#AmWriting

More words, better words, in less time? Sometimes. In this episode, finding your own path to write faster.

If only we could write as fast as we type! You could set your clock by our book production, right? Not so. This week we’re exploring how to write faster with Sarina in the lead. Finding your own patterns, prewriting and avoiding that “stuck” feeling by finding tangible ways to explore your characters and book without doing battle with words dominate our conversation as we riff on ways to up our daily word counts without ending up with something that’s destined for the cutting room floor file.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 30, 2019: Top Five Reasons to Be on Instagram. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

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

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Jess: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement Jodi Kantor, Meghan Twohey

KJ: Podcasts for book recommendations: What Should I Read Next? with Anne Bogel and Get Booked, from BookRiot

Sarina: 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation, Clint Emerson

#FaveIndieBookstore NEWS

Jenny Lawson, author of You Are Here, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Furiously Happy, will be opening Nowhere Books in San Antonio with the former GM of Book People. We love it when a new indie is born.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

The image in our podcast illustration is by Jordan on Unsplash.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ:                                        00:01                    Hey writers, are you whispering to yourself that this might just be your year to make NaNoWriMo happen? Or maybe planning to do it again? Then, do yourself a favor and invest in Author Accelerator's Inside Outline coaching now, so that you've got a structure to free you up to use those 30 days in November to write something that really works. It is no fun to 'win' NaNoWriMo with 56,000 words and then realize 35,000 of them don't serve your story at all. Trust me, I speak from experience. The Inside Outline really works. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.

Jess:                                     00:36                    Go ahead.

KJ:                                        00:36                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Jess:                                     00:36                    All right, let's start over.

KJ:                                        00:36                    Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.

Jess:                                     00:36                    Okay.

KJ:                                        00:36                    Now one, two, three. I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast, your podcast we hope, about writing all the things, short things, long things, fiction, nonfiction, genre, new and creative genre, proposals, pitches, emails to potential agents. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done.

Jess:                                     01:26                    And I'm Jess Lahey. I am the author of the Gift of Failure and an upcoming book about substance abuse in kids. And I think I'm on like day 31 until my deadline, so I'm completely insane. You can also find my most recent work that I'm super excited about The Smarter Living Guide to How to Help Your Kids Succeed in School This Year, which was super fun to write. And my first foray into the guides at the New York Times.

Sarina:                                 01:53                    I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of several USA today bestselling romance novels and my newest one will be called Moonlighter coming on October 22.

KJ:                                        02:04                    And I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the former lead editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, the author of the book How to Be a Happier Parent and of a novel forthcoming from GP Putnam and Sons next summer about which you'll just be hearing so much later. And now that we are providing (by email) show notes every week, I'm going to invite everybody, first of all, to head over to our website and sign up so you can get the show notes and consider supporting us by signing up for the #Writer'sTopFive emails. But the real reason that I wanted to bring that up, is that every time Jess introduces herself on the artificial intelligence transcript app that we use to start out before our lovely assistant Marisa goes through and makes it all much, much, much better it says, I'm just lucky. I thought that was glorious. All right, we have a great topic today. Sarina, kick us off.

Sarina:                                 03:16                    Today we're talking about writing faster, which of course you know is an art and a science. Jess laughs because she's up against her deadline, but the truth is...

Jess:                                     03:29                    Jess laughs cause she's losing her mind. And KJ texted yesterday something about the fact that you just can't get as much done in a day as you think that you can get done in a day. And that's my life right now.

KJ:                                        03:44                    Before we talk about writing faster, which I think is doable and there are strategies and I can't wait to hear them. I just want to say that I'm having two struggles this week. And one is that - I just can't do as much in a day as I think I can. You'd think I'd know that by now, but I don't. And the other is that I also can't make all the people happy. So yeah, apparently I have learned nothing in my life because I'm still trying.

Jess:                                     04:15                    Well your book was not called How to Make Everybody Happy, it's just how to be a happier parent. So how are we going to write faster? Someone give me the keys to this car. How do we write faster?

