Today we’re talking about the need for a writer to be resilient over the long haul of a career and my guest is A.S. King

A.S. King has been called “One of the best Y.A. writers working today” by The New York Times Book Review and is one of YA fiction's most decorated. She is the only two-time winner of the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award (2020 for Dig and 2024 for The Collectors) and has won the LA Times Book Prize for Ask the Passengers. In 2022, King received the ALA's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement to YA literature and 2023, she accepted the ALAN Award for "artistry, courage and outstanding contributions to YA literature."

Amy – which is her real name – has taught for years in MFA programs and is working on her PhD in creative literature

I wanted to talk to Amy because I heard from a mutual friend – Caroline Leavitt – that Amy’s publisher had made a change to her promotional team just weeks before the launch of her newest book, Pick the Lock, which one reviewer described as "a punk opera, a primal scream, and a portrait of a family buried in lies."

Many of our listeners are trying to get their foot in the door with their first book, or to get a career off the ground with their second or third and here is someone who has written 15 books, who is at the top of her game, and who still has things like this happen – which is to say things that go wrong, things that don’t go her way.

I thought a conversation about what it feels like at this stage in a career would be illuminating – and was I sure right. Let’s get to it.Find A.S. King at AS-King.com

Heads up!

Join me—KJ—for Novelmber, which is very hard to pronounce but is my word for reclaiming my writing space in November. Think NaNoWriMo, our version—daily challenges and stretch goals, formatted by you, for you.

There will be write-alongs, posts, a massive Google spreadsheet for sharing goals and updating progress, thoughts on how hard this is, and more than you want to know about why I need this regroup so badly. All writers, every genre, welcome.

This is sign-up only—I don’t plan to spam the whole #AmWriting community with my wails of writerly distress daily for an entire month—but it’s also for everyone who wants in. I hope you’ll join me—I don’t want to go this alone.

Don’t worry, signing up is simple! Here’s how:

Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, toggle “Novelmber” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

THAT’S IT!

Once you set that up, you’ll get all future Novelmber emails. Any audio or video will show up in those, along with write-along schedules.

You’ll also want to add yourself to the Google Sheet where we’ll all record our overall goal, day’s goals, daily progress and what we’re feeling. I’ve started it off.Join me, help me, let’s make Novelmber WORK!

I couldn’t resist the subtitle, kids, sorry. It’s not that shocking—but Tim’s journey was definitely only for the bold.

I’ve known Tim Grahl—or known of him—for more than a decade. I watched him help writers like Dan Pink launch their non-fiction books onto the best seller list, and devoured and followed his excellent advice about launching my own books (which you can find here at booklaunch.com). Then I watched—or rather, listened—as he pivoted into the world of fiction, enlisting editor Shaun Coyne to join him on a podcast and help him use Coyne’s Storygrid method to work on what eventually, after many revisions and a whole lot of failing in public, became Tim’s first novel, The Threshing. At the same time, he and Shaun were building Storygrid into what’s not just a business, but a huge community of writers and editors. He’s just published his second novel, The Shithead, a very different book from the first… I call it The Firm meets The Alchemist; Tim prefers Fleishman Is In Trouble meets Faust. Both work.

We talk Tim’s sideways journey into fiction, and then we talk craft—in particular, how to learn what you don’t know, the myth of the lone writer in a cabin and the importance of feedback and then we dig into a passionate discussion of theme.

You can check out The Shithead here.

Links from the pod

Booklaunch.com

Storygrid

Shaun Coyne’s book, Storygrid

The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

(KJ also mentions Redhead by the Side of the Road)

The Husband’s Secret, What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty

Heads up! This is probably the only time you’ll see this.

Join me—KJ—for Novelmber, which is very hard to pronounce but is my word for reclaiming my writing space in November. Think NaNoWriMo, our version—daily challenges and stretch goals, formatted by you, for you.

There will be write-alongs, posts, a massive Google spreadsheet for sharing goals and updating progress, thoughts on how hard this is, and more than you want to know about why I need this regroup so badly. All writers, every genre, welcome.

This is sign-up only—I don’t plan to spam the whole #AmWriting community with my wails of writerly distress daily for an entire month—but it’s also for everyone who wants in. I hope you’ll join me—I don’t want to go this alone.

Don’t worry, signing up is simple! Here’s how:

Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, toggle “Novelmber” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

THAT’S IT!

Once you set that up, you’ll get all future Novelmber emails. Any audio or video will show up in those, along with write-along schedules.

You’ll also want to add yourself to the Google Sheet where we’ll all record our overall goal, day’s goals, daily progress and what we’re feeling. I’ve started it off.

Join me for the first write-alongs HERE. (That’s a link to my Zoom Room.) I’ll be sitting there:

Friday, November 1 10:30-12:30 (ALL TIMES EST)

Tuesday, November 5, 2:00-4:00

Friday, November 8, 9:00-11:00

More times coming. Join me, help me, let’s make Novelmber WORK!

Hey writers! I’m Jennie Nash — and this is the #amwriting podcast, the place where we talk about writing all the things: short things, long things, fiction, non-fiction, pitches and proposals. 

Today, we’re going to dig into a part of the writing process that comes WAY before you write anything — which is giving yourself permission to write in the first place. 

So many writers are shut down by teachers, people who love them, critique partners, well-meaning editors and book coaches, perhaps the entire culture– and the impact of that shutting down can last for decades, if not entire lifetimes. 

In my Blueprint framework – a method of inquiry for starting a project -- the first question is why write this book? Why do you want to do this? It’s amazing to me the number of times that the deep level why has to do with reclaiming a voice that was shut down. 

My colleague and friend Julie Artz was shut down when she was 25 and 20 years later she is finally grappling with what happened – and feeling a creative spaciousness that eluded her until now. She’s been on the show before, but I invited her back to talk about this important topic. 

About Julie:

Julie Artz is an Author Accelerator-certified Founding Book Coach, a sought-after speaker and writing instructor, and a regular contributor to Jane Friedman, Writers Helping Writers, AuthorsPublish, IWWG, ProWritingAid and more. Her work as a Pitch Wars and Teen Pit mentor, a former SCBWI Regional Advisor (WWA), and her memberships in The EFA, the WFWA, AWP, and the Authors Guild keep her industry knowledge sharp. She’s built a thriving book coaching business based on her values, her editing chops, and her knowledge of story. Connect with her on Instagram @JulieArtz and download her freebie on giving yourself permission. https://pages.julieartz.com/giveyourselfpermission 

It’s hard to believe the summer is almost over, and in the next few weeks, we will be wrapping up our special Blueprint Challenge that we did here at the #AmWriting podcast. As a part of that challenge, anyone who signed up for and completed it will be getting a list of exclusive offers from Author Accelerator book coaches to help them with their blueprints.

But if, as the summer closes, you're at a point where you feel like you could use some help from a book coach, we suggest you check out Author Accelerator’s book coach directory. They’ve certified more than 260 book coaches in fiction, nonfiction and memoir, and one of them may be the perfect person to help you get your book back on track.

Head to https://www.authoraccelerator.com/matchme to find the book coach that’s right for you.

Many of you have heard me (this is obviously KJ) whine about my revision in process. Well, I’m here to report that it’s done, and successfully. Below is a full description of the process, and in the episode you’ll hear me talking about it with Jennie Nash. I detail everything except the Peeps that fueled me, and I decided it was wrong to leave them out.

So, in addition to a lot of butt-in-chair time and a surprising number of hours spend really just staring the at screen, I should own that I also ate a lot of Halloween peeps and most of a bag of fun-sized $100,000 bars. And I would have eaten the whole bag but someone else beat me too it, and they owe me big.

Here it is in writing, THE LONG VERSION: How to do a substantial novel revision in 30 days

The Overview

I had a long, rambling, completed draft of a book with a solid plot and decent thematic/internal story. The magic system was unclear and the romance undeveloped, and I had too many side-characters and too many scenes that weren’t doing more than one job. Because it’s a seasonal book, I couldn’t take my time with a revision without getting pushed another full year out. So we were shooting for publication in less than a year—and we needed to leave some time, tbh, for me to get this wrong and have to fix it again. Thus: 30 days to a revision that involved nearly a full rewrite, even though the characters, story and in particular the plot excitement of the ending would stay the same.

What the hell did I sell?

At the time, I thought I sold a solid, almost-ready 102K draft.  Looking back, I see I sold an idea (Grown-up Gilmore Girls meets Practical Magic with a stolen set of family Tarot cards with powers and a mission of their own) and a rambling, creaky proof-of-concept draft with a solid plot at its core and characters my editor liked and wanted to spend time with.

What this was: Same basic plot, both inside and out. I’ve done revisions that required altering a major plot point or removing characters. This did not.

Same characters.

Same themes, but narrowed and clarified.

A few thoughts on that—the draft I sold was, in my mind, intentionally “edit-able”. There comes a point in a draft when editing it is hard. When what you have is both very polished and tightly wound, the editor may be able to see what’s wrong, but pulling it out will be more painful for the writer, because you’ve locked down all the story elements to intertwine and all the language, etc. This wasn’t that—when I yanked out scenes, they were at least flabby or tangential. I didn’t have to feel too bad about it. And the story wasn’t quite locked in as well. So none of this was unexpected. I know this editor likes to edit and is really good at it.

That said, it WAS a … third or fourth draft or fifth, I can’t remember. I’d done a lot of work on it. When I let go of it I thought it was pretty darn good. When I got it back I was like, OMG I can’t BELIEVE I gave this to anyone, it’s so long and there are scenes that don’t go anywhere and it takes forever to get to the point. And in many ways I had done too much writing work on a story that wasn’t ready to be written (although some of that is necessary for me to find the story).

So a) I thought this was a lot better than it was and b) even after you sell a book, sometimes there is substantial work still to be done and that is fine, it doesn’t mean you’re terrible and the story is crap and the editor is staring at it and thinking, I cannot believe I bought this horrible piece of junk. (Or so I kept telling myself, over and over and over.) And c) apparently what you go out with can be (and will be) far, far from perfect. Even if you think it is.

All that said, some editors don’t edit. I was talking with another writer at a party recently, a NYT best-seller who broke out on her seventh novel, and has written 2 more since, told me that she doesn’t get edited any more. That may be because of her skill and experience (and if so, I am so not there and can go back to feeling terrible about this draft) but I’ve heard the same from newer novelists. And debut novelists, although that situation is a little different, as our debuts are usually the product of a longer period of work and often working with paid editors or readers.

I knew this editor and knew what to expect. If I was submitting to an unknown editor, I would submit something that—to me—was ready to go. Which, I should say, does not mean that it won’t get the same big editorial treatment, so it’s important to be ready for that and accept it. It also doesn’t mean it wouldn’t need it.

The goal for this go-round.

Major notes from my editor: it’s too long, and it drags. The magic system is unclear. The motivations of several major secondary characters who move the plot are unclear. The love story is an afterthought. There’s too much of one secondary character and not enough of 2 others. Too much internal monologue, too many conversations in parts that should be action. The deep backstory (i.e where the magic comes from) should be super-clear to me but mostly unseen by the reader.

Minor notes: Some scenes don’t work hard enough. Magic should be more magical. The stakes are high, but make it more clear what they are. More descriptions of the cute town and shop.

My editor suggested a fresh structure of the first half of the book that moved it more quickly, which was very helpful. There are two inciting incidents, and we moved things so one of them happens very very quickly (the return of the magic) and the other later, after the first had more time to develop (the magic goes badly).

I had two calls with my editor, the first before she wrote her (10 page!) editorial letter and the second after I’d read it. I didn’t do any revision in between—I re-wrote the flap copy and worked on their author questionnaire (and if you’ve never done one of those, they’re quite long). We also wrote the tagline. Both of those—the flap copy and the tagline—were really helpful in reminding me what it was I was doing here, especially the tagline, which ended up on a post-it on my desktop: Flair is done with magic. But magic isn’t done with her.

I needed to cut at least 10K words, make the magic, the plot and the motivations of the characters around it clear, bring the romance forward and take out a lot of action (and a few tertiary characters and events) that were obscuring the main story.

An aside: I think we’re either writers who stuff too much into the story (and write long) or writers who get right to the point (and write short). Whichever you are, outlining a favorite book in your genre or one that really did whatever your goal is (page-turner, thought-provoking, slow burn) successfully for you can really help. How many additional characters and plotlines were there? Which did you remember at the end of the book? How many did you really love, or really contributed to the book’s success with you? Did they move the plot and the inner story or just one or the other?

I did this during my revision and found it really helpful. Again. For me, outlining—or at least thinking about specific elements—of books I hope to be like on some level is always a good move.

The numbers

Original: 102K/330 pp 36 chapters

Revision: 83K/298 pp 30 chapters

30 days/189.5 hours of butt-in-chair. This does not count anxiety dreams, walks to think through problems or time spent staring at other people and nodding while thinking about book.

Longest day: 11 hours (I had 2 11 hour days and 5 10 hour days)

What did that look like? 7-8 hours before dinner, with a substantial dinner stop that often included a walk or short bike ride, then back at it until 11 pm or so. I’m a natural night owl, so that’s not that hard for me.

Shortest: 1.5 (I traveled 3x during the 30 days, so I knew in advance that there would be several days when I did very little.)

 The shortest “real” day—as in, I didn’t drive for 8 hours or spend a full day in family activity—was 6 hours. I’d consider that a normal day, and if I hadn’t been in a rush I would say that’s about ideal.

Average: 6.3

The mechanics

I made one big decision first thing: I decided not to work in the draft, even though it had (relatively few) line notes from my editor. Instead, I decided to return to Scrivener.

The big advantage to Scrivener is the ability to move from chapter to chapter easily—as in, when you realize you’re quoting something said in an earlier chapter, it’s in the outline off to the side and easy to pop up and see, or if you realize you’ve forgotten something, ditto. That’s really tough in 300 pp in Word, or even if you pull out each chapter and work on them separately in Word. And the risk of choosing an old version is high for me.  This worked really well, and I would do it again on any revision where I didn’t need to be following line notes in Word. The ease of moving around a doc in Scrivener cannot be beat.

