Sign up for a free pep talk here! https://manuscriptacademy.com/pep-talk

Have you ever had a publishing question you couldn't answer with Google? Or maybe you're just stressed out and wondering if it's time to pivot, panic, or be patient?

What if you could have a conversation with a person instead of finding more conflicting advice online?

Well, now you can.

Last week, Julie and I tried an experiment. For months, we’ve had our friend Mary, our Minister of Writing Happiness, make random calls to our members to pep them up, talk about their writing, and just generally make them feel better. The world is hard! (Seems even harder than usual the past few years.) And Mary’s voice is like sunshine on the phone.

But last week, we took Mary's call list, and started calling writers out of the blue. This was great fun for us (and we’re amazed how many of you picked up!).

You’re all working on such interesting things, and it’s great to hear your voices. It was so much fun, we thought "Hey, maybe we should do this on purpose."

We also noticed many of you are going through the same things—but felt alone in your creative process. It was wonderful for us to be able to offer advice, consolation, and reasons to be hopeful.

So, if you’d like a pep talk meets advice call, want to help your fellow writers, and you’re free this Thursday, 2pm-4pm ET, opt in for a call that will turn into a podcast. We’ll record, heavily edit, promise to cut anything you don’t want in there (just let us know), anonymize partially or fully if you wish (“This is Joe from North Dakota, and I just got the worst rejection…” or even just “I’m a writer, and I got the worst rejection”) and turn it into a 30-minute podcast episode.

The result, we hope, will be a window into writing life, how you’re not alone in your feelings—and why you and our writing community should feel hopeful. Until we find a way for all of you to meet—we think most of you would be friends!—this is a great way to connect.

Interested? Fill out this form, and we’ll be in touch with as many of you as we can: https://manuscriptacademy.com/pep-talk

We look forward to talking with you soon!

All best,

Jessica & Julie