Sarina:                                 04:59                    I came about this topic listening to lots of fiction authors (because that's mostly who I'm talking to during a week) talk about how to write faster. And every once in awhile, a so-called friend of mine will post, 'I wrote 11,000 words today.' And I will feel nothing but rage, because I have never once written 11,000 words in a day and never will and that's fine. But it really got me thinking about why is my pace, my pace? And what does it mean about my habits that has brought me here? And is there any way for me to increase that pace? So my average pace, like on a longterm basis, is about 1200 words a day. And that…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Joshilyn Jackson doesn't just write best-selling thrillers. She narrates them, too. Should we?

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 23, 2019: Top Five Steps to Burn Chart Success (a How-to). Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Jess:

I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, Emily Nussbaum

KJ:

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein

Joshilyn:

Gretchen, Shannon Kirk

The Better Liar: A Novel, Tanen Jones

Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman

#FaveIndieBookstore

Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA

Our guest for this episode is Joshilyn Jackson.

She is the author of:

Never Have I Ever

The Almost Sisters

The Opposite of Everyone

Someone Else’s Love Story

A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

Backseat Saints

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Between, Georgia,

Gods in Alabama

My Own Miraculous

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

Wedding Cake for Breakfast

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

The image in our podcast illustration is by TK

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ:                                        00:01                    Hey all. As you likely know, the one and only sponsor of the #AmWriting podcast is Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps writers all the way through their projects to the very end. Usually Author Accelerator offers only longterm coaching and they're great at it, but they've just launched something new inside outline coaching, a four week long program for novelists and memoir writers that can help you find just the right amount of structure so that you can plot or pants your way to an actual draft. I love the inside outline and I think you will too. I come back to mine again and again, whether I'm writing or revising. Working through it with someone else helps keep you honest and helps you deliver a story structure that works. Find out more at www.authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.

Jess:                                     00:57                    Go ahead.

KJ:                                        00:57                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Jess:                                     00:57                    All right, let's start over.

KJ:                                        00:57                    Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.

Jess:                                     00:57                    Okay.

KJ:                                        00:57                    Now one, two, three.

KJ:                                        00:57                    Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia,

Jess:                                     00:57                    and I'm Jess Lahey.

KJ:                                        00:57                    And this is #AmWriting,

Jess:                                     00:57                    with Jess and KJ.

KJ:                                        00:57                    #AmWriting is our podcast about all things writing. Long things, short things, book proposals, entire books, short articles, blog posts, YA, pitches, whatever we can think of. And as I think most of you know, #AmWriting is really the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done.

Jess:                                     01:43                    I'm Jess Lahey, I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and an upcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids. And I write for the Washington Post and the New York Times and various other outlets.

KJ:                                        01:53                    And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of a novel forthcoming next year and also a parent-y type book How to Be a Happier Parent, former lead editor and writer for the New York Times Motherlode blog But I saw someone in one of our reviews accusing us of having a nonfiction focus on parenting writing. To which I was like, 'What?' I mean that has certainly been our professional writing, I guess our guests probably see it that way. But not today.

Jess:                                     02:27                    Not today. I'm so excited. Can I introduce? Cause I'm super excited. Today our guest is Joshilyn Jackson. She is a New York Times and USA Today best selling author of nine novels, including one that I am (spoiler) not finished with, so be careful - called Never Have I Ever, it is so good. But one of the big reasons we wanted to have Joshilyn on today is that she does something that almost no one really does, which is narrate. She narrates her own fiction audio. And we know a lot of people, including ourselves who narrated our own nonfiction, but fiction is a whole other game. Not only does she narrate her own fiction, she's really, really good at it. She's won a bunch of awards. She was nominated for an Audi award, she was on Audio File Magazine's best of the year list, she was an Audible All Star for the highest listener ranks and reviews. I mean that's huge. And then I also have to add, because near and dear to my heart, she also works with an organization called Reforming Arts. And she has taught writing and literature inside Georgia's maximum security facility for women. So we have that in common as well. Welcome so much to the show, Joshilyn. We're so excited to talk to you.