I also decided not to pull out each chapter, put it in Scrivener and plan to revise it. Here’s why—there was a LOT in this draft that wasn’t going to make it into the final. At a minimum I needed to cut 10K/15pp. But truly, so much needed re-writing as much as revising—or maybe I should say, there was a lot of new material that needed to fit in. It would be easier to take what I needed from the old draft and add it to new stuff than to cut things, especially things I liked. Most of the scenes I needed had been written, but interspersed with scenes I did not. It was MUCH easier not to even look at those scenes again unless, say, I began writing a conversation and thought –they’ve done this before. Then I’d go dig it out.  

Instead, I tackled it bit by bit, taking out the part I planned to work on and creating a Scrivener folder for it. I divided my book into about 6 sections—broadly, the beginning, the beginning of the middle, the midpoint scenes, the beginning of the end, the big action at the end and then the end. I planned for it all to end up in Scrivener and to compile it out from there.

I often did the editing in Word by pulling out, say, three chapters that needed to become 2, dumping them into a fresh word doc (that way I got my editor’s comments, too), giving it a name and working in there by also opening a dumping ground word doc next to (on desktop) or behind (laptop) it. I’d pull out a huge chunk, put it in the dumping ground and then go snatch lines or paragraphs as needed. This also gave me confidence, because the original always remained whole. I could always go back and get something if I needed it.

Those Word docs looked like this:

I drafted new material in Scrivener. Once or twice, I duplicated a chapter so that I could try something and see if it worked but easily go back to a previous version, which Scrivener also makes easy. I did some smaller chapter revisions in Scrivener too, although often I did them in Word and then pasted the result into Scrivener.

I created multiple outlines (about which more in the next section), and often—especially as I got closer to the end—included target word counts, and I really paid attention to those. I have a tendency to repeat things, especially in dialogue, and keeping an awareness of where I was in the scene/chapter in terms of middle and approaching end helped me move things faster.

Why are my fingers not moving?

Of that 189.5 hours, I spent approximately 103 staring at the screen, outlining, prewriting, staring, outlining again, and generally struggling.

I loosely outlined my revision with my editor before I started. A few days in I crashed headlong into the first wall and pulled back to really outline. We’d focused mostly on plot, which was just great—but what I ran into was the question of why anyone did anything and then, what the reader knew and believed when and what they were wondering about.

It seems so straightforward now, but on day four I wrote in my calendar (I keep a calendar record of what I actually did, as opposed to what I meant to do, often quite different): “struggling.” And struggle I did, for 9 days. I tried summarizing, I tried outlining, I tried fitting the story into various structures. I did a lot of prewriting of dialogue, which is dialogue with no punctuation and no tags or stage direction, which was one of the most useful things I did—just basically let the characters yell what they really thought at one another and then used it in various places. Here’s an example:

Mocking her. None of those cards were for her, they never were.

What came next, Nana taught her, was what you faced.

The card that, for Flair, held the flash of premonition, the knowledge of what was coming.

She pushed it away. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want the cards, not even these cookies, to exert their control. She didn’t want to know what would happen. She knew what she wasn’t going to let happen.

He can’t take Lucie from me.

The Hermit. Herself, alone.

A figure on the ground, lucie’s frightened eyes, the five of cups. She hadn’t even made a five of cups. Death—we cannot outwit death and we cannot outwit change—that was not what lay ahead.

They were just cookies.

I made them.

They’re mine.

None of that. She reached out, seized on the Devil, that card of control, to push it away with all her might but found her grip tightening on it.

Because of David. David needs to do what I want and leave my daughter alone.

Whew. Harsh.

Well, he’s an a*****e. She can’t go live with him.

Agreed. But you know what I think.

I know, enabling, blah blah. Well that’s done. I’m done with him. As long as he’s done with Lucie.

Oh yeah that sounds like you’ve totally let him go in a healthy way.

Flair picked up death and bit its head off.

Oh, maybe we leave the nice cookies alone now, morticia. I think you’ve had enough.

And then things went on well enough for a little over a week. And then I hit another wall and spent 2 days circling around, again, why one secondary character (the antagonist) would do what she does and how she would interact with my protagonist, in particular in one scene—what would she be offering and why would it work? That seemed to go on forever. Part of the problem was that I had two different elements of her motivation that I quite liked but I couldn’t keep them both, and I kept leaning in one direction, then the other, depending on what I was working on… honestly I can barely remember the details now, but that’s when I created the document labeled “pick a f*****g side”.

Sometimes you just need to make a decision and write it that way. Sure, save your place so you can go back and all that. But sometimes you just have to CHOOSE.

At about the same time I sent my agent what I had, and she didn’t like the first chapter and that… let’s just say I took that badly. I mean, she had like 35K words and she liked them all except the opening 3K. IT WAS FINE. And revising them later was really good. But I might have had a slightly unprofessional meltdown.

A few quotes from that time: 10/8, 12 PM: Day of Panic. Why does anyone do anything? Why?

10/9, 1 AM: Ugly ugly ugly

10/9, 10 AM: Still staring at Loretta scene….

10/9, 7 PM: Finally back on track!

In which I actually revise actual words on actual pages

So after about 30 hours of returning to outlining/prewriting/cursing mode, I found my way back in, moved a scene to earlier, revised some transitions and then… finally… chugged along to the end. Where I’d known all along that the action would remain the same, but the dialogue/internal dialogue would change a lot. (In part because, right at the most dramatic moment when life and death hang in the balance, I … had two people go have a heart-to-heart about their relationship. Twice.)

But I knew it wouldn’t be hard to revise, and it wasn’t. It was such a relief to be there, too! And then I changed one part of the end dramatically, which oddly didn’t involve changing that much text, and then, instead of dropping straight out of the story and heading to a “one month later” style epilogue, I actually WROTE the end of the story, which I know will be way more satisfying for readers. The other was largely a choice made from exhaustion.

Once I’d solved all the problems (that are going to be solved in this draft, anyway), it took 4 days to actually revise the rest of the book and get to the end, a glorious moment.

Which was immediately followed by rewriting the first two chapters, and then it was on to my checklist.

The yellow and the green

Jennie Nash suggests a stoplight checklist for revisions—Red/Yellow/Green. I had such a list, at the beginning of this process. But I quickly realized that so much was red here that, for the most part, that was all I could do. I fixed some green things (changed the name of a character, physical descriptions, that kind of thing) as I went and had an awareness of some yellow (build up this relationship, tighten the dialogue) but I was very much concentrating on red. So I kept a running list of things I’d need to go back and revise for at the end. Here’s what that looked like:

Play up can’t use magic without cards even more esp cyn

Craft enclave. Kansas League of Craftswomen/coven, build up trail’s importance again

Bakery has bright turquoise boxes with the logo stamped on them by her

Josie is still an EMT

Cyn needs to know who Alice is

Maybe Renee would call Flair Harwicke? Maybe she coached some ridiculous soccer team they were on once?

Loretta lick lip

Add Jude pop rocks

Back of the cards: On each was an elaborate medallion, a fleur de lis with an eye inside a triangle made of a floral vine,

Loretta and Jude: The tough, genuinely ruthless spirit had also doted on him and raised him, supported his dreams, pushed him to be more, driven him relentlessly, had—along with Renee—turned him into who he was today, good and bad/or wtf IS the deal between him and Loretta and Renee? Because Renee didn’t tell him anything, bc she never gave him any credit.

Josie’s sig other still in national guard

Someone needs to extinguish flames as well as start them. Maybe make point that it’s easiet to put out your own fire?

BLACK MOON is big deal all over

Some of those I ended up disregarding. Some were literally one line additions (green), others I needed to look at in nearly every chapter—which could be green (hair color, bakery boxes) or yellow (the relationship between two characters). I made a tidier checklist and then went back through most of the chapters in the book, line editing and addressing those issues.

Anything I’d really worked on and didn’t want to touch again, I mostly left for the next round. Which I knew would come.

How did it turn out?

Well. Fabulously. Here’s this, from my editor:

Wow! Amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever had a book improve so much from the first draft to the second. You have done incredible work. Brava! Standing ovation! You took all the different elements that had so much potential and you pulled them tightly together into a story that is constantly moving forward, has a solid internal logic, makes use of the fun magic that is dying to be used, but without making it kitschy, and that has a wonderful happy ending. I’m truly amazed by how far you have taken the book in just one draft. I’m also impressed by how much self-editing I can tell that you did. There are so many fewer instances of circular thinking, sentences where it’s difficult to parse the meaning, and using forty words when twenty would do. It’s hard to self-edit and you have done it and I’m very grateful.

Do note that she managed to list all the things I usually do poorly (most particularly, “using 40 words where 20 would do”) and that she’s this excited because the last time I did a revision for her, I managed to actually make the book worse.

So.

Maybe I learned, maybe I didn’t. But this one goes in the win column!

Listeners, the team at Author Accelerator knows that all kinds of people can make good book coaches. It’s not necessarily people who have had massive success as writers themselves. It’s not necessarily people who have secured agents, book deals, degrees, or awards.

It’s people who really could spend all day talking about books, who get excited by the idea of lifting up other writers, and who are ready to back up their passion for writing with skills, training, and hard work.

If that might be you, join the Author Accelerator team for two days of exploration on November 30 and December 1, 2022, to find out if 2023 will be the year you launch a book coaching business or level up the one you already have. Head to bookcoaches.com/dreamjob to learn more.

Sometimes your first book is a gateway. For me—KJ—it was Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos, a book I wrote in 2006 with Susan Straub. Susan was the expert and I was a rising writer with a lesser expertise riding on her coattails. We pitched the book before I had many bylines at all—but adding the words “is the author of the forthcoming book…” to my pitches opened a lot of doors. The book itself was shorter and much differently formatted than standard non-fiction.

Many writers get started this way, with gift books, guides and other non-fiction books that follow existing formats or fit into existing series. (The fiction version would be work-for-hire chapter books or books within a fandom—and we’d love to talk about that if you have guest ideas.)

Maria Teresa Hart is a writer and editor who works most often in food and travel, with a series of impressive bylines that range from the New York Times and The Atlantic to VICE and Business Insider, but she came on the pod to talk about the experience of writing a book for a publishing house within an existing series. Her book, Doll, is part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. We talk about how that happened, what it was like and how an experience like this can become an doorway into larger opportunities in publishing.

LINKS

Maria Teresa Hart’s book, DOLL, is a pop-culture feminist critique of doll history and culture, from Raggedy Ann to Barbie to android sex dolls. Find it HERE.

Readers of Jane Friedman’s The Hot Sheet (if you’re not a subscriber, I recommend it, find it HERE) can read an interesting piece about work-for-hire in fiction fandoms in the 9/28/22 issue.

High Heel, Summer Brennan

Object Lessons Series

objectsobjectsobjects.com

Object lessons essay series in The Atlantic

Maria Teresa’s essay on Bidets

33 1/3 series

33 1/3 WEBSITE

Barbie movie

AmReading

Maria Teresa: The Witches of Willow Cove, Josh Roberts

How to Be Eaten, Maria Adelmann

KJ: The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix

Small Town, Big Magic by Hazel Beck

https://www.mariateresahart.com, Twitter: /maritehart, IG: @mariathart

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

Also…. you know we here at #AmWriting tend to think working with a book coach or developmental editor is the gold standard for getting help with your project. But that’s not always in the cards—and even if it is, doing as much as you can before bringing in help is often a smart approach. (Although throwing small amounts of $$ at things for years until you’ve spent as much as you would have if you’d just gone all in is not…. so if that resonates with you go find a book coach already!)

The women of Pages & Platforms have created a course they call Story Path after years of going through this process on their own, and helping many clients fix their stories and finish their books. They saw how many people struggled with getting from a zero draft to a professional, working draft and made Story Path to help other writers get to “the end” faster. 

Here’s what you’ll get in the course:

* You’ll have the tools you need to understand what type of story you’re telling and how to use it to satisfy readers

* You’ll finally be able to have an objective means to evaluate important aspects of your story

* You’ll map a plan to a complete professional draft that will have readers eager to turn the page

* You’ll have the confidence to keep on the path!

The developmental editors of Pages & Platforms provide 20 multimedia lessons, worksheets, exercises and quizzes to help you apply your knowledge to your work-in-progress, monthly live group coaching calls and 12 months of access to the course materials.

Here’s some feedback from a real student when she first started (she’s now querying her completed novel!):

“Already ‘Story Path’ has proven invaluable, and we’re barely halfway through the course! It’s given me (an aspiring novelist stalled on bringing my rough draft in for a landing) the tools, frameworks, and inspiration needed to confidently tackle both my ending and effective revision of a complete ‘professional draft.’ Hawley, Ramirez, and Campbell probably saved me from tons of angst and flailing around. I highly recommend this course!”

—Carolyn Cowen, novelist 

This one is NOT FREE. But putting your $$ where your mouth is can be very very motivating. So if it sounds like it’s for you, get all the details and register HERE. We’re an affiliate, so we do make a little something if you decide to sign up —but please know that we only team up with people and businesses we trust!

I (KJ here) adore Nanowrimo. Tell me it’s impossible to write a whole novel in a month, especially a month with Thanksgiving in it, and I will set out to prove you wrong. My first novel, The Chicken Sisters started as a NaNo project, as did Playing the Witch Card (which is probably coming out in Fall 2023).

I… cannot NaNo this year (yes it’s a verb), because my next set of revisions, with an accompanying deadline, will be heading my way in the last week of October. But Jess can and will!

So I offered Jess my favorite advice on a successful NaNoWritMo—the KJ version, at least. Here’s how I approached last year’s NaNoWriMo, and it worked pretty well in the end:

My first novel clocks in at around 107K, my current WIP draft is at 99K. I favor long, convoluted sentences. I like to express things in sets of three—reasons the character is reacting as she is, emotions that are bombarding her, the ways her body responds— or even five: lists, smells, tastes, memories, expressions and as I have just demonstrated, I tend to use a lot of punctuation while I’m doing it.

