test I have come across except the stupid, like, you know, social media ones. One of my favorites is the Sally Hogshead’s How do you Fascinate. And that one is about how to best market yourself. Mine’s the secret weapon. I’m going by names and I love that.

So now the Clifton strengths. So what are the Clifton strengths? Clifton strengths is a profile test that is kind of about more how you work in teams. It was truly created as a business tool and Becca has applied it very uniquely and specifically to writers. And what she said about it in one of her YouTube videos was, what’s useful about doing this test and knowing your traits or themes as they call them, is when you understand the trait itself, you have more control over the behavior and then you get better faster. So that’s the baseline for her whole class, that idea.

My top five, which are the ones that you get for free for doing the class. And then I paid for the full 34, but my top five are learner, input, relater, intellection, and individualization. And my next five, so your 10 are kind of your top wheelhouse. Your top five are really how you can first most maximize by focusing on those and then your next five are, these are all things you’re pretty good at. After that, it’s kind of like, well, these are things you don’t prioritize and that’s fine. You don’t have to prioritize everything.

But my next five, six through 10 are achiever, consistency, activator, maximizer, and arranger. And I’m going to go through what those mean in general and what they mean to me. So learner, pretty self-explanatory. The keywords are knowledge and competency. You love learning for the sake of learning. Not really focused on the outcome necessarily. You just like to know, and the way I’ve been fulfilling that for the past year is honestly only podcasts and the Author Success Mastermind. A few books, but when I looked back and realized that I was actually surprised because I’ve always defined myself as a learner.

I would love to go back to university and study just for fun. I love that environment. I loved being at school. And I actually have plans to go back to school just because I can, at some point when I can just pay for it out of pocket. Not in the U.S., that’s not happening. But I hadn’t been doing a lot of learning outside of my little realm. And I think a lot of that’s because I’d been in burnout, I’d been overloaded, but I used to just lose myself in, you know, the Wikipedia rabbit hole or down just random trains of thoughts, something would spark my interest and I’d just go. And I haven’t done that in a really long time. And I haven’t taken classes either and I love classes. So I have prioritized taking more classes. Because I know that that fills my well, like that’s not a drain on my energy. That fills me up.

Knowing that, I have started putting specific classes into my schedule and learning things outside of the book world, because I know that I just love learning and it honestly doesn’t matter what it is. As long as I’m learning something new.

My second kind of ties into learner a bit. I think it ties together really well, is input, which is information collection. Though some people collect people and some people collect hoarder kind of things, but basically you collect. And I have always been that person like, Oh, did you read that article? Have you seen that thing? Oh, this reminds me of. I just have all these odd bits of often worthless, but often useful information just stacked away in my head somewhere. I believe I remember in Becca’s YouTube about the input type, Sherlock is one that you can think of as an example with his mind palace, like storing all this useful information way. She said that a lot of, input people have a way that they organize their information. And if they don’t, they sometimes get really lost. And I resonate with that.

Number three is relater. The keyword for this I found is tribe. One of the interesting things that I learned about this one is that it doesn’t mean that you’re really good at just relating to anyone, anyone and everyone.

That’s not me. It means that you are good at building relationships. You’re building trust. But that relaters have kind of this idea of concentric circles. And there are walls that you have to get over to get closer to a relater. So a relater might have, you know, very few close friends and then a slightly smaller circle of friends and then a larger circle of acquaintances.

And a relater is very conscious of their relationship to individuals. And the closer you get to a relater, the more access you have to them, the more themselves they are going to be with you. And you can almost see, at least a relater in their mind can see, like when someone crosses over from acquaintance to friend. And I a hundred percent find that true. And it is one of those things where it’s interesting to see like, Oh yeah, other people don’t necessarily work this way. A lot of my extrovert friends, and a relater is not necessarily an introvert versus extrovert trait, but a lot of my extrovert friends that I know don’t process friendship the same way. They’ll call everyone their friend, even if they just met them two minutes ago.

That does not compute for me. How I think it relates really well with all of my traits, learner, input, intellection, individualization, and some of the other ones, is that it also makes me really interested in teaching. So input people like to share their knowledge. Learners like to have the knowledge and be useful, be able to have competency, be able to do things.

And the relater likes to like have people that they can interact really closely with. So all of that kind of explains why I’ve so often in my life fallen into a teaching role. Whether it was when I was a software developer and they often put me in charge of bringing newbies up to scale, or when I lived in Nashville and I stepped into leading writing groups there, or just in my individual relationships with friends and writers who are starting out. I have had to actually at times be very careful about when I do step in because I’m so ready to help. And as my six through 10 traits will show, I’m also like ready to jump and do.

So when people tell me that they’re interested in something, I assume that they’re ready to jump and do like, I would be in times, ready to jump and help, but they’re often not actually at that stage.

So number four, intellection. The keyword I found for this one was time to think. And Becca said this was the most common trait among all of her coaching clients. And I suspect that that may be a writer trait, but I don’t know. Intellection people are often introspective. They like to process things. You’ll get your best answers from them two or three days after you ask a question. You’ll often see them lost in thought. And one comment she made in our one-on-one was that they often need lots of sleep. So I’m using that to justify my need for some really solid sleep, because I’ve had to defend that before in my life. One of the interesting things I found with this is that it is kind of in opposition to the activator. Like you could think of them as kind of the ying and the yang. Some traits have that, which I also have, but in my lower five.

Number five, individualization. The keyword I found for this was customization. So this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re the lone wolf. Though I would be curious to see how often that kind of approach coincides with individualization. But what an individualization themed person does is they see the differences between people, including yourself, you see how you’re different from other people. They’re intrigued by the unique qualities of people and they make people feel safe enough to be vulnerable. And I see this has a lot of value, both as a teacher, both as a collaborator when you’re writing coworks, and for creating characters as you are writing.