Joshilyn:                              03:56                    Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Jess:                                     03:59                    We love talking to authors, but one of the topics that has come up a lot for us is narrating audio books. Not only because Sarina Bowen (one of our frequent guests and sort of almost another host) has a podcast about audio books. Specifically, I'm a huge audio book fan and we've been talking a lot lately about people who choose to narrate their own fiction cause it's really hard. So we would love to talk to you about that today, but we'd love to start with sort of just how you got started with writing. What's your story?

Joshilyn:                              04:40                    Oh, I've always wanted to be a writer. When I was three, I published my first novel using the Crayola stapler method. My mom helped, and to be fair, it wasn't a very good book. Yeah, I'm dating myself, but when Walden Books came out with Blank Books, I was in middle school and I would buy a Blank Book and write a novel into it and the novel would be just however many pages the Blank Book was. And I was a huge Stephen King fan. I would write these books, I remember one was called Don't Go Into the Woods and all these girls who looked a lot like girls who were kind of mean to me in middle school, one by one went into the woods and never came back. It's terrible, but really derivative Stephen King novel.

Jess:           …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Fresh fall starts or pressing fall deadlines? Here's how to make the most of that new season, sharpened pencils, back-to-school mojo.

Even when a pressing deadline means you’re not starting anything new, fall still manages to feel like a time for fresh starts and renewed productivity—and setting goals for what can get done by the end of the year now, when it still feels like so much is possible. We’re talking planning software, balancing reality with what we think our tomorrow selves might be capable of, and grabbing any momentum the annual back-to-school season offers with both hands.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 16, 2019: Top 5 Mistakes Writer Websites Make. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Jess: Holding, Graham Norton

KJ: Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, Laura Vanderkam

Sarina: Take Off Your Pants: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

#FaveIndieBookstore

Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

The image in our podcast illustration is by Bernd Schulz on Unsplash.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ:                                00:01                Hey writers, are you whispering to yourself that this might just be your year to make NaNoWriMo happen? Or maybe planning to do it again? Then, do yourself a favor and invest in Author Accelerator's Inside Outline coaching now so that you've got a structure to free you up to use those 30 days in November to write something that really works. It is no fun to "win" NaNoWriMo with 56,000 words and then realize 35,000 of them don't serve your story at all. Trust me, I speak from experience. The Inside Outline really works. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline. Is it recording?

Jess:                             00:44                Now it's recording.

KJ:                                00:44                Yay.

Jess:                             00:45                Go ahead.

KJ:                                00:46                This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Jess:                             00:50                Alright, let's start over.

KJ:                                00:51                Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers. Now one, two, three. Hey, I am KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast about writing all the things, short things, long things, fictional things, nonfictional things, but please not nonfictional. Not, not nonfictional things pretending to be fictional. Well anyway, just don't get that wrong people. Right? We need to clarify. Some things are fiction, some things are nonfiction, short, long. We write them, all except for the ones that you're not supposed to write. Oh, I know the ones where you say they're nonfiction, but they're really fiction. That's bad. Alright. They can be short, they can be long, they can be proposals, they can be pitches, they can be essays, all the things. But most of all, #AmWriting is the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done.

Jess:                             01:54                I'm Jess Lahey and I am the author of the Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids and you can find my writing all over the place, the New York Times and the Washington Post. And actually as this airs, over at a new publication called Air Mail.

Sarina:                          02:11                And I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 30-ish contemporary romance novels. You can find me at sarinabowen.com.

KJ:                                02:19                I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent, and of the novel The Chicken Sisters, which will be available next summer. I'm also the former lead editor and writer for the Motherlode blog at the New York Times, where I still write occasionally, and you can find my work (a little bit of it) at The New Yorker.

Jess:                             02:36                That's funny and still really cool. I still can't get over it, it's just so cool.