I do this from the very beginning. If I’m writing a scene, I write a whole scene. The people move, they eat, they smell and taste and feel, they think about their backstory: the whole shebang. Historically, that’s meant two things. First, when November 30 rolls around, I’ll have 50,000 words—but I’ll only have a draft of about half of my story.

Second, I’ll have put in a lot of time writing those long sentences and and elaborate scenes. The terrible truth about my first drafts is that the writing tends to be pretty good. The dialogue flows, the action moves, there’s humor and pathos and feeling in the way the characters interact with one another.

It’s the story that usually sucks.

Getting to The End, not The Middle

I suspect that to some extent it will always be this way for me. I plot, then I write, then I discover that the plot doesn’t create room to bring the character to the place where she needs to be and I have to go back and do it all over again. But I also suspect I could do that initial finding my way to a character arc and plot that weave together in a way that satisfies the whole a lot more efficiently if I just wrote fewer words.

Make a Plan

To do that, I need a plan that forces me out of my usual loquacious style, and here it is: I divide my 30 days and 50,000 words into a beginning (6 days, 10K) , a middle (18 days, 30K) and an end (6 days and 10K again). World-building and character riffing are fine as long as I stick to the schedule. 

Write Some, Pre-write Some or Just Say What Happens

Next, I pay attention to time and word count. If I’m lingering and I need to move along, I throw down some plans and some prewriting. Conversation about the Halloween event here. Town history TK.  Some prescient line that recurs at end.

So that’s my weird NaNoWriMo plan: write fewer words, but get more of the whole picture on the page, with the goal of finding my way to “the end” instead of “the middle”. I know (and you know) that it won’t really be the end. There will be much, much work ahead—but I’ll have a draft. It will be a terrible draft, as it should be, but it will help me do the work I find hardest: not writing the scenes but finding the story. If I’m lucky I’ll be putting flesh on the bones; if I’m not, I’ll be rebuilding a scaffolding, not taking down a whole house.

And here, from the archives, is a NaNoWriMo Prep list I created a few years back.

Here’s a fun calendar Sarina found:

And a link to How to Do the Blueprint for a Book Challenge.

A few useful past episodes:

#NaWhateverWriMo, Episode 181

#SupporterMini 1: #Prewriting

#AmWriting

Jess: A Little Too Late, Sarina Bowen

Mad Honey, Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

All Good People Here, Ashley Flowers *for loving the audio version

KJ:

We All Want Impossible Things, and What Can I Say?, Catherine Newman

Reluctant Immortals, Gwendolyn Kiste

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

Also…. you know we here at #AmWriting tend to think working with a book coach or developmental editor is the gold standard for getting help with your project. But that’s not always in the cards—and even if it is, doing as much as you can on your own is always a smart approach.

The developmental editors of Pages & Platforms, Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez, want to share their top tips for editing your own work in a FREE webinar Monday 10/31/22.

YOU WILL LEARN:

* Why marketing categories or “genres” don’t help you write a good working story, and what does.

* The three most common structural problems with novels and memoirs and how to start solving them.

* The importance of good working scenes, and how to fix scenes that don’t work.

Learn more HERE. We’re an affiliate, so we do make a little something if you decide to sign up for additional services. But this is FREE. And please know that we only team up with people and businesses we trust!

Listeners, we’re sharing this interview again because if you’re not already subscribed to Theodora’s substack, you should be. We sent you a taste of it this morning on top of this episode. We adored talking to TT, as we like to call her around here—but now that she’s revved up her Substack, every single time we’re texting back and forth about its brilliance. “Butter” has joined our official #AmWriting lexicon.

So, enjoy a favorite that you might have missed when it originally rolled out over the holidays last year.

Notes on the Pod: Who doesn’t want a craft book that’s fun to read and will help you plan your fiction (or memoir), write that fiction, revise that fiction and then sell that fiction? This week we talked to Theodora Taylor, author of more than 50 novels and one brilliant book about writing that made Sarina and I (KJ) go SQUEEEE and then text back and forth frantically for a couple of hours. It’s all about the “Universal Fantasies” that give our story-loving brains the things we need when we read—and how to spot those in your own writing to help you tell people what you’re all about, use them in drafting and revising and just generally make sure they’re everywhere in everything you write—literary, commercial, genre, short stories, novellas—everything.

We read Harry Potter for Hogwarts fun and the hero’s journey—but we also are in it for the universal fantasies of “crushed underdog proves self to loathsome family” and “ordinary person turns out to be special” and “loyal friends can be better than family” and so on—and the thing about those elements is that they appear everywhere. You could find a book in any genre that scratches those itches, and those feelings are a big part of what we’re reading for. As Theodora says, they’re what makes your book taste good.

They’re the butter.

7 Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to Sell Your Books to Anyone

Facebook group: 7 Figure Fiction

https://theodorataylor.com

https://7figurefiction.com

#AmReading

Theodora: Beastars Manga by Paru Itagaki

KJ: Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova

Sarina: The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

People my people, if you’re thinking becoming a Book Coach might just be your next sparkly goal, DO NOT MISS this live event with Jennie Nash: Find Your Zone of Genius as a Book Coach, Jennie will host the top reasons people resist starting a new endeavor, and how to fight through those negative thoughts and share how to brainstorm your way to a zone of genius to your book coaching business.

This is a live working session that will not be recorded - because Jennie wants to workshop with YOU on your idea. It’s happening October 27th at 1PM Pacific, 4PM Eastern. FIND OUT MORE.

Also…. you know we here at #AmWriting tend to think working with a book coach or developmental editor is the gold standard for getting help with your project. But that’s not always in the cards. If you’re more in the market for a course that will help you move forward with your project, check Happily Ever After Week. Our friends at Pages and Platforms have distilled what they've learned working with hundreds of authors into a 3-part framework to give you: 

* the mindset you need to persist in your efforts,

* the tools you need to write the best book possible, 

and the willingness to put yourself out there and build the audience your book deserves. Learn more HERE. We’re an affiliate, so we do make a little something if you decide to sign up. But please know that we only team up with people and businesses we trust!

Listeners, you KNOW we got granular with this one because there are just plain so many links!

Terena Elizabeth Bell has been writing all her life. Her first short story was published in a literary magazine when she was in college—almost thirty years ago, and she’s published many since and won multiple awards. She’s also written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Playboy, MysteryTribune, and Santa Monica Review. Platform-o-rama, right?

But she could NOT find a publisher for her debut novel or debut short story collection. As she puts it: It wasn't for want of trying. Her novel was turned down by 64 agents.

That novel, RECURSION, and Terena’s short story collection, Tell Me What You See were both purchased within two weeks once Terena decided to turn to the small presses associated with the lit mags she’d been a part of for so long.

We talk about the glories AND problems with small presses, how to be sure you’re talking to a small press and not the kind of hybrid publisher we often warn you about (there are legit hybrids, but be careful out there, many take advantage of writers who don’t understand what they offer), finding the right small presses and literary magazines and what it’s like to be a more literary and experimental writer. It’s a great episode with a lot of information we haven’t covered before.

BONUS: Read Previous guest Joni B. Cole’s When Is It Smart to Submit Your Work to a University Press? (You’d Be Surprised!)

Big Literary journals Duotrope, The Submission Grinder

Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference

SMOL Fair Readings

NYT article on how Billie Eilish’s platform didn’t sell her book

CamCat Books

Justine Bateman’s book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, which her platform also didn’t sell.

The 10 National Book Award Finalists for 2022 include 4 books of short stories.

Beacon Press: an American left-wing non-profit book publisher.

Soho Press: a New York City-based publisher founded by Juris Jurjevics and Laura Hruska in 1986 and currently headed by Bronwen Hruska. It specializes in literary fiction and international crime series.

Best Short Stories of 2022

Malarkey Books

Authors Guild Model Contract

Brooklyn Book Festival

FSG—Farrar Straus Giroux does/does not take unagented submissions

Submittable

The controversy surrounding Roxane Gay’s PANK

ThrillerFest

Find Terena at www.terenabell.com or on Twitter @TerenaBell

#AmReading

Terena: Edith Wharton’s A Glimpse of the Moon, A Son at the Front , and The Custom of the Country

Night Rider, All the Kings Men, both by Robert Penn Warren

KJ: The Letters of Shirley Jackson, as well as the four book omnibus that has Sundial in it (and Alexis Hall’s Paris Daillencourt is About to Crumble and Glitterland)

If you’ve listened to any of us for any time at all you know we love Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. People often attribute to KJ a piece of advice she learned from Laura: People are a good use of time. We think of Laura every time we start to call ourselves “too busy” and then remember that much of what fills our time is a choice, and if we want to do it, we’ll find a way to get it done.

One glorious result—we’re all much better at saying “yes” to the things that are important to us and “no” to the things that would get in their way.

Because we always benefit from a re-read of Laura’s books, we’re bringing this earlier interview out and sharing it again.

Laura also has a new book out: Tranquility by Tuesday:  9 ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. The idea is genius: upgrade your Tuesday, upgrade your life. The nine rules here really do offer big impact from small change. We can’t recommend it highly enough!

Also on the horizon: If being a book coach –and you know we love book coaches here--sounds like a dream,  but you have no idea how you will run your business or get clients, our friend and sponsor Jennie Nash is hosting an event this month for you.

In Find Your Zone of Genius as a Book Coach, Jennie will share the top reasons people resist starting a new endeavor, and how to fight through those negative thoughts. She’ll also show you  how to brainstorm your way to a zone of genius to your book coaching business.

This is a live working session that will not be recorded - because Jennie wants to workshop with YOU on your idea. It’s happening October 27th, 2022 at 1PM Pacific, 4PM Eastern. Head here for more info!

Alexis Hall describes himself as a genrequeer writer of kissing books. You may know him as the author of Boyfriend Material and Rosalyn Palmer Takes the Cake, both of which we’ve talked about here. But like recent guest Emily Henry and so many others, those successes were far from his first rodeo. Head to his website, quicunquevult.com, to see the evidence. (Why is it called that? You’ll have to listen to find out.) Alexis has written, and still writes, everything from paranormal and fantasy to billionaire romance to rom-com, with the recent addition of genre mystery and historical fiction.

We talk tropes, dialogue and leaning into the the thing you do best then revising for the rest. (And we did it all with a kitten climbing around on my desk, adding to both the joy and the challenge.)

Sarina and I (this is, as usual, KJ) have long hoped to talk to Alexis because he is so prolific and also so willing to take chances. When we finally did, what we heard was someone who doesn’t see himself the way we see him—successful, talented, charming and able to convey all of that on the page. That shouldn’t be a surprise, because he often writes characters with that same block—they’re successful and delightful but see themselves as flawed in some way. That may be almost too generic to be considered advice (after all, we’re often told to write a “misbelief” into our characters)—but I found it striking, because along with the many other emotional journeys Alexis writes, he writes this one often and well: that of a self-perceived f**k-up accepting that they’ve transcended that earlier self and become someone capable and worthy of love.

I’m calling that out here because as we talked to Alexis, we talked about his brand being clever banter and an uber-confident writer’s voice—but I think that emotional journey is part of his brand as well. So this episode left me thinking about how brand is more than the way a book or a writer looks and sounds. It’s also the way the book feels. And when you think about it that way—that the emotional arc and feel are part of the brand as well—I think it may help silence any voice in your head complaining that things are repetitive, or that you’ve “ done that before” or that something has been done by others.

We tell our own stories and the stories that we hold most closely, in fiction, in non-fiction, in whatever we’re working on. Indirectly, directly. Again and again. I hope this episode helps you think about what your story is and how you’re telling it.

LINKS!

Alexis’s books in general are all here.

But you can pre-order Paris Daillencourt Is about to Crumble on Amazon here and Bookshop.org here.

Follow Alexis on Goodreads, Twitter and Instagram.

#AmReading

Alexis: ARC of Kate Clayborn’s Georgie, All Along

Sarina: Dark Matter, Blake Crouch

KJ: Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

And— this is KJ with a question. Do you own In Her Boots yet? Have you read it yourself, or given it to a friend who’d love a fun story about figuring out who you are as opposed to who you think everyone wants you to be—that also delivers a literary hoax, farm life and an ex who can’t seem to find the exit? If you don’t have it on the shelf yet, now’s the time!

Kids, this interview with Gretchen Rubin is just too good not to share again. Find more about Gretchen, and sign up for her always interesting newsletter, here. Want to know which tendency you are? Take the quiz here. And which tendency would you attribute to your hosts? Answers coming soon… (or maybe in the episode…)

Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click here. And if you’ve considered becoming a book coach, here’s your link: Click here.

Writers, do you read Sarina Bowen? If you don’t, you should—first off because her books are killer fun, and secondly because every one is a masterclass in pacing, characterization and plot—and if you think plotting romance is easy because “we know what’s going to happen” then call me again after you’ve tried it. Her latest is A Little Too Late. Find out more at SarinaBowen.com.

THIS EPISODE. “Overnight success” Emily Henry reminds us that she’s not—she published three sad-and-serious YA novels before she embraced her real calling and wrote the book she craved—Beach Read, which she says “I never expected to send to anyone.”

This discussion was so true to our hearts (KJ writing, Sarina co-signing). It’s hard to for some of us to give ourselves permission to write fun books in a world where “things we like” and especially “things women like” are often dismissed as less worthy. Sarina reminded us of this George Michael quote—when asked when he was going to “write serious music” his response was “You don’t understand. I’m very serious about pop music.” And KJ immediately demanded that everyone read This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch which is, instead, a book about exactly what we just said. That you should read. Immediately. We’ll wait.

So how do your get very serious about writing fun reads? Emily’s insight on how to turn the seemingly small internal battles that our kind of fiction often hinges on is perfection: “you have to make things realer than real life”. For more, hit play.

