This week, one of us is tantalisingly close to reaching her word count goal, and the other spends more time fantasising about getting there than actually writing. 

We have each other, (and our listeners!) to keep us company on our otherwise solo missions, but generally its a pretty lonely task writing a novel, and we dive into that on this episode. 

Tis possibly the hardest part of our journeys so far - having to make touch decisions about the direction of our books as the light at the end of the tunnel gets bigger and brighter. That fun chapter that we enjoyed writing? Gotta go. That sub-plot that doesn't fit in anymore? Deleted. It's devastating stuff. Never-the-less we continue on, and even start looking ahead to who we will give our finished books to to read!

We affectionally call it fluff. All the stuff that makes up a book that isn't the big, exciting events. Two thirds of our way through our writing journey, we are coming to realise that the fluff is important and you can't have a book without it!

What helps you stay focussed, and what distracts you to the point where you've been 'writing' for an hour but only have 4 words on the page? On todays episode we discuss our helps and hinderances while writing our first novels. 

We wouldn't have much if we didn't have them - characters! This week we have a good long chat about the people that make up our fictional worlds. Charlie has a crisis and ponders if her characters are interesting enough and Britt reveals if she has based hers on the people in her life.

Can you believe it? We barely can. We're halfway through! Halfway through our first drafts that's is... There is still a very long road ahead of us, but we're trying not to let that dampen our celebrations.

What provides us inspiration? What inspires successful, and hopeful authors alike to create whole worlds and scores of fictional characters? We try to answer this deep question, and discuss the absolute dream of being a full time novelist.  

Of course, committing to recording a podcast every two weeks until our books are done is one source of motivation, but what else keeps us at it? There are a thousand tips out there for how to stay motivated when attempting to write a novel; today we try to weed out which strategies actually work when the last thing you want to do is sit down and write a thousand words. And then another thousand…and another…

Taking a break from talking about ourselves for once (kind of), this episode is dedicated to chatting about what we are currently reading. Is it inspiring reading incredible novels while attempting to write our own, or just down-right depressing? It's really hard to tell sometimes...

This week we chat about our individual writing processes (planner vs pants-er) while trying to supress the panic of hitting walls and word targets. 

Britt reveals a secret from her last two weeks of writing, and Charlie shares the un-conventional reminder she has for remembering her goals.