KJ:                                02:42                Just as a shout out to everyone who's ever written once for something. There are no gatekeepers of what you say you do. You can say, "You can find my work in the New York Times if you have written for the New York Times online, that counts.

KJ:                                03:02                There are not rules, there is no one checking, and if you don't grab it and take hold of it somebody will. Other people are, so take it and rock it people.

Jess:                             03:13                The nice thing is when something like that's on your SIG file, or your bio, or your resume, or your CV, no one can ever take it away from you. So what are we talking about today?

KJ:                                03:28                Today's topic is fresh fall starts, productivity, the real new year, September, all the school supplies.

Jess:                             03:38                Okay. Well, you and Sarina get to take the lead today because frankly, fall stinks, fall is horrible. Fall is my nemesis this year because my book deadline is October 10th. So every single time someone mentions fall, I want to just go into a hole and disappear. So fall is bad this year.

KJ:                                04:04                You don't have a sense like you've got some renewed energy? You know, your house is empty?

Jess:                             04:12                No, no. I feel like my deadline's getting here really fast.

Sarina:                          04:18                Somebody needs a nap and a hug because fall is awesome.

Jess:                             04:23                No, I know it is. I love fall. I mean, I live in New England, I live in the epicenter of beautiful fallness. But as I was mentioning earlier, for our listeners that have been listening for a while, we have these wonderful calendars that we love to keep and we have this sticker system and I love my stickers. This month they came from Robbie Bear and Matthew Swanson, some authors that I love. I got some beautiful stickers from them and I have at the top of my calendar the words, 'the final stretch' and on every single day I have days left to my deadline and today (or the day we are recording) I have 38 days left until my deadline. And so I'm in crazy countdown mode, and tomorrow I leave for a road trip for two days. So yeah, you people can be excited about fall all you want, but I'm just gonna live in my state of dread and oppression. I will say as a progress report, I did hand in the first five chapters of my book to my editor this past weekend and …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

The burn chart mindset, whole book project management, and a how-to for finding a progress tracker that works for you.

KJ’s an avid user of burn charts. Sarina uses a desktop variant (and has her own style). Jess doesn’t entirely see the appeal. What’s the difference between a burn chart and to-do list? Maybe nothing, if your to-do list goes all the way to the end of your project—and maybe everything, if you’re not paying attention to the difference between what you’ve got on your list, and what has to be done by when and by who in order to meet a deadline. This week on the podcast, KJ tries to talk Jess into the burn chart mindset, Sarina talks whole book project management, and we all come down to a how-to for finding a progress tracker that works for you.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 9, 2019: Top 5 Reasons You Need a Burn Chart. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Pacemaker Planner

KJ’s Burn charts: Happier Parent, left; The Chicken Sisters revision, right.

Sarina’s Pacemarker chart, left and burn-up columns, right.

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

KJ: The Beautiful No, Sheri Salata (As you consider this one, you might want to take a look at KJ’s Goodreads review here.)

The Writer Files (a podcast)

Sarina: The Rest of the Story, Sarah Dessen

Jess: Daisy Jones and The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid

Dani Shapiro’s Family Secrets (a podcast)

#FaveIndieBookstore

Norwich Bookstore, Norwich, VT

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ:                                00:01                Hey all. As you likely know, the one and only sponsor of the #AmWriting podcast is Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps writers all the way through their projects to the very end. Usually Author Accelerator offers only longterm coaching and they're great at it, but they've just launched something new inside outline coaching, a four week long program for novelists and memoir writers that can help you find just the right amount of structure so that you can plot or pants your way to an actual draft. I love the inside outline and I think you will too. I come back to mine again and again, whether I'm writing or revising. Working through it with someone else helps keep you honest and helps you deliver a story structure that works. Find out more at www.authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.

Jess:                             00:57                Go ahead.

KJ:                                00:58                This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Jess:                             01:02                All right, let's start over.

KJ:                                01:03                Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.

Jess:                             01:06                Okay.