Links in the Pod

#AmWriting Episode 302 with Katherine Center

#AmReading

Emily: Miss Aldridge Regrets, Louise Hare

The Bodyguard, Katherine Center

The Change, Kirsten Miller

Sarina: The Bodyguard, Katherine Center

Upgrade, Blake Couch (Emily then shouted out Dark Matter and The Letty Dobesh Chronicles with its Good Behavior TV adaptation)

KJ: This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, Tabitha Carvan

Thank You for Listening, Julia Whelan

Emily Henry on Insta: @emilyhenrywrites

Join Emily’s newsletter: Get My Grocery List

WHOA heading into fall like

Hope you’re feeling the fall mojo more than we are. Struggling here, which is a bummer because usually fall is the season that gives when it comes to forward momentum. We, a subset of three, can’t tell if this is a mood that’s overtaken us all, or if it’s life stage specific when you have kids leaving the house, or if it’s just that that the weird weather is taking its toll.

A suggestion, if you too are grasping at momentum straws? Change it up. Have a ridiculous adventure. Sarina and I (KJ here as always) teamed up with another friend and some assorted partners and went… to the Hilton Garden Inn to hear their “house band”.

Because when you tell me the Hilton Garden Inn has a house band, I say, bring it on. It fully lived up to the promise of the phrase. The band was a couple of talented guys, an enormous amp and a repertoire of songs ranging from originals to Thin Lizzie to… I don’t know. It would probably have all been quite loud for my old ears, except that we were outside, overlooking the bus station, and the band was… in the parking lot.

The waitress had bright red hair and a constantly changing wardrobe and strongly recommended the salmon.

Everyone was trying very hard, no one seemed to know what we were trying hard for, and high levels of absurdity were reached.

I know, not EVERYONE has a Hilton Garden Inn House Band. But perhaps there is something, somewhere to go where humanity transcends our urge to mock ourselves and just plays The Boys Are Back in Town in the parking lot for people eating chicken fingers and jalapeño poppers. Which were excellent.

Links from the pod:

Leuchtturm monthly B5 planner

Sarah Stewart Taylor

Nanowrimo

#AmReading

Jess: Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Thank You for Listening, Julia Whelan

Sarina: Girl, Forgotten, Karin Slaughter

Jess also mentioned Michael Connelly and Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon

KJ: Also a Poet, Ada Calhoun

Also mentioned, and Jess is now reading: The Last Chairlift, John Irving

It all Started on the ‘Book

Sarina, here! This episode began in a Facebook thread. In a writers’ group, author Dena Moes R.N. expressed some concern about trying to bring a book to market during a very noisy news cycle.

I pushed back a little, given the nature of her book: It's Your Body: The Young Woman's Guide to Empowered Sexual Health. This lovely book is no stranger to politics. In 2024 it’s political to even suggest that a young woman has the right to decide the fate of her own body.

What could be more timely?

Dena and I brought our friendly debate to your door, where we cover:

* What does the election cycle really mean for books and book buyers?

* What are some elements of Dena’s story that play well with readers who are staring down the barrel at a very important election?

* Who should Dena talk to about this book, and why?

You can see some of the content Dena is working on at Instagram and Tiktok

You can find the book at Amazon and Bookshop.

Books we’re reading this week:

Dena is reading I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol and The Inner Practice of Medicine by Dr. Wendy Lau.

Sarina is reading: Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center and One Jump at a Time by Nathan Chen.

Are you a “sticker”?

Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).

We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).

Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)

I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.

Subscribe

To join the Blueprint for a Book Summer Sprint, you must be a paid subscriber. Then, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple! Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:

* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.

Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).

You’ve got everything you need to write this book—so what now? You may be feeling pumped and ready to dive in, or you may be feeling overwhelmed. I know that the truth is that you’re all at somewhat different stages of this. Some of you were working with totally new material, others imposing a better structure on a project you’ve been working on for a long time and others somewhere in between. But wherever you are, this is a hard moment—because you’re going to have to take off the training wheels and pedal this bike on your own.

For many of us, these assignments, while challenging, also offer kind of a crutch. They’re things to check off a list, signs of progress, short achievable goals. They’re real and so is the progress they represent but they’ve also made things a little easier by providing structure—and now you need to provide that structure for yourself.

In the episode, we talked about moving your project forward—the book, the chapters, the scenes, the story. Right now I want to talk mechanics. It’s one thing to know it’s time to write the book and another to know how—in terms of tools and timing—you’re going to do it. This bonus suggests you create your own goals and measurements to help you to both move forward—and to see yourself making that progress. Hours, words per day, specific in-book goals … they all work. The trick is setting them ahead of time and them meeting them.

And—that’s it! You’ve blueprinted. Huge congrats are in order for getting this done. Hope to see you at the AMA in two weeks.

Here’s the link for the End of Blueprint AMA on Friday September 16 at 12PM Eastern: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89290223042?pwd=QkUrbkpoWm51REFLbkdiaTdPZENPZz09

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

You’re rolling into the final week of the challenge my friend! And yes, this episode is late. We’re rolling into the final moments before school starts in my house, and things are rough.

But not in our Blueprints! Those are perfect… hahahahahaha.

Listen. Your Blueprint isn’t perfect. This Inside/Outline or Outcome Outline sitting there, so shiny and new? It has flaws, my friend, flaws that will seem glaring to you in about a month or six months or a year or all three.

Last week you went through a checklist to try to test that puppy out, and it helped. But as you head forward—as you start writing, keep writing, draft the beginning six times (don’t do that) and face the muddly middle (go back to that outline) and drag your way to the end (and then rewrite it)—there will be times when you doubt.

When everything in the whole world you ever imagined will seem like it would make a better book than this sad, sorry pile of words. Words? Ha! They’re barely letters.

So this little bonus is me at just such a moment, telling you what I’m doing to drag my sorry butt back to the chair and get my head back in the game.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

This short outline thing is hard. It’s hard for one of two possible reasons: Either you don’t want to write an outline at all, bc “you know what you’re going to write” or you “hate outlining” or “don’t want to practically write it before I write it” OR you love outlining and could do it all day, to the tune of 17 pages all about what this is about and what it’s going to say and therefore “can’t possibly fit this onto 2 pages!”

Both of you, chill. It’s okay. You’re going to do this, and I suspect that you’ll end up liking it. The cool thing is that the thing that makes it easier—to either outline at all or to make a short outline as opposed to the monster some of us tend to create—is actually the same. (And don’t worry—there’s a place for those monster outline instincts. That’s called pre-writing, and we have a whole episode about it coming up in the fall.) Making outlines for fiction easier is all about where you start (try the end or the middle), and focusing on the emotions and tentpole events rather than on the plot.

In non-fiction, the same reluctance applies—especially if you think you know where you’re going or what you’re doing. Know your topic inside and out? Think you could “write this book in your sleep” because you write, lecture or teach about the subject all the time, or it’s your business? Do you have a list of things to cover chapter by chapter, or a particular memoir story to tell? Then you need an outline desperately. Trust me. Can you write this book without one? Yep. Will it be the book you want it to be? Almost certainly not, and I speak from experience. You, two, may be inclined to either gloss over this, or to want to write reams, going into detail about each area you intend to cover.

But doing either will get in your way. The path to a better book—one that has readers turning the pages of even a how-to in order to get to the next thing, or engrosses them in a chronological story of a thing they’ve never done and have no interest in doing—lies in getting this skeleton right. In non-fiction, that means finding a way to build interest and knowledge so that the reader constantly sees the need to follow you through to the end. In your outline, focus on the repeating themes and topics and the way those develop for the reader as they progress through the book.

Keeping it short forces you to look hard at what you’re building before you cover it with glitter and tinsel and helps you see and work on the flaws before they get baked in.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Pace, y’all. It’s the magic secret sauce in everything. And yet it’s also a squishy sounding word that’s almost undefinable. What is it? Can you point to it? Can you highlight it in yellow so I can see it? Can you tattoo it on my arm?

I would if I could. But sadly, pace is invisible. In fact, write it out in so many words: I just knew that if I didn’t get that promotion, I’d feel like a failure forever—and you’ve killed it. It’s an airy sprite, damnit, totally un-pin-downable.

Pace is the wind at your back as a reader. It’s the ghostly tug forward. It’s the thing that makes you turn the page. And it exists in the most unlikely places, especially when it comes to non-fiction. This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch truly is, if you’re the right reader, a page-turner—because at every stopping point, it essentially says to you, ah, now you think you understand me. And therefore you think you understand yourself. But wait there’s more.

It’s the ginzu knife commercial of non-fiction, in a good way. Structurally, it unpacks the problem facing the writer on a deeper level in every chapter, and suddenly there you are with a book you can’t put down.

My latest fiction can’t-stop-won’t-stop was Carrie Soto Is Back, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s latest. That book had a wildly intense narrative thrust that was so brilliant (I actually forgot to talk about this in the recording)—the whole question, the whole time, is always will she win this match/this tournament/this Slam—and as a reader you care about that—but ONLY because you care about where she is emotionally. It’s a tour de force, TJR at her peak, a masterpiece of intertwining plot action with emotion.

Yeah, I can’t do that yet, and maybe neither can you. But we can look for it, and try to figure out what makes it work and learn from it. So that’s your bonus assignment this week, as I say in the audio: look at the books on your bed table that are just kind of lingering there, versus the ones you finished days (or hours) after you started them and ask yourself—why? What make this work for me, and what’s there that I can use in my own work?

PS: If you’ve done all the exercises up to now, NICE JOB getting this far, kids. I can’t tell you how much this is really going to help as you write or revise. Color me envious, because it’s always hard for me to do this work. But I, too, am learning!

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Structure, people. It’s everything. Or it’s a very simple thing. Like I said in the shownotes, for fiction, chronological 3rd or 1st person, present or past tense, following the protagonist through the story is the white-button-down and jeans of structure. Always appropriate, almost invisible.

For non-fiction, it’s harder—there is no fall-back basic, but a good trick is to pretend your book is either a chronological story or a how-to and start from there, then see what feels right and what feels wrong about it. Overlaying a very practical structure on a philosophical topic can make it more accessible to the reader—and easier to write.

I threw in a bunch of book references to this one. Our stand-by, The Art of the Book Proposal from Eric Maisel. The Christie Affair, The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls, Adult Assembly Required, The Arc, The Mutual Friend.

Hope the blueprint is going well for you!

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.

Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too.

I touched on this in the bonus for Blueprint episode 1—but now I get to really dig in. The change is the theme, y’all. If your readers are going to learn how to be happier parents—the theme is around happiness and why it matters (and why we resist it, in the case of my own non-fiction). If your protagonist is going to learn to value what’s important to her over what she’s been told she should value, that’s your theme (oh, and also why it matters and why it’s so hard to trust ourselves to figure out what makes us happy). Or if she’s going to learn that you cannot be happy while you’re hiding yourself from the people she loves… why, your theme might just be around being true to yourself and understanding what will make you happy! (Hello, yes, I have a single theme that I return to again and again, as do many of us.)

But you may not be able to spot that theme from the beginning. So trust me—to find your theme, keep coming back to that change, in yourself, the protagonist(s) or the reader until you can put that baby on a bumper sticker. That’s when you know you’ve got it.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.

Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too.

This is a longish episode in the hopes of offering you some shortcuts to writing a short thing—that often feels super-hard.

Here’s my shortcut to a starter sentence for your logline for fiction/biography or narrative nonfiction (read on for memoir and prescriptive non-fic):

On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before CURRENT LIFE, a NOUN who HAS A PROBLEM discovers/is drawn into/some other action THE INCITING INCIDENT/PLOT PROBLEM and STAKES, but when TWIST, s/h/the/y must SOLVE INTERNAL PROBLEM to SOLVE PLOT PROBLEM.

Here’s my current one. I can transform this into jacket copy by adding some proper names and sparking it up—but starting with a terrible run-on sentence like this can be really helpful.

On the verge of losing a chance to start over in the small town she loves, a woman who believes her flaky mother destroyed her life by depending on fortune-telling and magic discovers that cookies with the images of the family heirloom Tarot cards she stole long ago have the ability to change her life and the lives of others, but when her attempts to control the cards play right into the hand of a witch more powerful than she’d ever imagined, she must recognize that true power lies in letting those you love make their own choices in order to save her daughter from sacrificing herself to a destiny that might not be her own.

For memoir, it’s similar but a little different.

On the verge of/About to/Just after/Just before/description of where author started, AUTHOR AND WHY WE CARE ABOUT/RELATE TO THEM (usually includes dramatic core narrative or how core narrative is universal) does/endures/experiences THE PLOT and learns THE CHANGE in order to survive/grow up/find something/achieve something.

Finally, for instructive/prescriptive nonfic:

AUTHOR/EXPERTISE offers a guide to/provides lessons in/ demonstrates/shares THE OSTENSIBLE THING BEING TAUGHT and gives readers/shows THE REAL TAKEAWAY FOR LIFE.

These are really logline cheats (and the Publisher’s Marketplace stuff I promised is WAY below)—but you can do the same thing by grabbing your comp books, looking at the jacket copy and then taking out all the specifics and replacing them with generalities, then use the various transitional words—on the verge of, but when, forced to, faced with or studied, learned, translated, to help readers, readers will learn—to make your own awful Frankenstein monster version.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

What follows (and will be too long for the show notes, you’re going to have to click through to the website to see it) is the Publishers’ Marketplace from 7/20/22. DO NOT LET IT WORRY YOU. Sure there are lots of CEOS and second-time authors here (and a neurosurgeon, jeez) but there are also debut authors and plenty of people you’ve never heard of. I love these, they’re very informative about what the INDUSTRY is looking for. It’s all there, fiction to memoir to non-fic to children’s and YA down at the bottom. Heck—bonus in the form of some agents and editors you might be interested in. The links probably won’t work, though, as I think they require a PM subscription.