Number six, achiever. This was another one that Becca and I talked about a bit. The key word for this one is accomplishment. Achievers are driven by a big goal. And that will fuel them and they will work crazy hard, possibly overwork, and very prone to burnout. And if they don’t have a big goal, they tend to flail and not really know where to put their energy. So the reason we talked about this one a bit for me is that I didn’t realize that I had an invisible goal when I was first starting out.

My goal was to make a full time income as only a writer, nothing else. And apparently the requirements for meeting that goal, my invisible goal that I didn’t know I had, were to have three five-figure months in a row, which I managed in 2019. I had three five-figure months in a row. And then it was kind of like this X-Box achievement had popped up like ding ding ding, you got that. And this desire to be only a full time author just went away. I’m like, oh, I got that, I’d done that good, good job me. And so now that that achievement has been unlocked I have floated a bit, not having a specific achievement that I’m really pushing for. And I don’t like consciously making income my focus point. That’s a really unhealthy place for me to be. It’s probably a really unhealthy place for most people to be, but there’s a difference between I need money to survive, which is where I started this whole process.

I was broke and living with my parents, with my son, husband, and two dogs. And no job. And now to knowing fairly consistently what my income is going to be month to month, I don’t have that hardcore drive to earn more, more, more. I mean, I absolutely want to earn more, but my goals are less concrete now.

And so it makes sense that I’ve been having a really hard time prioritizing and figuring out how to push forward. So actually last week, and the week before a lot of the work I did was just kind of sitting around and brainstorming about what were my priorities in life and what were the things I wanted to put the most energy toward. And so I’m still wrestling with that a little bit, but that was really helpful. And knowing that I’m an achiever pushed me to have that review.

So number seven, consistency. Which I feel connects really well with my need for stability, but the keyword for this one was fairness. And I read up on this one a bit and most of the information I found was within teams. And I find that this is kind of the yin yang to individualization, is that this one sees the need to treat all people fairly. So while individualization sees the need to treat people as individual, consistency means we also have to treat everybody kind of the same. Nice little war there. But what consistency is really happy with is creating routines, rules and procedures for everyone to kind of fall in the same realm. And I think it’s completely possible to have the two working in a beautiful union. and right now I’m thinking more of like a team effort. I really haven’t thought about what it means as me sitting, working by myself, but I can see a high consistency person creating an environment where everyone is held to the same standards, but in individualization, being able to put people where their strengths will be best used.

So number eight, activator. This one I think is the one that keeps me from being too slow because over in my top five we have learner, input, relater, intellection, individualization. And that’s a lot of sitting, thinking and gathering information. Activators, what I think keeps me moving forward. Activator is the jumpstarter. They are very impatient to start. They are really good at starting projects, getting things going. That is definitely one of my traits. I’m kind of terrible at finishing projects. I have trained myself to finish books, which is wonderful. But I’m really good at starting projects.

And when I was in software development and thought I’d be there for a long time, I really just wanted the job where I jumped in, started projects, got them to a good place and handed them off. That was the kind of role I wanted. And I never got to that point, never really pursued that, but I’m really glad that I am full time writer now. I am way happier.

My number nine is maximizer. The keyword for this is upgrade. Maximizers see potential. They have high standards and they’re a perfectionist. It’s really interesting to see how all of these traits work together and balance. So like my maximizer again, could slow me down because perfectionism and high standards, all of which I have for myself. But my activator, my achiever, are like, well, you’ve got to keep things moving. Like don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good, and in the teaching realm, I think this is such a good teacher quality because you see potential, you see where people can go, you can see where projects can go as an individual and you know how far you can go.

You know, there’s just so much possibility and you can see it. This is also a really good entrepreneur trait. I didn’t realize that not everyone sees basically everything they do as a possible business venture. But everything from gardening to my gluten-free cooking, I see how all of these could be turned into businesses. And I have actually trained myself to not pursue them because I used to be that person who emphasized my activator. I would jumpstart everything. I would start a million projects, start a million plans, but then never finish. And so I focus hardcore. I think that’s one of the reasons I focused hardcore on writing for so long.

It’s like, get it up, get it going. Get it good. Before I, you know, sideways off into a new project. It might be tangential. It might be something completely different. But I put all of my energy forward on one path and I think that’s been really beneficial, but my maximizer sees the potential in everything I do.

And then my number 10 is arranger. Keyword best configuration. So the arranger likes to figure out what the best process is. They’re planners, organized, flexible. But they’re also always changing plans because nothing’s ever like perfect. Nothing’s ever good enough. So they’re like, okay, this worked for a while, but like how could we make it even better?

So the arranger and maximizer kind of go hand in hand. So I think it was in the last podcast I had just said, like I have to come to terms with the fact that no process is going to be good forever. And it turns out that my personality wouldn’t let me keep a process the same, even if it was pretty okay. So that’s good. That is meant to be. One note I have on one of the traits that is not high is that I have low empathy. And this doesn’t mean that I’m not empathic, doesn’t mean that I don’t have the ability to empathize. But one of the things that Becca said about this when we were talking about therapy and that was very good to do while you’re going through a divorce is that low empathy themed people will often bottle their emotions because they don’t need to deal with them in the moment. Their personality does not prioritize them, but then they get to a point where they just kind of all come out at once. That has been me. For a really long time, basically since being a teenager.

And so I’ve really enjoyed digging into all of this. I’m going to continue to dig into this myself. I will probably do more coaching sessions with Becca outside of the classes as I hit new essential pain points, or just have enough questions that I feel I can justify it. There’s that judging planning part of me.

I really do recommend the class. If you feel like you don’t understand why you’re having a problem, or even if you understand why you’re having a problem and don’t know how to deal with it. One of the things that I love most about Becca, and she has a whole book on this, is that she doesn’t expect and doesn’t want anyone else to expect them to hold themselves to any kind of standard that doesn’t fit them.

And I know that I talked about this in my last podcast with things that aren’t the right way for you. And Becca calls it Question the Premise. If somebody says you have to rapid release, you have to be exclusive on Kindle, you have to write every day. Question the premise. And her book on that is Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. I highly recommend it. I also recommend this class. I will probably take more of her classes. I believe there’s a Write Better-Faster 2.0. And there’s also a Strengths for Writers course. I haven’t looked at them closely, but because I really enjoy Becca’s approach and I enjoyed this class, I suspect that I will take one or both of them at some point.