KJ:                                01:06                Now one, two, three.

KJ:                                01:15                Hey, welcome to #AmWriting podcast.

Jess:                             01:18                I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and some articles you can find if you Google my name and a forthcoming book on preventing substance abuse in kids.

Sarina:                          01:28                I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 30 romance novels. The next one will be called Moonlighter.

KJ:                                01:35                And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent, former lead editor and writer for the New York Times Motherlode blog and author of a novel forthcoming next summer, a beach read. And if you are a regular listener, you might've noticed a little difference in our introduction today because we are now #AmWriting The Podcast and now with more Sarina.

Jess:                             02:01                Now with more Sarina and you may have noticed some weird hesitation in our voices as we were doing the intro cause it's been a couple of years doing the regular intro and I'm happy to make a change.

KJ:                                02:11                Yeah, this fall we're sparking it up. There's going to be three of us sometimes. We're going to do lots of interviews, we're going to do some great new projects that we are excited about. But today we're just doing a podcast on one of my favorite dear to my heart topics, which is the burn chart.

Jess:                             02:33                This is very timely because in the #AmWriting Facebook group, someone posted just a few days ago, could someone please explain this whole tracking software burn chart thing. And we've talked about burn charts a couple of times because KJ likes them. And because I've never really used them, I wanted to know more about how to use them, especially, you know, with this deadline looming. But you and Sarina are so good at planning your time I think it's something I could really learn from.

KJ:                                03:03                Well that was something I was thinking about was I thinking, is there a difference between a burn chart and a to do list? And the answer is not necessarily, If your to do list goes all the way to the end.

Jess:                             03:19                Well, where are we now? KJ, you still use burn charts? Sarina, do you use burn charts?

Sarina:                          03:24                Well, I use a thing called Pacemaker and I can't wait to hear how much like or different it is from KJ's burn chart.

Jess:                             03:32                Okay.

KJ:                                03:32                And this is perfect because that is clearly a software thing, right?

Sarina:                          03:37                Yup.

KJ:                                03:37                Yeah. So I, I'm the paper burn chart. You, you are the digital version. All right.

Jess:                             03:44                And I'm the one who just sits in the chair and hopes that I get enough words on the page to meet my deadline in October.

KJ:                                03:51                Yeah. Well I mean I hope you're doing a little bit more than hoping, but if not, Hey, we've got time. We've got time to like rein you in. All right, so a burn chart is a physical manifestation of two things and one is the amount of time that you have to go towards your deadline. And the other is your is tangible markers of your progress towards that deadline. So just to really make it incredibly easy. If for some reason you knew that you had to write 10,000 words and it doesn't matter what they say, just that you just have to write 10,000 words and then you have five days in which to do it. Obviously at the end of every day you need to check off tha…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Writing through chronic illness and other challenges, with Karen Locke Kolp.

Writing through chronic illness and other challenges, with Karen Lock Kolp

This writing thing often feels hard. A common text among the three of us (Jess, Sarina and KJ) goes like this: OW OW OW OWOWOWOW. Our brains hurt. But for this week’s guest, Karen Lock Kolp, it’s more than that. Because of a rare tendon condition, Karen does all her writing and online work—and we do mean all—using her voice. That means that when it comes to both dictation and writing through big challenges, she’s a pro, and her advice in this episode was solid gold on both counts.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 2, 2019: Top 5 Things to Remember When Writing is REALLY Hard. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month.

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

The Solopreneur Hour with Michael O'Neal

Joanna Penn's The Creative Penn

Karen's Dictation Software Choices: Dragon Dictation, Chrome Browser, Dragon's Transcription Button.

MouseGrid video on YouTube: How to Use the Dragon MouseGrid (as it turns out, it’s focused on navigating in Facebook with Dragon, but still a great video)

It's a Long Way to the Top, AC/DC

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Karen: Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez

The Purloined Paperweight, P.G. Wodehouse

Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, Daniel Wolff

KJ: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, Abbi Waxman

Jess: God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America, Lyz Lenz (Hear Lyz on the podcast here.)