Fiction

Debut

Emily Jane's ON EARTH AS IT IS ON TELEVISION, in which the world is rocked by the arrival of alien spacecrafts that appear over major cities only to disappear as suddenly as they arrived, leaving humanity to wonder why they came and what happens next, to Adam Wilson at Hyperion Avenue, for publication in summer 2023, by Holly Root at Root Literary (world). Rights:linda@defliterary.com

General/Other

Author of THE WIFE UPSTAIRS Rachel Hawkins's THE VILLA, a dual timeline Gothic suspense following two women on a trip to Italy, where they uncover the deadly legacy of their rental villa, tracing back to one unforgettable summer in the 1970s whose events reverberate into the present day, to Sarah Cantin at St. Martin's, for publication in January 2023, by Holly Root at Root Literary (world English). Foreign: Heather Baror at Baror International Film: Jon Cassir and Berni Barta at CAA

Noa Yedlin's STOCKHOLM, the basis for a Israeli television series optioned by Amazon Studios, a dark comedy in which four lifelong friends in their 70s conspire to hide the corpse of their friend, a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in economics who has been found dead just one week before the prize's announcement, a plot that begins as a tribute to the legacy of their late friend but becomes a revealing journey that will test their bonds, their sanity, and the lengths they will go for redemption, to Daniella Wexler at Harper Via, by Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein at McIntosh & Otis, on behalf of Steph Thwaites at Curtis Brown (world English).

Women's/Romance

Michele Dunaway's WHAT HAPPENS IN THE AIR, in which a photojournalist returns home only to find her father involved in a feud that could endanger the town's hot air balloon festival, and she and her widowed high school sweetheart are the only ones who can fix it, to Megan Broderick at Harlequin Special Edition, in a nice deal, in a three-book deal, for publication in January 2023, by Jennifer Herrington at Harvey Klinger (world).

Sidney Halston's VALENTINE'S HATE, an enemies-to-lovers holiday romance, featuring an anti-Valentine's Day heroine who, while preparing for her best friend's Valentine's Day wedding, runs into the man who ruined her love for the holiday many years ago, through a series of unfortunate events they end up sharing a hotel suite, to Tessa Woodward at Avon, for publication in winter 2023, by Sarah Younger at Nancy Yost Literary Agency (world).

Willow Quinn's THE RIDE, a debut rom-com pitched as FORCES OF NATURE meets ALONG CAME POLLY, where a straight-laced architect who analyzes and calculates his every decision has no choice but to journey down the path less traveled, in more ways than one, when he hitches a ride with an eccentric free spirit, to Gilded Press, in a nice deal, for publication in the summer of 2023 (world).publisher@gildedpressbooks.com Rights contact(s):rights@gildedpressbooks.com

Digital

Fiction: Mystery/Crime

Author of IMAGINING ELSEWHERE Sara Hosey's SUMMER PEOPLE, in which a neurodiverse seventeen-year-old girl hoping to enjoy her last summer before college in her small, sleepy town instead discovers the body of a friend in the polluted town lake, forcing her to investigate and find justice for his death, even if it means implicating her own family and community, to Sue Arroyo at CamCat Books, with Helga Schier editing, in a nice deal, for publication in summer 2023 (world).

Non-fiction

Business/Investing/Finance

Former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and Harvard economics professor Jason Furman's INFLATION, about how to understand inflation and think about it, how worried we should be, and when it's likely to abate, to Joe Jackson at Princeton University Press, by Rafe Sagalyn at ICM (world English).

General/Other

National Magazine Award-winning writer Richard Conniff's ENDING EPIDEMICS: A HISTORY OF ESCAPE FROM CONTAGION, the story of how we came to understand the infectious diseases that once killed us and how we might escape such diseases in the future, to Robert Prior at MIT Press, for publication in spring 2023, by John Thornton at The Spieler Agency (world). Rights:mitpbooks-rights@mit.edu

Associate professor of surgery and a practicing transplantation surgeon at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Joshua Mezrich's XENO, a transplant surgeon's view of the history and future of xenotransplantation, to Robert Prior at MIT Press, for publication in fall 2024, by Eric Lupfer at Fletcher & Company (world English). Rights:mitpbooks-rights@mit.edu

Stu Horvath's MONSTERS, ALIENS, AND HOLES IN THE GROUND: A GUIDE TO TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAMES FROM D&D TO MOTHERSHIP, a decade-by-decade examination of the evolution of tabletop roleplaying games, to Noah Springer at MIT Press, for publication in fall 2023 (world). Rights:mitpbooks-rights@mit.edu

NYT contributor and cultural critic Lindsay Zoladz's FEAR OF A FEMALE GENIUS, a feminist history of the idea of artistic genius and a critical journey through the lives and work of many female artists, writers, and musicians who transformed male-dominated fields, including Joni Mitchell, Yoko Ono, Elaine May, Hilma af Klint, and Mary Shelley, as well as several previously unsung female artists, all of whom inspire and argument for a new and more expansive understanding of genius itself, to Jackson Howard at MCD/FSG, in a pre-empt, by Ethan Bassoff at Ross Yoon Agency (world). Rights:devon.mazzone@fsgbooks.com

History/Politics/Current Affairs

Vice provost at the University of Montana and author of PASSIONATE UPRISINGS and HYPHEN Dr. Pardis Mahdavi PhD's BOOK OF QUEENS: THE TRUE STORY OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN HORSEWOMEN WHO FOUGHT THE WAR ON TERROR, the story of Middle Eastern freedom fighters—horsewomen who safeguarded an ancient breed of Caspian horse—and their efforts to help themselves and defend their homelands from the Taliban through combat, ally training, and counterintelligence, to Mollie Weisenfeld at Hachette Books, by Jessica Regel at Helm Literary (NA).

Illustrated/Art

The late Joseph Mitchell's THE BOTTOM OF THE HARBOR, illustrated by Joana Avillez, to Modern Library, with Kaeli Subberwal editing, by David Kuhn and Kate Mack at Aevitas Creative Management for the illustrator.

Memoir

Author of DEMON CAMP and a NYT Magazine and Harper's contributor, as well as a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing Jen Percy's GIRLS PLAY DEAD, blending personal narrative and cultural reportage to examine coming-of-age, trauma, and the ways women survive and heal from violence, told through the unforgiving wildness of the writer's upbringing in rural Oregon and the prismatic stories of battered women, cultists, psychic disconnection, and utopian visions, to Thomas Gebremedhin at Doubleday, in a six-figure deal, in a pre-empt, by Jin Auh at The Wylie Agency (NA).

Clark Fredericks's untitled memoir, about how the abuse the author suffered as a young boy fundamentally altered his life: from his inability to maintain relationships to bouts with addiction and gambling, his closely held secret culminated in slitting his abuser's throat with his childhood hunting knife some three decades later; covering his subsequent incarceration and rehabilitation, and his current work fighting for meaningful legislative reform, while offering hope and strength to those suffering in silence, to Amar Deol at Atria, by David Halpern at The Robbins Office (world English).

Narrative

Columnist for the Nation Magazine and the author of A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES Dave Zirin's THE PEOPLE'S HISTORIAN, a biography of Howard Zinn that examines his life and work as a progressive icon and thought leader through the story of the times that shaped him -- and America, based on access to Zinn's papers and the full cooperation of his family, to Brent Howard at Dutton, in an exclusive submission, by Susan Canavan at Waxman Literary Agency (NA).

Pop Culture

Frankie Cosmos drummer and journalist Luke Pyenson and Real Estate multi-instrumentalist Alex Bleeker, eds.'s THEY'RE FEEDING YOU TONIGHT: ON TOUR AND AROUND THE TABLE WITH INDIE MUSICIANS, an anthology of essays, photos, and ephemera that lets readers pull up a chair to the table with a diverse lineup of inspiring indie musicians around the world, sharing meals and travel experiences, peeking intimately behind the curtain at the commonly misunderstood way of life on tour, including original, unpublished contributions from over 25 indie favorites including Fleet Foxes, Pavement, Animal Collective, Weyes Blood, and many more, to Olivia Roberts at Chronicle, at auction, by Soumeya Bendimerad Roberts at HG Literary (NA).

Religion/Spirituality

Bloggers, lifestyle influencers, and cohosts of The Good Life podcast Stevie Hendrix and Sazan Hendrix's THE GOOD LIFE, a guide for making each part of each day an installment and investment in a beautiful life; showing readers that the acceptance and belonging they desperately want is something that happens in the heart—one good day at a time, to Brigitta Nortker at Nelson Books, for publication in October 2023, by Bryan Norman at Alive Literary Agency.

Podcaster and television personality Jinger Vuolo's BECOMING FREE INDEED, sharing how the author began to question the harmful teachings of her childhood to find and experience true freedom in Christ, to Stephanie Newton at W Publishing, for publication in February 2023, by Bryan Norman at Alive Literary Agency.

Bloggers, podcasters, cofounders of Marriage After God, and the parents of five children Aaron Smith and Jennifer Smith's 365 PRAYERS FOR MY MARRIAGE, guiding couples in praying for their marriage to reflect Christ into a hurting world, to Carolyn McCready at Zondervan, with Carly Kellerman editing, for publication in October 2023, by Bryan Norman at Alive Literary Agency.

Children's

Middle Grade Fiction

Author of the Kiki Kallira duology and the forthcoming THE VERY SECRET SOCIETY OF IRREGULAR WITCHES Sangu Mandanna's VANYA AND THE WILD HUNT and VANYA AND THE SHIFTING SPIRE, pitched as AMARI AND THE NIGHT BROTHERS meets Nevermoor with a touch of How to Train Your Dragon, following a neurodivergent British Indian girl who is swept away to a magical school where she trains to become a monster hunter and learns to fully embrace her different and wonderful brain, to Jennifer Besser at Roaring Brook Press, with Luisa Beguiristain editing, a joint acquisition with Sam Smith at Macmillan UK Children's, in a significant deal, at auction, in a two-book deal, for publication in spring 2024, by Penny Moore at Aevitas Creative Management (world). Film:awarren@aevitascreative.com

Caldecott Award-winning WE ARE WATER PROTECTORS author Carole Lindstrom's two untitled books, to Mary Kate Castellani at Bloomsbury Children's, in a two-book deal, for publication in 2024 and 2025, by Natascha Morris and Sarah Fisk at The Tobias Literary Agency (world).

Picture Book Fiction

Carrie Kruck's IGGY WHO BREATHED FIRE, about an ordinary girl with a quite extraordinary condition, in a magical twist on girl power and a reminder to us all to treasure the fire within, illustrated by Erika Meza, to Sylvie Frank at Disney-Hyperion, at auction, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2024, by Ammi-Joan Paquette at Erin Murphy Literary Agency for the author, and by Claire Cartey at Holroyde Cartey for the illustrator (world).

D.J. Steinberg's ST. PATRICK'S DAY, HERE I COME and YOGA, HERE I COME, in the Here I Come series, illustrated by Emanuel Wiemans, to Penguin Workshop, in a two-book deal, for publication in February 2023 and November 2023, by Kelly Sonnack at Andrea Brown Literary Agency for the illustrator.

Picture Book Non-fiction

Author and illustrator of NEITHER Airlie Anderson's ONLY, a story that explores the spectrum between introversion and extroversion, about a bird that doesn't like the same loud and boisterous activities as its friends, preferring alone time in its quiet nest, but also doesn't want to feel lonely, to Deirdre Jones at Little, Brown Children's, for publication in winter 2024 (world).

Co-founder of Multicultural Children's Book Day Mia Wenjen's FOOD FOR THE FUTURE: SUSTAINABLE FARMS AROUND THE WORLD, an exploration of 12 amazing ways we can grow food while caring for our planet, illustrated by Robert Sae-Heng, to Lisa Rosinsky at Barefoot Books, for publication in spring 2023, by Lary Rosenblatt at 22MediaWorks for the author, and by Jess Lomax at Inkling Illustration Agency for the illustrator (world). Rights:helen.kissler@barefootbooks.com

Don Tate's A POEM FOR DUDLEY RANDALL, a biography-in-verse about Dudley Randall, a poet, poetry publisher, and leader in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, illustrated by Laura Freeman, to Howard Reeves at Abrams Children's, for publication in spring 2025, by Caryn Wiseman at Andrea Brown Literary Agency for the author, and by Janet DeCarlo at Storybook Arts for the illustrator (world).

Young Adult Fiction

Joelle Wellington's THEIR VICIOUS GAMES, pitched as Ready or Not meets The Bachelor, following an 18-year-old Black girl offered entrance to the 1%'s twisted games after her acceptance to her top choice college is rescinded, but once she accepts the challenge, she finds that she has two choices—win the game or die, to Alexa Pastor at Simon & Schuster Children's, in a major deal, at auction, in a two-book deal, for publication in summer 2023, by Quressa Robinson at Folio Jr. (NA). Rights also to Penguin Random House UK. Rights:jenny@meyerlit.com

NYT bestselling author Morgan Matson's PROMCHANTED, a rom-com about two teens who, en route to the prom, find themselves in the Disney film SLEEPING BEAUTY and must team up to keep the film's events on track, to Brittany Rubiano at Disney-Hyperion, in a two-book deal, for publication in spring 2024, by Emily van Beek at Folio Literary Management (world).

Author of SETON GIRLS Charlene Thomas's PEEKABOO, in which a tiny town is firmly divided—with Have-Lots and Have-Nots—and a girl knows all too well which side is hers; but when she meets a stranger at the annual Halloween carnival, she gains the power to get everything she wants—until her addiction to perfection uncovers the town's biggest secret of all, to Andrew Karre at Dutton Children's, for publication in fall 2024, by Ann Rose at Prospect Agency.

Graphic Novel

Lambda Award-winning author of SKYE FALLING Mia McKenzie's DORIS STEELE, a comic novel about a pious, small-town teenager who travels to Atlanta in 1960 to get an abortion and finds herself smack in the middle of the civil rights movement and the secret lives of queer Black people, ultimately discovering the transformative power of leaving your bubble, even for just one chaotic weekend, to Caitlin McKenna at Random House, by Alexa Stark at Writers House (world). Rights:decronin@prh.com

THE MARKET.

First of all, I am having the best day here. I’m through 9 of 10 phone call/Zoom interviews about In Her Boots, and 8 of those interviewers appeared to have read it or at least in one case started it (a record) and a bunch of them seemed to have genuinely LOVED it and I’m delighted. Why tell you this here? In part because something readers have come back to several times is a piece of the book that I changed, at my editor’s suggestion—because she thought readers would want something different from what my original draft gave them.

In other words, the market. I made the change and I’m so glad I did, not just because readers like it, but also because it was true to the story I wanted to tell to the people I wanted to read it. And that’s what thinking about reaching your market can be. It’s not “selling out” or “writing to market”. It’s—how can I tell my story or share my thoughts or message in a way that reaches the people I want to reach?