I hope this is really useful to anyone who is considering taking the class. And if you’re interested in hearing more of my thoughts about different classes, let me know. I’m a pretty big fan of Holly Lisle. I’ve taken quite a few of her classes. I’ve taken some of Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s classes, both in person and online.

And honestly, I won’t talk about anything that I don’t think is helpful. I’ll only talk about the positives, because I only want to point people towards things that are good. I will talk about negatives to a class that I got more net positive out of, but if I got something that I hated, I’m not going to talk about it. I just don’t find that a worthwhile expenditure of my time.

So thanks for joining me today. If this has helped you at all, please leave me a comment. If you’ve taken the class, leave me a comment. Tell me what you’ve gotten out of the Write Better-Faster class. And if you want to throw some money my way to help support the podcast and transcriptions, you can go to www.ko-fi.com/cryscain. Thank you so much and I hope to see you next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Flagg

Crys: Welcome, Jeremy Flagg. I’d like to introduce Jeremy real quick. He is the author of the Fhildren of Nostradamus dystopian science fiction series and suburban zombie young adult humor series, taking his love of pop culture and comic books. He focuses on fast paced action packed novels with complex characters and contemporary themes.

Jeremy spends most of his free time at his desk reading snarky books, and when he gets a moment away from writing, he watches too much Netflix and Hulu and reads too many comic books. Jeremy, a Maine native, resides in Clinton, Massachusetts, and can be found in local coffee shops pounding away at the keyboard.

Except now we’re stuck in our houses, but that’s okay. There’s still a lot of coffee there.

Jeremy: There’s still plenty of the coffee. Other than that, not much has changed lately.

Crys: Maybe an extra bit of Netflix and Hulu.

Jeremy: Hulu is getting a workout right now.

Crys: This is a bit different interview than my last three have been.

My last three guests have all kind of achieved the full time writing life. But you are on the path right now, not necessarily to full time writing, but to more of a free life in general. so why don’t you talk about where you’re at right now?

Jeremy: I’ve been publishing since 2006 and when I started, I had a lot of angst about my day job at the time. I work as a high school teacher and I couldn’t kill the kids in my classroom, so I made them zombies in a book. I found a mildly constructive way to deal with this problem. And when I published it, it was really just, I’m just going to publish it. My mom wants to buy a copy, no big deal. And all of a sudden they started to sell and I realized strangers were buying my book, and this was not ever part of the plan. I just enjoyed writing for the sake of writing, and at that point I realized, Oh. People are interested in some of the stuff I have to say.

The second book happened, and then the third book, and at this point I was participating in NaNoWriMo and it was just a good way to get out and meet other people and to be doing some sort of activity and really forcing yourself to write more. And ultimately I wound up working with a publisher and getting the first two books in my superhero series published. It was with a romance publisher, and I don’t write romance at all. They were looking to branch out into science fiction, but that’s not where their strengths were. So ultimately, I became the entire division of science fiction. Last year I, got my rights back and I decided to republish my superhero series.

Everything’s under my name now. I can exert full, crazy control over what I want to do. And that’s been kind of my goal at the moment. Superhero fiction is a kind of a hard sell because our fan base are comic book readers, and just because people like comic books doesn’t mean that they’re going to like superhero novels, just like comic book fans don’t necessarily watch the movies or the superhero movie fans don’t read the comics. It’s kind of a medium specific things.

That’s been a little bit of a struggle, but I’m expanding my world and my superhero books now take place in a universe. And the series I’m working on right now is actually more urban fantasy, but it ties into the superhero theme overall.

I’m working on my third series, and this is the second in my superhero universe. The ride’s been kind of crazy at this point. It’s been fun. It’s been. Weird to think of myself as an author. When people ask what you do, I kind of stopped saying that I work in education and I tell people that I write novels. People just kind of don’t understand that you can make money writing novels.

It’s been a great ride so far, and now we’re in that weird phase of “what could the future hold?” The five year plan has gone from five years to “what could the rest of my life look like?” That’s where I’m kind of sitting right now. The transition from this part time gig into looking at the potential for full time status and what would I have to change in my life to make that viable without, you know, resorting to ramen every night.

I’m a big guy. Ramen’s just not going to cut it.

Crys: Oh yeah. I actually miss ramen. I have to be gluten free and sometimes like just a cup of ramen would be lovely, but yeah, you can’t live on that. You have a really clear vision of where you want to be in the near future. However, and I’m really interested in this. Tell me what your ideal near future looks like.

Jeremy: There’s a long story to this, and I’ll abbreviate it, but for a while, when I started writing, I was feeling really homesick. I come from a very small town in northern Maine, and it is unlike anything else I could possibly describe to people. And I always tell stories about where I grew up. I would try to explain to people how all freshmen in high school are required to take drug and alcohol awareness, sex ed, oh—and hunter safety. It’s all one class.

People would constantly look at me and say, are you serious? Well, so I wound up writing a book about it, and it’s all about growing up in the small town in Maine and what life is like and what it means to be a Mainer and how we’re just a very weird breed of people.

And while I was doing this, I started researching my family tree. I am not close to any of my grandparents except for my, my mother’s mother. And her last name was Cowain. I wanted to learn more about her last name, which is an estranged grandfather’s last name. As I was researching this, I found out that my ancestors are actually from Scotland, and I decided, you know, someday I’m going to go there.

And you constantly say that someday I’m going to do this thing. And one day I went to the post office and I got my, passport application and I was like, sorry, it’s just going to happen. Let’s just do this. And in the course of just a couple of weeks, I planned the entire trip to the UK and I spent ten days in London, five days in Scotland.

I got to see the, the town of Luss, which is where my clan resides. I got to meet, the Cowain bagpipers, which are a nationally recognized organization. And I got to meet family. |People were so kind and sweet, so nice. And it was just this amazing trip I went on. I went by myself. I enjoyed every moment of it and I got to see this whole new world.