#FaveIndieBookstore

Jeff Kinney's An UnLikely Story in Plainville, MA

Karen Lock Kolp is the author of Positive Discipline Ninja Tactics: Key Tools to Handle Every Temper Tantrum, Keep Your Cool, and Enjoy Life with Your Young Child and 10 Secrets Happy Parents Know: How to Stop the Chaos, Bring Out Your Child’s Good Behavior, and Truly Enjoy Family Time (Your Child Explained). Find out more at Karen's website: We Turned Out Okay. Listen to her podcast here. Her popular episode Positive Discipline Ninja Tactics is here.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)

KJ:                                00:01                Howdy writers and listeners. August is basically over. September is here and this is the very last time I can invite you to join us in Bar Harbor, Maine for the Find Your Book, Find Your Mojo retreat from September 12th through 15th of 2019. It's a fantastic chance to get some one on one time for your project with me or Author Accelerator founder Jenny Nash, and then dig in with all your might in a gorgeous setting surrounded by your fellow #AmWriting word nerds, including Serena Bowen, who's going to talk about indie versus traditional publishing. There will be bonding, there will be writing, and knitting and artistic renderings of words of the year and all kinds of festivities and I for one can't wait. Find all the [email protected]/am writing.

KJ:                                00:55                Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone and try to remember what I was supposed to be doing.

Jess:                             00:59                All right, let's start over.

KJ:                                01:01                Awkward pause. I'm going to rustle some papers.

Jess:                             01:04                Okay.

KJ:                                01:04                Now one, two, three. Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia.

Jess:                             01:13                And I'm Jess Lahey.

KJ:                                01:15                And this is #AmWriting with Jess and KJ. #AmWriting is our weekly podcast about all things writing, be they fiction, nonfiction, some bizarre intertwined creation, short stories, proposals, essays, long pieces, short pieces. And most of all, the one thing we always are is the podcast about getting the work done.

Jess:                             01:46                And I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids. And you can find my work at the New York Times and the Washington Post and recently at Air Mail, which is a new venture by Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair. And that was kind of fun to write for someone new.

KJ:                                02:06                I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I'm the author of How To Be a Happier Parent and the former lead editor and writer of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times where I am still a contributor. I'm having a freelancing break while I work on what will be my second novel and my first novel, The Chicken Sisters will be out next year.

Jess:                             02:24                So exciting.

KJ:                                02:26                That's who we are. That's why you should listen to us. Today, we have a guest that I think you are also going to want to listen to. I want to welcome Karen Lock Kolp. She is a child development expert and a parenting coach with a podcast, a thriving online community, and she is the independently published author of 10 Secrets Happy Parents Know. But we are not going to talk about anything parenty because what we are gonna talk about is getting all that work done because Karen is also a woman who lives with chronic illness. She has a tendon disorder that she'll describe to you later, but it has made her an expert in the use of her voice, both as a podcaster and in dictating her writing, which I know you're all going to want to hear about. And it's also made her an expert at keeping her butt in the chair sometimes whether she wants to or not, and getting her work done anyway, even when it's really, really hard. And that's why you're here. So thank you so much for joining us.

Karen:                          03:28                Oh, thank you. It's really wonderful to be here. This is very exciting for me. Your podcast is one of my favorites. It is one of the few that survived my recent digital reset. Yours was one of the few that I brought back in because it's incredibly valuable.

Jess:                             03:51                Oh, that's so nice. We survived a purge. That's so exciting.

KJ:                                03:56                I purged lately too, although I partly purged just because I get so frustrated with the iTunes podcast app and switched and then once I switched I realized I hadn't brought everything with me and some of it I didn't miss.

Jess:                             04:08                I had that moment where iTunes said, you seem to have not downloaded this in awhile. Do you still want to listen? And I thought about it and I said, well, no, actually I'm done.

Karen:                          04:20                That's really cool. I did that.