I love this assignment. I hope you do too.

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.

Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too. If this one inspires you to join the challenge, it’s not too late to sign up. Start with Step 1, do the work (we’ll give you an assignment every week), and in 10 weeks, you’ll have a solid foundation for a first draft or revision of your project that will help you push through to “the end”. For the details on the challenge, and to sign up for weekly encouragement, bonuses and the chance to win a blueprint critique, head to authoraccelerator.com/amwritingblueprintchallenge before July 15, 2022. 

This bonus episode is all about… the book’s why. What’s your protagonist or your reader working toward? What do you want that character (fiction or non-fiction) to know at the end of this that they don’t know at the beginning, and what is the reader thinking hard about too? This is the heart of your book, and every book, whether it’s The Chicken Sisters or How to Be a Happier Parent, needs a heart. Once you find it, a whole lot of other things drop into place. Sadly, however, this may be the single hardest one-sentence-to-go-on-a-post-it-note you ever write. But fear not! It’s ok to keep groping toward this for as long as it takes.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Kids, this is a Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge Bonus Episode. I’ll be dropping these weekly throughout the Summer 2022 Challenge. Some of you are already signed up and challenging away, turning in weekly assignments and pushing yourself to get this done.

Some of you are #AmWriting supporters who’ve put your $$$ where your <3 is (that’s an old school pre-emoji keyboard heart, in case you’re wondering). We appreciate you—and so you’re getting these bonus episodes too. If this one inspires you to join the challenge, it’s not too late to sign up. Start with Step 1, do the work (we’ll give you an assignment every week), and in 10 weeks, you’ll have a solid foundation for a first draft or revision of your project that will help you push through to “the end”. For the details on the challenge, and to sign up for weekly encouragement, bonuses and the chance to win a blueprint critique, head to authoraccelerator.com/amwritingblueprintchallenge before July 15, 2022. 

This bonus episode is all about YOUR why. Next week, we’ll talk about what I think of as the book’s why—but for this week, it’s all about you. Knowing why you want to do this hard thing will help you keep your butt in the chair and head in the game when you’d rather do something else—because you’ll know better what you’re working for and why. And it will also help you make some decisions down the road about exactly what this thing is that you’re working to hard to produce and where you want it to go in the end.

How to listen: if you’ve listened to any previous Bonus episodes or Minisodes, this one should already BE in your podcast feed. If not, click on the link to listen and you’ll find yourself at amwriting.substack.com. You COULD listen there, but we’re guessing you’d rather get all subscriber episodes, from now on, in your usual podcast-listening app. It’s easy, and you only have to do it once to get every #Minisode from now on right where you want it.

So click “listen in podcast app.” You’ll get an email with a link in it. Click the link—ON YOUR PHONE—and you will get a menu of the most popular podcast apps. Chose yours and click, and you’ll have a new “private” podcast feed for supporters only.

If your favorite listening app isn’t included, fear not. There’s an RSS link in the email. Your podcast app has a way to add that—it’s probably a “+” sign somewhere on your main page. Add the link once, and any time we do a #SupporterMini, you’ll get it without having to do a thing. (Trust us, it’s easy. This is WHY we chose Substack.)

Hello #AmWriters! Jess here at the beginning of a very busy fall speaking season, coming to you from the northwest corner of Indiana. I’ve talked to you before about the nuts and bolts of my speaking work, but I thought it would be fun to bring you along with me and talk about the things I pack, plan for, and think about when I’m on the road.

If I missed anything you want to learn about, head on over to the #AmWriting Facebook group and hit me up with questions!

What’s in my speaking bag:

What I found when I visited the Lafayette Barnes and Noble in search of Sarina Bowen’s books (look for the yellow pages!):

Then I went over to the thriller department and found:

And when I looked for KJ I found:

And finally, I check for my books so I can sign them, photograph the books and let readers on social media know there are signed copies at the bookstore! I was not originally face out but once I signed, the bookseller re-arranged so I could be. Loved her for that.

Are you a “sticker”?

Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).

We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).

Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)

I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.

Subscribe

To join the Blueprint for a Book Summer Sprint, you must be a paid subscriber. Then, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple! Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:

* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.

Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).

It’s the things-that-aren’t in the episode edition of your weekly #AmWriting email! First off, about 60 seconds in, I mention (this is KJ, it’s nearly always KJ) a podcast I like. But then I flake off to look up the name… and forget to ever mention it again.

It’s the Crappy Friends Podcast with Kristan Higgins and Joss Dey. And it’s FICTION GOLD. Every week, a couple of people write in with stories of awful friends and angsty dilemmas and towns that are too-small-for-the-both-of-us and there is a novel in every question and a whole lot of shadenfreudy entertainment in the answers provided by best friends Kristan and Joss. It’s a fun, I’m just here for the hang situation.

Want more? Sarina just texted me that she forgot to tell y’all her BIGGEST achievement so far this year: she writes first thing. I’m going to take credit for this one. I’m a big fan of eat-the-frog first (I exercise first thing, then write, for the same reasons) although I can’t remember what I said that finally got her to actually do it, but she just gave herself a big, justified pat-on-the-back for this one. “I have felt as though I had lots of free time this month because I didn’t spend half the day in avoidance.” That’s a gift you can give yourself too!

Overall note from the episode? There are lots of reasons to check in on your goals. To cheer. To re-assess and decide—do I even want this? If I do, what do I need to go to get there? To wonder—really? Why? Maybe I don’t need to organize that drawer. Maybe I need to throw its contents away.

To remind ourselves of what we’ve done, and what we still hope to do.

It’s all even more meaningful that we all figured out the universal truth that landed in March 2020: we don’t even really control the goals we think we can control. But if life gives us a chance to make a choice to do a thing… better grab it!

So… how go your goals so far this year? In honor of this episode, we’ve started our first thread discussion. If you’re on our email list, you’ll get an invite shortly after the episode airs. Otherwise, head to amwritingpodcast.com and look for the thread to tell us—is 2022 half-over, or half-to-go? What will you do with the rest of your year, and what have you done so far?

Links from the Pod

Gen the bookworm on Instagram

#AmReading

Sarina: The Mutual Friend by Carter Bays—Sarina shouts out the omniscient narrator, and KJ notes the head-hopping omniscience in The Arc.

Jess: Mr. Nobody, Catherine Steadman

KJ: The Murder of Mr. Wickham, Claudia Gray

BETTER SIGN UP SOON!! It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE. And quickly. Sign-ups end July 8.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

We made something amazing. It’s called the Blueprint for a Book Summer Challenge, and it’s coming your way starting July 1, 2022 in the form of 10 episodes that could guide you through the steps for a creating a blueprint for the book you’ll write this fall—or for revising the one that’s just not quite coming together.

The episodes will all drop into your pod-player just as they always do—and they’re great listens whether you’re ready to work through the Blueprint or just starting to think about what your book might look like when you are. But if you’re thinking about going ALL-IN, you’ll want to SIGN UP HERE for all the pokes and prods you’ll need to really get this done, and to be entered to win a free critique from Jennie or KJ of the Blueprint you write.

Come on, play with us. Come September, you’ll be glad you did.

PS: Already ready? No need for a Blueprint because you’ve already built the house? Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

This episode is for you if: you’re starting, re-starting or sparking a freelance career with a focus on something you’re passionate about OR you’ve ever thought the heck with this, I’m striking out on my own.

Sometimes the best way to find a publication that reaches the readers you want is to start one. That might mean starting a Substack or a podcast—hello out there, Burnt Toast, one of the best examples I can think of of doing exactly that.* Or it might mean doing something both a little bigger and a little more old school.

When Valerie Kathawala decided to write about her passion, wine, she had to start from scratch—as in, she took a job at a local wine store. She stocked shelves, studied labels and wrote the in-house wine magazine, which led to bylines at other small publications and built up from there. For her it was wine, but I was so excited to talk about how to build up a freelance career now, as opposed to 20 years ago. (I think y’all know us well enough by now to know this is not an episode about wine.)

But Valerie wanted more. So she and a partner started TRINK, “the first and only English-language digital publication dedicated to the "German-speaking wines" of Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.”

They commission articles, pay writers and publish (digitally) in “volumes”. Are they making bank? Sadly, not yet, but they are self-supporting and growing fast. Volume 12 is coming soon. Whole story is in the podcast, and sorry-not-sorry if it inspires you to start something of your own.

#AmReading

Valerie: After Nature, W. G. Sebald

KJ: Bittersweet, Susan Cain

TrinkMag

Follow Valerie on Instagram @Valkatnyc

HEY LOOKY LOOKY: Starting July 1, it’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! I am so excited about this. 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

*Virginia Sole Smith on bodies, fatphobia and diet culture, a topic that’s very hard to cover in traditional journalism because the pubs that reach the people who are interested sell advertising to the culprits—take a look, bet you learn something.

As a bonus this week, we’re sharing “The Bulletproof Writer” from the Write Now Podcast—because this past few weeks have NOT been a perfect time for me to write, with guests and celebrations and also setbacks and discouragements. Not only is that often true, it’s pretty much always true. The challenge is to write anyway, and Sarah offers help and compassion for us as we sort out how to get our butts in the chair when everything is trying to yank it out from under us. We hope you like it!

Find more about Write Now HERE.

Or subscribe on Apple Podcasts HERE.

AND…we’ve got a challenge for you this summer! Starting July 1, we’ll be digging in for the Blueprint for a Book Challenge—10 episodes, 10 weeks, 10 guests, 10 steps to you creating a blueprint that will help you take book idea from amorphous blob to solid plan. Whether you’re at the inspiration stage, have a few chapters written or are sitting on a big chunk of draft that just isn’t coming together, this series will help you get things in shape and make taking your idea to the next stage easier.  Why am I telling you about it now? So you can sign up. Get ready. Because if you play along in real time and meet the deadlines, you could win a critique of that blueprint from me or from Jennie Nash, and if you sign up early, you get a deal on a critique from an Author Accelerator book coach at the end of the process, plus bonus episodes and write-alongs. For details and to get all signed up, go to authoraccelerator.com/amwritingblueprintchallenge.

It’s hard to start. It’s hard to finish. It’s hard to choose. Sometimes writers (especially those who have had to step back from a professional journalism job for family or other reasons) have all the ideas and in some sense, all the time to execute them, and the result isn’t wild productivity, but a frustrating spinning of wheels—because if everything is possible, how do you choose? What if you choose wrong? Everything looks like a shiny opportunity, but when you write the first few sentences, it turns out the shiny thing was just a gum wrapper.

It blows, and it can go on for a long time (and even forever)—because when you’re used to externally imposed topic and deadlines, it’s hard to shift into creating your own—and putting in the time you need to finish them and turn them into something real. KJ talks to former CBC national reporter and occasional freelancer Alison Myers about harnessing your strengths and the way you work best to get things done instead of starting and stopping a million things. Here’s what Alison said in her email:

Hello from Canada, the country that used to be known for being polite and apologetic but more recently seems to be inspiring people around the world to be horn-honking jerks. 

You have no idea how relieved I was to hear you both talk about writing for an audience on a recent show. I used to be a big deal radio reporter before I had kids so I’m used to writing and performing for the sake of other people (i.e., feedback). I always stacked it up to what must be the raging dissatisfaction of my massive ego, that evil thing I'm supposed to suppress. As cliché as this sounds, you guys made me feel like less of an a*****e for wanting people to read my words. 

I have ideas coming out the wazoo and can write well when I commit to it. My problem is it has no purpose (read: audience). I have 52 untitled documents open with half-written essays that I haven't finished because I don’t know where this is all going. They’re like a million bowls of soggy cereal waiting for someone to pour them down the train. There’s no structure, no roadmap and, most importantly, no one on the other end waiting to receive. 

Alison agreed to come on and talk through her version of Shiny Thing Syndrome (which manifests differently than the one Jennie Nash and I talk about here). There’s a LOT of useful stuff here about getting your writing habit started or restarted and how to get to where we all want to be—you know, butt in chair, head in game.

Links from the pod

Becca Syme episode, her website, Clifton Strengths

Gretchen Rubin episode

Laura Vanderkam

Jess and I on the “not today, muse” episode

Hugo Lindgrin, Be Wrong as Fast as You Can

KJ on being on time

George Saunders’ Substack

Writers and Lovers, Lily King

The Menopause Manifesto, Dr Jen Gunter (read about her take on Goop here.)

@allmyinklings on IG

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Oh yeah we’ve been there. Heck, we are there. Pigeonholed. Safe in our little bunker. Maybe just a tiny bit typecast. Jumping genres can be exciting, scary, nerve-wracking. But it can be done.

Everybody gravitates to one genre or another when we get started. Maybe nonfiction feels a little less threatening—or maybe it feels too hard and fiction is your starting place of choice. Maybe you’ve been writing rom-coms but are sure you have a thriller in you, or the other way around. Are you giving up everything you’ve learned, or everything you’ve gained if you’re published?

That would be no and maybe kinda but not necessarily in a bad way, in that order.

This week we’re tackling the question of genre-hopping, in part because Sarina’s going thriller, KJ’s tackling magical realism and Jess is drafting fiction, and in part because listener and thriller writer Aggie Thompson sent us this plaintive missive:

I am a thriller writer, published by Forge/Macmillan, and my debut -- I DON’T FORGIVE YOU -- came out summer 2021. My second book is coming out this July – ALL THE DIRTY SECRETS – and I am currently waiting to hear back from my editor regarding my proposal for my the third book. Which means I refresh my email more than a couple of times a day. And I am at my wits end as to what to do with myself.

I don’t want to work on book no. 3 in case the answer is no, or even a yes – but needs lots of work. So start something new, right? But what I am yearning to write is waaaaayy off genre. Something light and funny where no one gets killed. Maybe it’s coming out of the pandemic, or just some personal stuff I have dealt with over the past two years, but I long to write some comfort fiction.

My question – when is it “safe” to veer out of your genre? And if it is never safe, when is it wise? I’m not getting any younger! I feel like I have so many other books in me. But it took so long to get to where I am, I don’t want to blow the momentum I have started building up as a D.C.-domestic thriller writer either.