So I kind of made the joke, you know, someday I’m going to move to Scotland. I really want to be connected with my heritage. I really liked the people, and it just became this kind of ongoing joke about, Oh, I’m now certain that I’m Scottish. I already wore kilts. It just now has a reason. And then I kind of put it out of my mind because you know, that’s an international trip and I’ve only ever been to Canada a couple times.

So fast forward to a year later. I get really annoyed because my then job won’t let me go to the 20BooksTo50k Summit conference in Vegas. And I was like, man, my day job is really getting in the way of my life. And just by chance, I happened to hear on a podcast that they were doing something in Edinburgh Scotland.

And I said, okay, well let’s check this out. Well, come to find out it was in the summer. I can go. Right then and there, with no knowledge of what was happening, I booked my rooms, I signed up and sent payment to Craig Martel, and Scotland. Here we come.

I went for two weeks and I got to see both sides of the country and go into the countryside, and it was just kind of this confirmation that this is where I want to be. The pace of life is so much slower. It’s very similar to what I grew up in Main and it confirmed a plan that I didn’t know was a plan, and at this point I decided this is where I need to be. This is the lifestyle I want, these are the people I want to be around, and farewell America, I got places to go.

Crys: The most important question, do you now have a clan Cowain kilt?

Jeremy: Oh, I absolutely did. Crys was asking me earlier about Texas, and I drove all the way to Texas to buy a cowboy hat which I wear when I am writing in the morning, religiously, while drinking my coffee. And I flew all the way to Scotland to buy a kilt.

It just seems that I like to buy things from the source and it requires a lot of airplane travel.

Crys: So what’s the next item on the list?

Jeremy: Oh, that’s a good call. I want hand-blown glass from the Island off of Italy that all that they do is blown glass. So I guess Italy is on the list now. Excellent. And I really want sushi from Japan.

Crys: Oh, I feel you. I’m a food traveler. I will travel to the most remote place to try like the one dish that they’re famous for and that’ll just be happiness to be

Jeremy: I did grad school in Savannah and I used to go to use the library to research my thesis, and it was really just an excuse to have biscuits and gravy.

Crys: Nice. Southerner at heart, whether you are born and raised in the north or not.

Jeremy: All about the biscuits and gravy.

Crys: What are you doing right now to get to the dream?

Jeremy: There’s a couple of things that are happening. It’s taken me a while to understand that everything has to fuel back into a very specific mission. And for awhile it was kind of like, so I wrote a young adult zombie series. It was great fun. I enjoyed it. I market it, but it doesn’t feed into my bigger series and the universe that I’m building.

And what I learned was I have to look at every project I do as, “Well. Will this advance my career? Will it bring in the money that I need? And will it give me the potential for either a reach with fans, open more doors as far as podcasts, for instance, or interviews or access to readers that I don’t already have?”

And so right now my superhero series, that universe is where I kind of want to be for a while. I’m a geek at heart. I have no problem staying in this universe for the long haul. But my first series was very action adventure. Think X-Men, think, you know, Avengers. While it did well, it’s kind of a hard sell because you’re pitching it to comic book fans and comic book fans want comic books.

What I’m doing with the series that I’m working on right now is it’s very classic urban fantasy. It’s a young female, urban setting. She has psychic abilities. She’s coming into her own. She’s emerging as kind of power. there’s a little bit of romance, not enough to be romance, but enough will-she-won’t-she that there’s some intrigue there.

My goal for this is in on Amazon, in the superhero category, superhero authors cannot place in the top one hundred. It’s too overrun with urban fantasy masquerading as superhero. So I’m literally writing an urban fantasy book. Masquerading as a superhero novel or the other way round. I’m writing out of my genre to place in my genre.

I know that doesn’t sound logical, but after two years of watching the Amazon charts, it’s the way to get in. I’m gonna use this to access a new reader base, a more urban fantasy base, and use it as a potential fuel into my superhero novels and vice versa. At the moment, it’s banging away at the keyboard, making as many words happen to finish out the third book in this trilogy.

Crys: Yeah. We, we’ve recently talked to a friend of ours who, they were writing a new, cozy mystery series. They had one series out already and this new one, they realized, also fit in a new genre called paranormal women’s fiction, which is, paranormal stories featuring women age forty plus, and they realized that the cozy mystery they were currently writing fit in the paranormal women’s as well.

They kind of slotted it into both categories and it’s doing really well. The dual slot can be really effective.

Jeremy: My action adventure book takes place in 2032. So it’s very light sci-fi because it’s still attainable. Sci-fi except for the giant robots.

But. Yeah. This one, however, it takes place in the forties during World War II. There was the discussion about, “Oh, is that urban fantasy or is this alt history?” And after doing some research, when I was pitching the idea to my cover artists, I realized that there is a lot of potential for an alt history overlap.

It has a lot of the urban fantasy tropes. It might even find a better home in all history. So that was definitely a nice little surprise to see it confirmed that it really fit into this. And after seeing the Mary Robinette Kowal, the Ghost Talkers cover…

Crys: Yeah. I’m a big Mary Robinette Kowal fan, for sure. Alt  history is definitely my jam. We were talking just before this, the whole situation that everybody’s going through right now—for listeners who are listening to this not in time, but in the future, we’re in the midst of the COVID-19 lock down. We’re all stuck at home. And you have been utilizing that really heavily, as you said, as a test run for what it might look like in the future.

Jeremy: When everyone talks about going full time, there’s this weird—and I hear everyone say that when they start, they think it’s going to be like a full time job. It’s eight hours. You can sit at a desk, you’re going to type away or do whatever admin task, and then you go about your business.

The truth of the matter is writing does not work like that. You can’t force a creative endeavor. To go for unsustainable amounts of time. And some people, I’m certain that they could write for eight hours a day.