KJ:           …

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Medicine, literature, academic writing, submitting to literary journals: we wander all over the map with guest Danielle Ofri.

Medicine, literature, academic writing, submitting to literary journals: we wander all over the map with guest Danielle Ofri.

Funny thing—writers for popular pubs tend to see literary magazines as an unsurmountable challenge (I know I do) and vice versa. Danielle Ofri, though, straddles both worlds as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review and a regular contributor to the New York Times and Slate as well as journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, making her the perfect person to talk to about that crossover, as well as the crossover between a career with confidentiality at its core, and one where telling the whole truth is key.

Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the weekly Top 5 for Writers that will be dropping into #AmWriting paid subscriber inboxes on Monday, August 26, 2019: Top 5 Questions for Your Novel's Main Character. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that!

Got a friend who needs more #AmWriting?

As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. Find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Outcast, Spotify and everywhere else. This show notes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend.

To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly Top 5 email.

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

#AmReading (Watching, Listening)

Danielle: Ragtime E.L. Doctorow and Little King, Salmon Rushdie's short story excerpt in the New Yorker from his book, Quichotte.

KJ: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport

#FaveIndieBookstore

The Strand again! We don't mind repeating a good one.

Our guest for this episode is Danielle Ofri, the author of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear; Singular Intimacies ; Incidental Findings;  Medicine in Translation; Intensive Care; What Doctors Feel;Best of the Bellevue Literary Reviewand the forthcoming When We Do Harm, a Doctor Confronts Medical Error.

She is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, a journal that explores issues of health and humanity. fiction and non-fiction and poetry. Find their submission guidelines here. Find out more about at Danielle at DanielleOfri.com, and Listen to her TEDMed Talk: Deconstructing Perfection, here. You can listen to her TEDMed talk Fear: A Necessary Emotion here.

This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.

Find more about Jess here, and about KJ here.

If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.

TRANSCRIPT (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)       

KJ:                                I'm KJ Dell'Antonia

Jess: and I'm Jess Lahey.

KJ: And this is #AmWriting

Jess: with Jess and KJ.

KJ: #AmWriting is the every week the podcast about writing all the things that you might be writing, fiction, nonfiction, short pieces, long pieces, essays, pitches, humor, proposals. And most of all, this is the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done.

Jess:                             01:52                I'm Jess Lahey and I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and a forthcoming book on preventing childhood substance abuse. And I had to think about it for a second. What am I writing? And you can find my work. Let's see. Pretty soon in air mail, but I generally am in the New York Times, Washington Post, places like that.

KJ:                                02:11                It must be August. I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the author of How To Be a Happier Parent. I'm the former editor of the Motherlode blog at the New York Times where I still contribute occasionally. I'm also the author of a novel that will be coming out next year and you can find my work most often at the New York Times. But just incidentally, just by the way, pretty soon you'll also be able to find a little something by me and Wendy Aarons at the New Yorker.

Jess:                             02:42                I mean I did not know if you were going to announce this today, but I am like burst rocketing bursting. This is a bucket list thing. This is huge and big bucket. Oh yeah. We'll be talking about that more because there's, it's cool and there's a lot to talk about there, but we have a guest, our guest today I'm so excited to talk about because my husband came home from work and he said, Oh my gosh, there's this woman you must talk to. I heard her speak. She's incredible. Her name is Danielle Ofri. She is a physician. She's at Bellevue hospital and is a writer of lots of different things. She writes for sort of traditional publishing about she has a forthcoming book on medical error.