Anyway, any wisdom or insight would be greatly appreciated.

We talked why, when and how to play the genre-hopping game. We referenced our Seressia Glass episode (because it’s always ok to consider the market). And then we admitted that sometimes, it’s better to have a little piece on the side but mostly stick with your main squeeze. (This outdated reference, with its totally terrible relationship advice, brought to you by the voices in KJ’s head, who are apparently speaking from a bad noir film from the forties.)

In reading, Sarina also veered wildly off genre with Tell Me Everything (which makes total sense when you think about it).

KJ caused herself to question all her writing skills with the brilliantly interior literary page-turner Kaleidoscope.

And Jess soothed her soul with the new Christina Lauren: Something Wilder.

Sarina’s butt is way out of the chair this week as she travels with her oldest kid. KJ’s is locked in place wrestling with revision—and Jess is gardening and thinking, gardening and thinking. There are lots of ways to keep your head in the game!

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

I don’t think we’ve ever talked about middle grade on #AmWriting, which was why I was so delighted to talk to Jamie Sumner, author of Roll With It, One Kid’s Trash, Tune It Out and the forthcoming, literally any day now The Summer of June, which you should order for your kid’s beach bag right now. (And if you happen to be in Nashville, scroll down for a link to an event next week.)

Jamie and KJ talk about the mechanics of writing and pitching middle grade fiction, touch on the horrors of your first edit letter (and what you absolutely must not do when you get it) and then dive deep into what really makes this genre and its readers special—and it’s not what you think. Hard topics with hope, depth that’s distractible, and the limits of characters with temporarily limited agency who are all about finding ways to control their own destiny—but who, by the end of the book, are probably physically in much the same place as where they began. That means the endings are necessarily open-ended—which young readers apparently love.

Links from the pod

KJ’s thing in Tiffany’s blog

Jason Reynolds

The Bridge Home, Padma Venkatraman

#AmReading

Jamie: The Christie Affair, Nina De Gramont

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket

KJ: Poison for Breakfast, Lemony Snicket

jamnie-sumner.com

Twitter: jamiesumner_

IG: jamiesumner_author

If you’re listening in real time and in Nashville, join Jamie on Saturday, June 4 at Parnassus Bookstore to launch The Summer of June with readings, free plants and lots of book love. Find out more here.

Or pre-order a signed copies of The Summer of June through Parnassus Books HERE.

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Some of us, which might be all of us, have spent a decent amount of time writhing in the throes of writer envy lately. Can’t IMAGINE what we’re talking about? Never opened Facebook to see news of yet another Netflix deal, or celebrated a friend’s fantastic New York Times review while just a little bit kind of secretly asking yourself where yours was? Well, bully for you. Go listen to another podcast this week.

Meanwhile, we’re owning all the envy—and if you think being successful in any way dials that green monster button down, think again. There’s always a higher bar to reach. What does help? Age, wisdom, beauty (ok I just threw that one in) and a couple of other ideas we put out there at the end of the episode. Come hang.

Links from the pod

Colleen Hoover The Bookworm Box Sulphur Springs

Ryan Holiday Bookstore

Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus

Mary Laura Philpott Episode 312, Essays That Start Light, Then Hit Hard

Emily Henry’s Beach Read

Michael Lewis

Nora Goes Off Script, Annabel Monaghan

#AmReading

Jess: Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus

KJ: The Bohemians, Jasmin Darznik

Sarina: Part of Your World, Abby Jimenez

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Jess here. On this week’s episode, I talk with New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green about her first book, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle and her new book, The Devil’s Half-Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail.

We go into the process of writing a research-intensive historical nonfiction book, particularly when that book requires the author to investigate and implicate her own family in the darker parts of the story.

We also discuss the birth of The Devil’s Half Acre, a tale that involves a lot of challenges including parting ways with one agent and finding another.

More than anything else, we discuss the need for authors to believe in themselves and their story.

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Shownotes up front—but scroll down, there’s an announcement!

Mia P. Manansala (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the author of 2 books so far in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series: Arsenic and Adobo and Homicide and Halo-Halo.

I was excited to talk to Mia because I read my way through hundreds of cozies well into my early adulthood, and I thought I knew the genre pretty well—but in coming back to it recently, I could see that things have changed. Just like in romance, there’s far more of an effort to balance reality with the deeply unlikely yet also deeply satisfying elements of the genre that are the reasons we come: Protagonists we love, puzzles to solve and justice to serve and peace to restore—until the next book!

Links from the Pod

Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, Joanne Fluke

#AmReading

Mia: Like a Sister, Kellye Garrett

Secret Identity, Alex Segura

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

Under Lock & Skeleton Key, Gigi Pandian

Dial a for Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto

Four Aunties and a Wedding, Jesse Q. Sutanto

KJ: The Arc, Tory Henwood Hoen

Find Mia at: Facebook, Twitter, IG = @MPMtheWriter or www.miapmanansala.com

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

The title of this episode comes from a great George Michael quote that Sarina reminded us of and one that I now think about all the time: People thought I wanted to be seen as a serious musician, but I didn’t. I just wanted to people to know that I was very serious about pop music.

That’s us here. We’re very serious about fun reads—and so grateful that Emily is too. This episode was recorded as Emily was releasing Book Lovers. This year, you can read her newest, Funny Story, which was just the delightful escape Sarina and I both needed this summer. And let me remind you right here that you can—and should!—also grab Sarina’s latest, the fantastic The Five Year Lie—a very very fun read.

This was a great talk and we know you’ll love it—but for your entertainment, here’s what AI had to say about it:

The speakers discussed their experiences and insights on writing and publishing, including the importance of maintaining a consistent brand, balancing creative expression with validation, and creating authentic conflicts in fiction. They also shared their thoughts on the value of joy and love in literature, and how societal pressure to produce world-changing literature can lead to a lack of appreciation for works that prioritize happiness and joy. Additionally, they discussed their favorite thriller books and the impact they've had on them, and shared book recommendations in the romantic comedy genre. Overall, the conversation highlighted the challenges and rewards of writing and publishing, and the importance of prioritizing joy and happiness in literature.

Something like that, yeah. But with more shrieking and laughing.

This discussion was so true to our hearts (KJ writing, Sarina co-signing). It’s hard to for some of us to give ourselves permission to write fun books in a world where “things we like” and especially “things women like” are often dismissed as less worthy. After Sarina reminded us of this George Michael quote—when asked when he was going to “write serious music” his response was “You don’t understand. I’m very serious about pop music.” And KJ immediately demanded that everyone read This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch which is, instead, a book about exactly what we just said. That you should read. Immediately. We’ll wait.

So how do your get very serious about writing fun reads? Emily’s insight on how to turn the seemingly small internal battles that our kind of fiction often hinges on is perfection: “you have to make things realer than real life”. For more, hit play.

Links in the Pod

#AmWriting Episode 302 with Katherine Center

#AmReading

Emily: Miss Aldridge Regrets, Louise Hare

The Bodyguard, Katherine Center

The Change, Kirsten Miller

Sarina: The Bodyguard, Katherine Center

Upgrade, Blake Couch (Emily then shouted out Dark Matter and The Letty Dobesh Chronicles with its Good Behavior TV adaptation)

KJ: This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, Tabitha Carvan

Thank You for Listening, Julia Whelan

Emily Henry on Insta: @emilyhenrywrites

Join Emily’s newsletter: Get My Grocery List

Are you a “sticker”?

Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).

We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).

Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)

I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.

Subscribe

To join the Blueprint for a Book Summer Sprint, you must be a paid subscriber. Then, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple! Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:

* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.

Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).

Jess here. A.J. Jacobs has long been my inspiration for both writing and writerly mentorship, so I was thrilled when his forthcoming book, The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life landed on my doorstep. I adore A.J.’s work and this book might be a new favorite. We talk about the book, yes, but we also discuss where the ideas come from, how to stay curious and the effect that curiosity has on the writing, and the work of crafting proposals that resemble the final book.

Links:

A.J. Jacobs: https://ajjacobs.com

Kevin Roose: https://www.kevinroose.com

The Unlikely Disciple

World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship

Great Vermont Corn Maze

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Fave return guest alert! We talked to Mary Laura Philpott in episode 71–#YouandYourBookstore, back when she was a Parnassus Books guru. And then in Episode 150: #NeverReady, when MLP (as we like to call her) launched her first book of essays, I Miss You When I Blink, into the world—and then again, for episode 163 #BookTourReality.

And now she’s back with a new book of essays: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time and other Explosives. (Read an excerpt here. And here. And then go order the book here.) The difference? Blink was, as MLP says, a book of essays that, together, became a memoir. Bomb Shelter is a memoir that took on the form of a book of essays—essays that went deeper than those shared in Bomb Shelter, that cut so much closer to the heart and were so much harder to write, and to share.

Links from the Pod:

marylauraphilpott.com

Mary Laura’s newsletter

Bomb Shelter

#AmReading

MLP: The Arc, Tory Henwood Hoen

The Mutual Friend, Carter Bays

Iona Iverson's Rules for Commuting, Clare Pooley

KJ: Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus

Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez

Jess: Girl in Ice, Erica Ferencik

Also mentioned: The Sober Diaries, Clare Pooley

Mitchell’s Book Corner

Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Where should your energy go? KJ here, and in this episode Jess and I catch up on what’s worth it and what isn’t when it comes to travel, the importance of getting over any (non-pandemic-related) hesitation around taking the time for conferences and work events and also, in our usual digressive fashion, covers, paperback launches and boots.

Links from the Pod

Sana, a rehab in Stowe Vermont

For info on the Sana Scholarship Fund

Oliver Burkeman 4 Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus

The Harvey Foundation

KJ’s boots on Instagram

#AmReading

KJ: How to Stop Time, Matt Haig

Jess:

Explorer Booksellers, Aspen Colorado

The Bookworm, Edwards Colorado

Boulder Bookstore, Boulder Colorado

Trailblazer, Dorothy Butler Gilliam

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

New York Times investigative journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults in 2017 and harassment and won a Pulitzer Prize for their efforts. Their book about the Weinstein investigation, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, came out in 2019 and the film version will be out this November.

Now, Jodi and Megan offer the lessons of their investigation - the process involved and the rules that governed its publication - to student journalists so they may be inspired and informed. I (Jess) got to talk to Jodi Kantor about the book they created for those young journalists, Chasing the Truth: A Young Journalist’s Guide to Investigative Reporting.

Links from the Pod:

#AmWriting Facebook group

COMING JULY 1: It’s the #AmWriting Blueprint for a Book Challenge! 10 episodes, 10 guests, 10 weeks to you being ready to write your best novel, memoir or non-fiction book this fall. There will be homework. There will be deadlines. Complete all 10 weeks, and you could win a critique of that Blueprint from KJ or Jennie Nash—but you’ll already be a winner, because you’ll have a plan that will put you way ahead of the game. Play for free—or reserve an Author Accelerator critique for your finished product to hold your feet to the fire and make sure you do the work and get bonus episodes and write-alongs. Want details? Ready to sign up? CLICK HERE.

PS: Along those lines, Author Accelerator has opened registration for the 2022 Manuscript Incubator, an intensive, 7 month coaching opportunity that offers one-one-one support and guidance for novelists and memoirists planning to have a submission-ready project by early 2023—and includes the opportunity to have that project reviewed by a group of agents and editors when it’s ready. For more information, head to authoraccelerator.com/manuscript-incubator.

Like all great stories, The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation was born out of writerly curiosity and a deceptively simple question: Why would India build a wall around Bangladesh?

I (Jess) spoke with co-authors Scott Carney and Jason Miklian about their collaboration and the work involved in answering this question.

I’ve known Scott for a while, as I became a fan of his work about a decade ago when I read The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers and later became one of those crazy cold plunge people after reading his books, What Doesn’t Kill Us and The Wedge. I’m new to Jason Miklian, though, and thoroughly enjoyed getting to know this venerable academic, writer, photographer, researcher, breakbeat DJ, and world record holder (for the fastest drive across North America).

In this episode, we talk about choosing narrative structure, finding your subjects, discovering the most relevant stories, and creating a comprehensible, cinematic story out of an incredibly complex topic.

The highlight of this podcast for me? Being reminded, “I don’t need to be the world expert on everything, I just need to be the world expert on the people whose stories I’m telling.”

Ka-boom. Blammo.

I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.

Hey—have you been spending small amounts on short term classes, watching videos and using up every possible opportunity for free feedback? Reworking the same pages over and over in your writing group? Are you starting to feel like you’re stuck in one stage of the process? Maybe it’s time to consider making a bigger investment in your career and working with an Author Accelerator Book Coach. No one can guarantee that you’ll write a book that will snag an agent or a excite an editor. But a coach can help you move forward, finish a book or proposal you’re proud of and approach the next stage of the process like a pro. I kmow it helped me! If that sounds like something you need, visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com to get matched with a coach who can help you.

Urban fantasy. Paranormal romance. Historicals. Plus the occasional billionaire, and now a rom-com, complete with a cute graphic cover that tells you exactly who you’ll be rooting for and what to expect. What do all of these things have in common, besides being written by todays’ guest, Seressia Glass?

Two things. First, they’re all—as she says on her website— tales of overcoming the odds to achieve love and acceptance–universal desires for everyone no matter who or what they are.

Second? They’re all books readers want. Books, in other words, that will sell.

I heard Seressia say briefly on another podcast that she and her agent had strategized about exactly that. On the pod, we dive more deeply into the balance between writing what you love, and writing what people will read. We also talk about super-agent Jenny Bent (travel back in time to listen to her on Episode 24 of the pod), Marlon James, the brilliance of Seressia’s pinned tweet and more.

Links from the Pod:

7 Figure Fiction

The “butter” episode with Theodora Taylor

#AmReading

Seressia: Island Queen, Vanessa Riley

The Dating Playbook, Farrah Rochon

KJ: The Sweetest Remedy, Jane Igharo (also mentioned Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo)

Jess: The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters, Julie Klam

(also mentioned The Stars in Her Eyes)

IG: @seressiaglass

https://seressiaglass.com

I just finished Author Accelerator’s book coaching course and submitted my materials—and let me tell you, I learned a ton. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know I spent five years as an editor with The New York Times—but I still had a lot to learn about helping writers through the process of taking a book from idea to manuscript, and I loved learning it with the Author Accelerator team. What they taught me has changed my approach to editing completely. I didn’t just learn how to help a writer move from one stage of the process to the next—I learned how to help them appreciate how far they’ve come and feel excited about what’s coming next, see their strengths and how they can build on them and trust me to guide them into the hard work that lies ahead. If you’d like to learn more about coaching fiction or non-fiction, you need to visit bookcoaches.com to learn more.

Abby Kincer is a reader and a bookstagrammer, a fun person, an enthusiastic consumer of bookish socks and t-shirts, a user of filters, a wearer of glasses, a possessor of many tote bags and—that’s what I know about her! Because her Instagram is bookstagram through and through, and that’s why she’s here. We asked Abby everything we ever wanted to know about bookstagramming, from how she got started to how she chooses books to how she prefers to interact with authors (kinda not much!).

Abby on:

Instagram: @bookmarkedbya

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/90454496-abby-kincer

#AmReading: (none for KJ)

Abby: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan “I loved it and I wanted to throw it out the window.”

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

The People We Keep by Allison Larkin

Sarina:

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The Other Woman by Sandie Jones

I just finished Author Accelerator’s book coaching course and submitted my materials—and let me tell you, I learned a ton. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know I spent five years as an editor with The New York Times—but I still had a lot to learn about helping writers through the process of taking a book from idea to manuscript, and I loved learning it with the Author Accelerator team. What they taught me has changed my approach to editing completely. I didn’t just learn how to help a writer move from one stage of the process to the next—I learned how to help them appreciate how far they’ve come and feel excited about what’s coming next, see their strengths and how they can build on them and trust me to guide them into the hard work that lies ahead. If you’d like to learn more about coaching fiction or non-fiction, you need to visit https://www.bookcoaches.com to learn more.

Crew, Anne Le Tissier is a listener with a question: What should I have on my website—and how can I get there without breaking the bank? She’s also the author of six traditionally published inspirational titles, some out of print, a speaker and the creator of a rather genius non-blog blog idea that I may just have to steal for myself. We critique her website and offer ideas for making it more professional without learning to code or spending big bucks—because there are some absolute must-haves, more than a few must-nots, and one important question to answer. Listen—and then go poke around on your own site!

Links from the Pod

AnneLeTissier.com

Authors Guild

Squarespace

Blogspot

Mailchimp

Mailerlite

Flodesk

Newsletter Ninja

#AmReading

Anne: Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice by Marilyn McEntyre

KJ: The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

Sarina: Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica

Twitter: @AnneLeTiss

IG @AnneLeTissier

I just finished Author Accelerator’s book coaching course and submitted my materials—and let me tell you, I learned a ton. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know I spent five years as an editor with The New York Times—but I still had a lot to learn about helping writers through the process of taking a book from idea to manuscript, and I loved learning it with the Author Accelerator team. What they taught me has changed my approach to editing completely. I didn’t just learn how to help a writer move from one stage of the process to the next—I learned how to help them appreciate how far they’ve come and feel excited about what’s coming next, see their strengths and how they can build on them and trust me to guide them into the hard work that lies ahead. If you’d like to learn more about coaching fiction or non-fiction, you need to visit https://www.bookcoaches.com to learn more.

Y’all, it’s an uber-informative, down in the trenches episode about writing memoir when it feels like your topic is on the lighter side—but of course, no truly successful memoir ever stays on the surface. Cate Doty is the author of Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages. She is a writer and former editor at The New York Times, where she covered the news of food, weddings, business, New York, and more.

To write Mergers and Acquisitions, Cate had to look at what was in some ways an obvious story—I fell in love at the NYT while working on the Wedding pages!—to the real story of growing up in an iconic newsroom and learning about what makes relationships get as far as the wedding pages—and then get past that one day. She had to find ways to dig into her past, and to write about real people she still loves and respects (and a few she doesn’t). And she had to accept that writing about the NYT probably means you’re not working there again.

And then she had to answer all my questions about it! You’re going to love it.

Links from the pod:

Jenny 8. Lee’s memoir The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

The little church around the corner

#AmReading

Cate:

Kaye Gibbons: Ellen Foster, A Cure for Dreams, Charms for an Easy Life

Having and Being Had, Eula Biss

Learning in Public, Courtney E. Martin

KJ:

Arsenic and Adobo, Mia P. Manansala

Other books we mentioned:

To Tell You the Truth, Gilly MacMillan

Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School

Alexander McCall Smith’s Isabel Dalhousie / The Sunday Philosophy Club books

Find out more about Cate: https://www.catedoty.com and follow her on Instagram: @CateDoty

Hey—have you been spending small amounts on short term classes, watching videos and using up every possible opportunity for free feedback? Reworking the same pages over and over in your writing group? Are you starting to feel like you’re stuck in one stage of the process? Maybe it’s time to consider making a bigger investment in your career and working with an Author Accelerator Book Coach. No one can guarantee that you’ll write a book that will snag an agent or a excite an editor. But a coach can help you move forward, finish a book or proposal you’re proud of and approach the next stage of the process like a pro. I kmow it helped me! If that sounds like something you need, visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com to get matched with a coach who can help you.

Here’s the deal: Jess and I (KJ here) have been rolling with different energies lately. She’s letting the spirit move her. Being inspired. Putting time into other creative projects and inviting that to feed her soul. I’m stepping over other projects, telling the spirit I’m not home right now and keeping the spotlight in one place.

In this episode, we talk about when you can—and can’t—go with the flow. How we handle it when other ideas beckon, but a deadline demands our attention. What we do between projects and why. And why KJ puts a meal plan on the fridge every week, while Jess asks “what do we feel like eating?”—but that does NOT mean Jess can’t make a plan and stick to it, or that KJ never follows the muse. (Although, re: dinner: I don’t CARE what you feel like eating. This is what we’re having.)

As always, if you’ve got a pressing writerly question you’d like us to answer or that you might be willing to work through on the show, email us: amwriting@substack.com.

Links from the Pod:

Special Care Instructions blog post

Jess’ video on Instagram

KJ’s dumb headphones

A Soft Murmur web app

Inventing Anna

2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron

Blueprint for a Book by Jennie Nash

Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You'll Ever Need by Jessica Brody

Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing by Libbie Hawker

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Outlander Lady: Diana Gabaldon

#AmReading

Jess:

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation, Scott Carney and Jason Miklian

KJ: The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Alison Bechdel

Hey—have you been spending small amounts on short term classes, watching videos and using up every possible opportunity for free feedback? Reworking the same pages over and over in your writing group? Are you starting to feel like you’re stuck in one stage of the process? Maybe it’s time to consider making a bigger investment in your career and working with an Author Accelerator Book Coach. No one can guarantee that you’ll write a book that will snag an agent or a excite an editor. But a coach can help you move forward, finish a book or proposal you’re proud of and approach the next stage of the process like a pro. I know it helped me! If that sounds like something you need, visit authoraccelerator.com to get matched with a coach who can help you.

Hey writers! Maybe I say this all the time, but this episode is GREAT. Remember how in Episode 402 I asked the question for the ages: How Bad Can a Good First Draft Be?

At that point I was on a fifth draft and it was sadly still pretty “bad”— think “I built a bookshelf but one of the shelves is on the back and I don’t think it necessarily needed window shutters or a fan”. I settled in to outline, not what WAS there but what I knew SHOULD be there on both the plot (outside) and emotional arc (inside) levels. And damn if it didn’t help. It always helps.

This episode is me and Jennie talking about how I did that, why I needed to and how much it helps. Funny story: last week after the episode as i was revising I looked at one of the new scenes I’d plotted out and thought, nah. Things were running a bit long, I thought. I don’t need that.

It took 48 hours of wrestling with what came next to realize that the problem was: yes, I did need that scene. It didn’t do masses of plot work but it was huge emotionally. Put it back in and started rolling along.

Whew. Ok, episode—enjoy!

Are you a “sticker”?

Regular listeners know that whenever we meet our writing goals around here, we text each other one word: STICKER. (and then we add a cute sticker to our calendar, because we’re fun like that).

We call supporters of the #AmWriting podcast “stickers” too—and while our regular podcasts and shownotes go out to all of our listeners, we have created a few things just for stickers. First, there’s the Summer Blueprint for a Book Sprint—10 weeks dedicated to working with coaches and a community to figure out how to turn your next idea—or your struggling draft—into the book you want to write. You can join it anytime (the how-to is below).

Stickers can also submit the first page of their WIP to the Booklab First Pages podcast, where we might choose it to discuss, review and offer ideas for persuading agents, editors and readers that they want to turn that page and see what happens next. (Find the link to submit a first page HERE.)

I’m a sticker! Give it all to me now.

To join the Blueprint for a Book Summer Sprint, you must be a paid subscriber. Then, opt-in and set up your podcast feed. Don’t worry, it’s simple! Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, do two things:

* Toggle “Blueprint for a Book” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).

* Click “set up podcast” next to Blueprint for a Book and follow the easy instructions.

Once you set those things up, you’ll get all the future Blueprint emails and podcasts (and if you’re joining the party a bit late, just head to our website and click on Blueprint for a Book in the top menu).

Your first book, we’ve all found, is usually something you’ve been mulling for a while. You second might be the same—so the question, how do you get you ideas, seems both confusing—I don’t know—and unnecessary—I have lots. Nonfiction, essays—when we first get started we’re bursting at the seams. What to write next isn’t a problem—until it is. Or until you find yourself wanting to think about ideas differently—about what you want to write or say, but also how you’d like it to be received and by who.

In this episode, we talk ideas from scrawled capture (where and how) to evaluation and expansion. Do we wait for the time to be right for an idea, or run with it and hope for the best? Who do we turn to when we’re not certain what we have or what to do with it? And when do we decide to settle down with one for a few weeks or months or years, and why?

Links from the pod

Episode 299: How to Sell Any Book to Any Publisher with Sue Shapiro

Episode 301: Do Morning Pages Work?

KJ Charles: How to Write a Book When You Can’t Write a Book “Every book you read is a choose your own adventure that the author has already played.”

Are you serious about writing a nonfiction book this year? Author Accelerator is offering a nonfiction book incubator starting February 28th. There are only a few seats in this intensive program because you will get 1:1 coaching on every single step of the process AND you will have the chance to pitch your proposal to a pool of agents and publishers at the end -- a fabulous opportunity. Apply for the program HERE -- and get a strategic session with Jennie Nash to kickstart your work. We think Jennie and her book coaches are terrific -- tell her we sent you!

Here’s Katherine Center, author of soon-to-be 9 bittersweet comic novels that have been described as “the best medicine for human souls,” on her relatively late-in life discover of romance novels: “I felt like I’d discovered chocolate cake after a lifetime of eating boneless skinless chicken breasts.”

We dig deep into the process of figuring out what you love in a book and how to find it in your own work, from analyzing other books to the importance of the reading journal, and then we get into the craft of writing books that satisfy the readerly urges you share, embracing unifying tropes, finding the compelling hook and how to ground a story that seems to big to be true by creating real characters with relatable problems in familiar settings. I took some serious notes here, people. I’m going to have to listen again!

#AmReading

Katherine Center :

Something Wilder, Christina Lauren (Also mentioned The Unhoneymooners)

Book Lovers, Emily Henry

Sarina:

The Long Game, Rachel Reid (sequel to Heated Rivalry)

KJ: Boyfriend Material, Alexis Hall

Are you serious about writing a nonfiction book this year? Author Accelerator is offering a nonfiction book incubator starting February 28th. There are only a few seats in this intensive program because you will get 1:1 coaching on every single step of the process AND you will have the chance to pitch your proposal to a pool of agents and publishers at the end -- a fabulous opportunity. Apply for the program HERE -- and get a strategic session with Jennie Nash to kickstart your work. We think Jennie and her book coaches are terrific -- tell her we sent you!

KJ here. Sarina wanted to try Morning Pages, the most famous ritual from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way—a book that, tbh, has never, ever floated my boat, just as my resistance to morning pages—in my mind, a variation on journaling, which I have also never liked—has been strong.

But Sarina wanted to try it. So we did, she in a fairly systematic way and me in what I still have to concede was more than a little half-assed. And now, having recorded the podcast, and kinda-sorta-promised to try this again later, I write these show notes still unconvinced. I already do creative things. I don’t think I need to free up my creativity. Is there really anything WRONG with only wanting to do the thing if it makes a thing—something someone might read, in the case of writing, but in other arts as well? That’s how I am. I’ll knit a hat, but I’m not just gonna sit here and knit. I like to draw but I like to share what I drew. And there’s no better art than making beautiful, tasty cookies and cakes.

I get it. Perhaps that’s a very Puritan approach to creativity, but I don’t feel like I only have “permission” to do it if it’s useful. I feel like it’s only fun if it ends in something. I go back and forth on whether that’s a good thing.

Well, these are unusual shownotes. Do you like Morning Pages? Do you do them? Every day, some days, always at the same time… how? What do you think comes from it? We’d love to hear your answers in the #AmWriting Facebook Group.

Links from the Pod

The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron

Video: Julia Cameron discusses morning pages

The prewriting concept comes from the excellent book From 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron

Becca Symes, The Quitcast

Atomic Habits, James Clear

#AmReading

Sarina: Loud is How I Love You, Mercy Brown

KJ: Apples Never Fall, Liane Moriarty

KJ also mentioned The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman and Major Labels, A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh

Are you serious about writing a nonfiction book this year? Author Accelerator is offering a nonfiction book incubator starting February 28th. There are only a few seats in this intensive program because you will get 1:1 coaching on every single step of the process AND you will have the chance to pitch your proposal to a pool of agents and publishers at the end -- a fabulous opportunity. Apply for the program HERE -- and get a strategic session with Jennie Nash to kickstart your work. We think Jennie and her book coaches are terrific -- tell her we sent you!