I have been known to once in a great while, but yeah. What I have found is this has been a good trial run for “what does a real writing schedule look like? What does getting up in the morning?” Checking my emails, making breakfast. Soon as breakfast is done, it’s time to go to the office and I stay here until I have done between 1500 to 2000 words, which is actually on the low end.

I think I want to start trying to bump that up between into the 2000 to 3000 range. Just because it’ll help me reach a production schedule that is, I guess it’s lightning years beyond what I’m used to, but I think that that would allow me to frequently be able to release a book every quarter, which I think is my personal sweet spot. I can definitely write more, but yeah, I found rapid release in my genre didn’t work particularly well.

I think knowing that I could do a book every three months and then create the system that allows that to happen, which includes, you know, your cover artists, your proofreaders, your editor, time to write, time to do all your, advertising, your promotions. It’s not just sitting down at the keyboard and clacking away at the keyboard. It’s all that other stuff that comes with it. And that has been a little bit surprising—and I don’t know why—it’s the same stuff I do every day, but when I was like, “Oh, this is a chance to pretend I’m a full time writer,” I’m not writing a whole lot more. I’m just being more productive with the time I sit at my computer. So. It’s weird and it’s not what I thought it would be, but I don’t know why I thought it would be anything different, if that makes any sense.

Crys: No, it does make total sense. And I really liked the way that you’re intending to slowly bump your words—I often refer to as building up your word muscles the same as building up your physical muscles.

Most people don’t come right out of the gate writing 5,000 words a day. And if you don’t use your word muscles frequently, they atrophy. I’ve had a really hard year and I am super comfortable with a thousand to 2000 words a day. My goal is to get up to about 3000 words a day, but I’m not pushing myself there straight out of the gate. It honestly takes physical training to sit there healthily, and it takes mental training of being in the words and being in the creativity and setting that pattern and that system up of, “These are my triggers. When I get to the computer, these things trigger my creative brain to engage.”

Jeremy: When you look at it like a traditional, a traditionally published author, Laurell K. Hamilton’s a great example. I follow her on Facebook. And she’ll applaud herself for, you know, a 500 word day, and that might be all she writes that day.

And I think, how could you possibly—oh, that’s because you released two books a year, whereas indie authors could be releasing, you know—last year I released five, six books. Four of them were written that year. Three audio books. All those assets take time. And if your publisher is not doing them for you, it’s your time.

I have a pretty good team that works with me, but at the same time, I’m one person, and that’s where the day job becomes problematic because. I can do a little bit of writing while I’m at work, or I can dictate in the car to and from work, but there’s still umpteen million other tasks I need to be doing and those I can’t do while I’m at work or in the car.

It’s not just about the writing at the keyboard and producing a book. One of the authors in my writing group only has one book out and he’s been making bank on it, and it’s because of all the admin stuff that he does to keep that book afloat. So there’s this weird balance that I guess I thought would be different as a full timer, but…

Crys: One of the things I do love about indie publishing is that freedom to publish either one book or two books, or—how many is Mallorie Cooper publishing per, per year? 20-some books per year? We have the freedom to set up whatever systems fit us and make it work that way, versus being limited by a publisher to one book a year or so.

Jeremy: And something I’m doing a little bit different—my first book in my superhero series is 80k words, then 90k then 105k and then 120k and it, those books had to be thick because there were six point of view characters and you know, it just requires that much space.

Well, this series is in first person. There’s one point of view, and so now I can drag those page counts down to 70k, which is telling a much tighter, cohesive story, and it still feels like I’m getting more story because there’s only one point of view character. Whereas if I was traditionally published, they might say, “Well, you can’t publish any faster. We don’t have space on our list or your fans have been expecting a book of this size. You need to keep up with that.”

I like the freedom of being able to say, Hmm, this didn’t work out quite the way. I wanted to. Let me adjust something and see if this’ll be better this time around. That that freedom to take risks and not rely on a sure thing is definitely why I love indie publishing far more than I ever did when I was traditionally published.

Crys: You have both points of view. Well, this has been an amazing conversation and the plan with Jeremy is that we’re going to follow back up once he’s achieved the Scotland dream and kind of do a before and after comparison conversation, which I’m super excited about cause I don’t think it’s gonna take too long before you get there.

Jeremy: The weird difficulty—it’s weird to try and think that I’m trying to become an immigrant. It’s not part of my vernacular from where I grew up—trying to move into another country is a lot more work than I thought. And I’m applying for university positions because to move into the UK and use your book sales, you have to prove that for two years you lived off nothing but your book sales. And unfortunately, I live in a very nice house with a very big mortgage and I can’t prove that I pay it with just book sales.

The goal is to go there, be a writer, be a professor. Go around wearing tweed jackets in tartan as much as they’ll let me, which is funny cause Scottish people don’t actually wear kilts, but I’ll do it anyways.

Crys: Excellent. Well, can you tell our listeners where to find you?

Jeremy: Probably the more interesting place to find me would be my website, which is www.childrenofnostradamus.com. it’s where I have a serial going. I’m building up the website, for when someday, I want to get into RPG in my universe. So I’m prepping it. Or if you want to go just the more boring authorly stuff, it’s just www.remyflagg.com.

Crys: And you have a podcast as well.

Jeremy: The podcast came around because I decided that because of this whole Amazon not reflecting our superhero novels really well, a whole bunch of superhero authors have created a kind of a justice league, if you will. And we started a website called www.superhero-fiction.com where you can find vetted superhero novels that are only superhero novels. And as part of this experiment, which is going quite well, my cohort, Trish Heinrich, and I have started a podcast called Geekorama, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Crys: Excellent, and I will have notes for everything that Jeremy has mentioned in the show notes, so those will be really easy for you to find. Thank you so much, Jeremy.

Intro

A friend recently asked me to read over a first draft for them. I’m always struck with anxiety and vulnerability in these situations. When someone invites you in to respond to their work, especially in an early, nascent stage, they’re placing a massive amount of trust on your shoulders. I might overthink it a little, but I feel very strongly about what kinds of responses ought to be given when you’re not a paid editor. Well, even as a paid editor, but that’s a whole other thing.

I almost always ask what kind of response the author is looking for. Because if they’re asking, “Does this make sense? Do my ideas connect well?” And my response is, “Your prose is clunky,” that’s neither helpful nor kind. If I don’t ask, I will tell the author what kind of response I am willing to give, which is always a reader response. I will do my best to recreate my reader experience for you. That kind of response isn’t very vulnerable for me. I state upfront that it’s just opinion, and they are willing to take it or leave it. I note things that are awesome, that bore me (I get distracted from the story or put it down), that confuse me, or that I don’t believe. I’ll link to a guide on that in the shownotes.

But the kind of response my friend asked me for was the deeper kind. I was worried about inadvertently stomping on the raw emotions that my friend was trying to convey in their piece or that I would discourage them from continuing. I couldn’t control how my words would be perceived.

That’s a raw spot for me right now. Anyone who has gone through a breakup knows that at the end, it’s nearly impossible for you to get your partner to understand what you mean. I have wrestled with being misunderstood a lot recently. I was so tempted to give a quick and kind of generic response because I was afraid of challenging my friend and pushing them and being perceived as bossy, trying to push their words in a direction they didn’t intend, or any number of interpretations I couldn’t anticipate.

Thankfully, I know this friend has some really tough skin, and that emboldened me to practice digging into my realness and vulnerability and say the things I was scared to say. They said thank you, and I may never know how my response was interpreted. I felt a little exhausted by all the mental hoops my brain put me through, trying to craft my simple but true response, but confident that I didn’t hold back, while using my words kindly and strongly. Vulnerability is a skill, and like all skills it has to be practiced.

Vulnerability is going to be a bit of a theme today. I’ve watched Malorie Cooper practice vulnerability very publicly over the last year as she’s come to understand herself as trans and share her story online. It was a wonderful talk and I hope you enjoy it.

Interview

Crys: I am happy to welcome my friend Malorie Cooper to the podcast. Malorie is also known as MD Cooper and is really known in indie circles for the book Help, My Facebook Ads Suck, and most of her books are in the Aeon 14 world, which is mostly sci-fi, but as she has said multiple times, you can write just about any genre in an 14, and she’s built it that way to satisfy her creative needs, correct?

Malorie: I did, yeah. Thanks for having me on.

Crys: Absolutely. I’m excited. I told you before we started that I wanted to read this quote from your book, which I didn’t know existed until you mentioned it. yesterday. The book that you wrote as Malorie Cooper is called How leggings Changed My Life. And I highlighted this quote because I thought it was so good for our conversation.

If I don’t know how to love myself as I am now, how will I know how to love myself when I reach my goal?

Let’s talk about that. Loving yourself and freedom… we’ve been talking a lot about freedom. How has that been problematic for you, in your life? Having to learn that lesson—what was that process like for you, that this became something that you had to write about?

Malorie: I’m transgender and for a lot of my life, I basically couldn’t stand to look at myself. I felt like the person I would see in the mirror wasn’t me, and I didn’t understand how to make it feel like it was me. It took quite a long time for me to, even though I spent most of my life dreaming of being a girl, every time I went to sleep. It took until my forties to realize that I was actually transgender because I had built up all these rules about what being trans actually meant and why it couldn’t be me.

Once I realized that I was trans, when you realize that—and this is one thing I’ve learned from talking to a lot of trans people—it makes you make your dysphoria worse, because before it’s kind of like, “Oh, there’s something wrong with me. I’m a freak. I’m weird.” And then once you realize you’re trans, you’re like, “No, it’s my body that’s wrong.”

And then seeing parts of your body—I mean, it’s always been there, but then seeing your body reminds you even more about how wrong you are and about how hard it’s going to be the way you want to be. It can kind of create a lot of self-loathing that can be a pretty hard thing to deal with.

I’m sure lots of other people have experienced the same sort of thing for other reasons, be it emotional or physical. Self-loathing. Or they’re upset with something they’ve done in the past, they’re blaming themselves for something and they take it out on themselves over and over again, and you end up stopping yourself from healing.

What I realized, it was actually during that event that I wrote about, was having to look at myself naked while I was shaving to go for laser, which the first couple of times I did, it usually had me on the floor crying through the process. But I realized that if I don’t understand how to look at myself and love myself the way I am now, I just don’t know how. Because you always hear stories with people who always get everything they want and they’re not happy. And I realized that the happiness that I wanted to have had to come inside of me and had to be there all the time. It couldn’t be something that I would get only when I reached a certain point. I had to do know how to do it now.

Crys: This was about a year ago, right? That in April 2019, that all of this kind of culminated for you. And at that point, you were very successful already as a writer, correct?

Malorie: I was, yeah.

Crys: Do you think that having kind of reached some of these writer goals could have freed up your mind to think about this more or… I’m just curious…

Malorie: Yeah. I think it did. Because what happened in 2018, I put out 44 books in that year. And I knew it wasn’t something I could do long term. I knew I was going to need a break and I sort of scheduled a break for myself in January and February of 2019 where I only had to put out, I think, one or two books in that entire span and one of them was coauthored, so it was going to be cake to get that one done. And I took almost a month just sort of to reconnect with myself and spend some time getting to know myself.

And what I realized as I went through all of that was that I had been suppressing a lot of who I wanted to be. I sort of started feeling it out with some friends, talking with them and kind of going out, presenting a lot more gender queer, kind of like it was hard to tell if I was a guy or a girl for a while the way I was dressing.

And I found that, one, people didn’t abandon me and run off, and two, it was, it felt more freeing. And that sort of kicked off this journey. So yeah, it definitely was. The fact that the success of that I had as a writer gave me the opportunity to spend more time reflecting than I’d be able to do in a long time.

Crys: Do you think that you would have unable to come to this understanding of yourself if you’d stayed in software development?

Malorie: I don’t know for sure. I mean, I actually knew a couple of trans people who worked in the same companies I worked in, over the years. So software development, especially in Boston, there’s no problem at all with being trans. But I don’t know if I would have had the time to do it because, I’m sort of the kind of person where I throw myself into something all the way. Like when I, when I start a new job in software, I’m working like 70 to 80 hours a week kind of thing. And I don’t know if I would have had the time for reflection or if I would have had the freedom to experiment. I hadn’t even thought of it until you mentioned it to me. I’m trying to think of how I would’ve done this if I was still working a nine to five job, and I can’t even imagine how I would have pulled it off.

Crys: There’s definitely a lot of extra side freedoms that come from the whole writing full time gig. How long have you been writing full time now?

Malorie: January 1st 2017 is when I went full time.

Crys: So you’ve been going hard for just over two years now. That’s really intense. How quickly were you putting books out in the beginning?

Malorie: Well, I only put out four books between 2012 and 2016, and then 2017 I want to say I did like 14, maybe 16 books, and then ramped it all up to 44 books in 2018, then 2019 I was back down to like 24 or so, and that’s something roughly when I do this year too, I think.

Crys: With the massive amount of output that you have maintained, how do you deal with the idea of burnout, or have you hit burnout before? Is it something you’re concerned about?

Malorie: I think I’ve… I totally burned out one time. I’ve just evolved. I’ve come close once or maybe twice since, and I’m better at recognizing the signs of it now.

One of the ways that I deal with it though is by having co-authors. Co-authors, the way that I work, coauthors don’t really accelerate the writing process so much as they give the opportunity for new story ideas that I don’t have to come up with. I find that sometimes when the creative juices just aren’t flowing, having a coauthor to work with, to bounce ideas off of and to, to come up with exciting ideas or just to take something that they wrote and just go through an editing process, it’s a lot easier. So that’s saved me a couple of times when I didn’t have anything to come out.

And I think sometimes too, it’s just a matter of burnout is just your body and your mind saying, you just gotta take a break. You know? You just gotta take a step back and do something else for a little while.

I am lucky in that because I do all of this speaking as an author, I go—I mean last year I think I went to 10 or 12 different writer conferences, and I would have again this year. But that’s sort of changed, unfortunately. But that gives me some breaks too, because whenever I go to a conference, I don’t write while I’m there, I’m not the sort of person that can bang out a couple of hours in the morning and then go to the sessions in the afternoon. That’s pretty hard for me. So I do have a lot of those opportunities to recharge as well.

Crys: And you’re one of the most extroverted authors I know. So those are total recharge points for you, aren’t they?

Malorie: Oh, they are. Yeah. It’s weird. I don’t know very many authors are extroverted like me, like maybe a handful or we’re pretty rare group.

Crys: It’s not a bad skill though.

Malorie: Yeah. I should say, by the way, I used to be super introverted when I was a teenager. My friends used to have to come to my house and drag me outside.

Crys: What changed?

Malorie: I think a lot of what I had when I was younger is I didn’t have a lot of self confidence, and so I wasn’t willing to put myself out there. And it caused me to retreat into books and into my own imagination. As I got older and I started to build up more self confidence and get wins under my belt, I realized, Hey, I have no reason to hide. I guess somewhere through that process, I don’t know if I’ve always been an extrovert and I was just in hiding or if just feeling confident around other people, maybe want to be around other people more might be a combination of those two things.

Crys: I wanted to talk about like your writing speed as well. One thing I have been impressed by, and we’ve been doing sprints together, is that you aren’t ashamed of writing slowly in sprints.

Malorie: It’s true. I’m probably consistently the slowest person in our sprint group.

Crys: And then you pretty consistently have some of the highest daily word counts. Have you ever felt pressured to write faster or have you just always accepted that that’s how you do things?

Malorie: I mean, it works for me, so I certainly don’t want to mess with it too much. But yeah, I’ve never, I’ve never felt the pressure to write faster because, I guess I have this empirical evidence that I get a lot of books done and I see my daily word counts and I hit them every day.

So I’m even though I’m the tortoise, basically, you know, tortoise and the hare, I’m going to make it across that finish line. It’s just going to take me a little bit longer. But also on the flip side, a lot of them today will be an example of that, because I was falling asleep while I was writing. But a lot of times what I write in a sprint—so if I’m doing 600-700 words an hour—I can hand those words directly to my editor without ever looking at them again.

So I feel that even though I write slower. I have a pretty good quality product, at least I think I do.

Crys: So I’m really curious about this innate confidence, because I know a lot of people—I don’t know if it’s an extrovert introvert thing or, you’ve mentioned in your book that you think that you’re probably somewhere on the autism spectrum, so I don’t know if it has to do with that—but a lot of people who have processes that work, still have this sense that they ought to be doing things differently, that they ought to be measuring up faster, to be faster, to produce more. Why do you think that you haven’t necessarily struggled with that as much?

Malorie: I grew up with an evangelical Christian background. I don’t really keep a lot of things from that with me, but one of the things I learned from a pastor that I had was that, most of what we think about ourselves is very subjective.

Humans are not particularly good at objectively measuring ourselves on a daily basis. We have to have external objective measurements to that are unchanging. Of course, in Christianity, they would say that’s the Bible. But I’ve sort of applied that to other things. I look at my, the number of novels I produce, and I look at my daily word counts. And that’s my objective measurement.

That, despite the fact that I’m slow, tells me that I’m doing a good job, and then I’m able to do this. And I do that with a lot of things. I really make sure that I make my decisions based on things outside of myself that I can look at and that are consistent and say, okay, this is how well I did last month. This is how I did the month before. I’m a little bit above, or I’m a little bit below because it is really easy to, without sort of those, those, those north stars things beyond yourself that you can look at in the horizon to tell where you’re going. It’s very easy to get led astray or worried or tangled up.

So I focus a lot on things like that to make sure that I’m always going in the right direction.

Crys: As we were setting up this meeting, we talked about how we’re both numbers people. We like knowing, how much did I make? How many sales did I have? And those are good information and data points, but not necessarily things to pin your success on a hundred percent completely.

You have a very clear vision of the next few years of the books you want to write. In that quote I read at the beginning, you have clear goals. How do you set those goals? What do those look like for you?

Malorie: This is actually something I learned from several years in software development. And I was sort of everywhere in software development. I was managing big teams. I was part of the product team. I was in daily meetings with developers and I was writing code myself.

I was kind of all over the place all the time. And one of the things that I learned with my exposure to the management side and the product team where the people are setting goals and visions for multi-year product builds is that you need to set a big hairy audacious goal. You need to go out there and say, this is the crazy thing that I want to do. And then you need to break it down into smaller point pieces and say, how am I going to achieve that crazy thing? And you break it down into pieces so small that they fall into almost daily goals, but they’re all still building towards that big, they’d be called the “bag” or something like that… Big hairy audacious goal, BHAG. I guess it’s kind of how you would pronounce that.

I always sort of keep that in mind, that this is my goal, to have somewhere between 400 and 500 books by 2030 and that means that I have to produce 20 to 25 books a year to hit that goal. And that means that my daily output needs to be a certain amount, but at the same time, I don’t beat myself up for it because I know that that’s a crazy goal.

So if I slip, I’m still doing really well. You know, I still stand a chance of being one of the most prolific science fiction authors of all time. Even if I missed that goal. That’s not my, my driving force. It’s part of it, that I want to do this thing that hasn’t been done before.

I think everybody has to have something like that. Maybe it’s a volume of books. Maybe it’s telling a certain type of story. Maybe it’s like trying to mesh two worlds together. Two ideas together. But I think it’s important to have some sort of goal that you feel is unique and is, is something that really expresses you in your work and then make sure that you’re constantly driving towards that.

Crys: So what would you say is your big driving force?

Malorie: I want to tell a story that is as big as an actual human life. Normally, when you read a book, you’re reading something that would take like, say, six to ten hours to read aloud and it’s snapshots of life strung together in an interesting way. But it’s not really so much of a person’s life, really get to see them go through decades of evolution, you know? And be with them the whole time. And to be honest, it wouldn’t be a very interesting story because most of our lives are pretty freaking boring. But what I wanted to do is want to try and create a story that is about multiple people that is kind of that big, that you could actually spend a decade reading everything I put together if you’re a more casual reader. And sort of see, not just from my eyes, but from maybe a dozen other authors all put together what this vision of the future could be like. And in doing so, tell a lot of really human stories about people and how they deal with things.

One of the subjects we tackle a lot is the emergence of AIs in my books.

A lot of the stuff about AIs is very analogous, analogous to human freedoms. Things you can do to people. What is privacy really? Sstuff like that. We build it all into this massive framework about humans and AI as the two dominant species, sort of butting heads with each other as they evolve.

It’s not deliberate, but because it’s a human story written by humans, it has a lot of connections to things that go on in our world all the time. So I kind of hope to create a tapestry that is so big, that could actually be a real human tapestry. Cause I don’t feel most books have the time to do that. That’s that’s kinda what I’d like to pull off. It’s a crazy goal. And who knows if I’ll actually pull it off well, but I’m going to try.

Crys: It’s a beautiful, crazy goal. I love it.

Malorie: Thank you.

Crys: What does it look like after? You’ve mentioned, 2025 or 2030 as being the point of which you have a vision until then. What does life look like after that?

Malorie: Oh God, I have no idea. I mean, it could be anything at that point. I’m going to be my fifties, so I probably won’t be a pinup model anymore at that point. I don’t know. I actually have enough stories in my head that I could tell stories in the Aeon 14 universe until I die, to be honest.

There’s, there’s enough going on in there because I created a setting large enough that I could write any story in it, so I don’t have to worry about world building a new place or anything like that. I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind like taking a year just to travel. Just to go around the globe and see a lot of different places.

I think that’s gotta happen sometime at the end. I got make a big reward for myself at the end of all of this.

Crys: Your daughter will be a late teens, early twenties at that point. So it’ll be delightful.

Malorie: Yes. Yeah. She’ll be older, so either she’ll be able to come with us really and really enjoy it or she’ll be off to do her own thing if she doesn’t want to come.

So yeah, we’ll have some options for us. But I don’t mind living a simple life. We have a relatively small house. I’m kind of happy with that. I used to dream of a bigger place, rooms like they have. That’d be kind of a fun goal too.

Crys: So I have a question. I have plenty of questions actually, but what is the most joyful part of your day?

Malorie: Oh, I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I kind of, it’s funny since since quarantine has come into play, our family mornings have been a lot more enjoyable than they used to be in that we all just kind of hang out together for like an hour or so in the morning. And that’s really nice. It used to be everybody was rushing off to go do their things, but Jill gets up first and she usually starts making some eggs. I get up shortly afterwards, brcause I don’t like cold eggs. I like warm eggs. She knows this about me. So she’s making sure that it all happens on a schedule. And then Eva gets up and wheedles, “Can I sit in the living room and talk?”

Eventually we started to go off in our various ways and then we always have supper together. Which something that we’ve done most of the time, even before quarantine. And then after supper we all play a game together. Right now it’s Overwatch. We actually have three Xboxes and we all have them all set up together and we’re all playing Overwatch together.

And then at the end of that, my daughter demands tickles and I usually tickle her for like 10 to 20 minutes, and she’s loud and screaming and driving Jill nutts. You know, and we’re all having a grand old time.

Those things are my favorite parts of the day. They bring me the most joy.

I mean, I love writing and I love creating and whatnot, but you know, those times of my family, I think are the types of stand out the most.

Crys: That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with me. This has been so delightful.

Malorie: Thank you. It’s been great.

Crys: With my past guests, I asked them to share a book, but because I read your, your memoir, just before this interview, I’m going to recommend to anyone listening that they pick up How Wearing Leggings Changed My Life.

and you’re working on the sequel, How Wearing Catsuits Changed My World, correct?

Malorie: I am. Yep.

Crys: Excellent. So people look up for those.