Jess:                             03:31                She has a book that I have been enjoying very much called What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear. And she also writes for the New York Times and Slate and a bunch of other places. But she's the co-founder and editor and chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, which coincidentally was the present you gave Tim last year, KJ. You gave Tim a subscription to the Bellevue Literary Review just last year, which was so cool. And this sound really fancy, but the truth is that I wrote for Danielle at the Bellevue, right. And they gave me a couple of subscriptions. All right, well I passed one on to Tim as someone I thought would deeply enjoy it. And that was, that's how that came about. So, so often we have guests who have at some point been edited by me. I have been edited by Danielle, a little little flip around. It's so cool. And actually speaking of bucket list, check this out. Her essays had been selected by Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Susan Orlean for best American essays, twice, best American science writing. And she, yeah, she got, she's just all over the place with all these buckets, things that we would be honored to have on our resume and our CV. So Danielle, welcome to the show and thank you so much for joining us today.

Danielle:                       04:49                Thank you guys. It's really fun to be here.

Jess:                             04:52                We get so many questions about academic writing and obviously at some point we want to spend some time talking about that. But really what I'd love to do is start with you and how you got started as a writer. Did the doctor part come first or did the writing part come first?

Danielle:                       05:09                Well, I, you know, as a little kid, I love to write books, but that got pushed by the wayside and I was a doctor first. I did a sort of a long route. I did an MD PhD program or did research that I ended up in a lab did a residency at Bellevue fell in love with internal medicine, but I trained in the 90s during the height of the AIDS epidemic. And if you remember that time, it was a fairly brutal time, a lot of death and destruction and very exhausting. And so when I finished my decade of training there, I took a year and a half off and I just needed to get away. So I, and I must say my, all my supervisors said, that's a terrible idea. You'll forget all your medicine. You'll never get back into academic medicine. You'll lose all your connections. But someone else said, you know, I think they might be jealous. You know what, maybe so. So, off I took to just support myself. I worked for, for eight weeks in various clinics around the country. There's a whole system for temporary doctors to fill in. And I did that. And then I would go to South America, traveled to the money, ran out, and then call, collect fr…

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Big dreams, and how to achieve them. (Jess likes to be told she can do it. KJ prefers to be told she can't.)
#AmReading (and watching) 
Other People's Houses (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780399587924) , Abbi Waxman
Jess: The Butterfly Girl: A Novel (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062698162) , Rene Denfeld
A Discovery of Witches (book one of the All Souls Trilogy), (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143119685) Deborah Harkness 
 (and the miniseries)
#FaveIndieBookstore
Northshire Books (https://www.northshire.com/) , Manchester VT and Saratoga Springs
This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s 2-tier outline template.
Find more about Jess here (http://www.jessicalahey.com/) , and about KJ here (https://kjdellantonia.com/) .
If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship (https://www.marginallypodcast.com/) .

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

The risks and benefits of writing about religion in any genre, with author Phoebe Farag Mikhail.
Phoebe's publisher: Paraclete Press (https://paracletepress.com)
A few other notes from the episode: 
Phoebe's book: Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church https://paracletepress.com/collections/new-releases/products/putting-joy-into-practice
Phoebe's blog: Being in Community (beingincommunity.com (http://beingincommunity.com/) )
Instagram & Twitter: @pkfarag   
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/phoebefaragmikhailauthor/  andhttps://www.facebook.com/beingincommunity/
Phoeble also mentioned her essay in Talking Writing Magazine about "bridge people":https://talkingwriting.com/agreeing-other-side-can-be-revolutionary
She chronicled her path to writing after becoming a mom in this essay as well: http://redtri.com/having-children-was-the-best-thing-i-did-for-my-career/
#AmReading
KJ: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780805092646) , Sendhil Mullainathan
Phoebe: The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction, (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062562814) Meghan Cox Gurdon
#FaveIndieBookstore
The Strand, New York, NY (https://www.strandbooks.com/)
This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwriting for details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s 2-tier outline template.
COME RETREAT WITH KJ AND SARINA! Details here (https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingretreat?fbclid=IwAR28UHKs094kMRXcybsP6zLyqpuMyJURur5fnc52AVP9ek5EWUpy7ckFu8M)
Find more about Jess here (http://www.jessicalahey.com/) , and about KJ here (https://kjdellantonia.com/) .
If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship (https://www.marginallypodcast.com/) .

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe