One-Drink Book Club

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* Emma returned triumphantly after months away … but only for the first 20 minutes. She opened a really interesting and seldom-talked-about topic: The fact that sometimes things really suck as a writer … and here’s how we deal. (NOTE: We’ll unpack this issue more next week if people are interested … so, you know, let us know if you are.)

* We talked a bit about backlist and advertising, and standing up for the books we’ve already written.

* Then a bit about imposter syndrome, being vulnerable, and more of that downer stuff. (Writing can be awesome, but it’s not always sunshine and roses, people!

* After Emma had to leave, Bill and I talked about “the writer’s unique fingerprint” — how repeated words and standard “safe home base” scenes become an individual writer’s DNA, so that readers can easily recognize their favorite writers’ style.

* Lastly, we talked about telling stories in person. Do good verbal storytellers make good writers, and what do you do when your best verbal stories just kind of stop landing like they used to?

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* Bill showed-and-told (there’s no good verb for “show and tell”) some of his old books from his collection, and talked about the special place they have in his life and home.

* Spinning off of this, I shared a strange revelation: Now that I’m selling my books in person, I feel like “a real author” in ways I never have before. After a dozen years in this business, only now — with physical books in hand and real readers in front of me — do I truly feel like I belong here.

* We talked about “writing and seeing where it goes” versus plotting (Bill’s current dilemma).

* And finally we talked about writing things you aren’t an expert in and how to avoid looking like an asshole by getting things wrong … which led me to one of my favorite writerly topics: Getting some obvious facts right as a way of buying yourself the leeway you need to flat-out invent fantastical things to follow.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* Reading order: do you read in publishing order, chronological order, the order books were written, or some other order?

* Are we attached to the characters in a series or the world itself? (Watch for the place in this one where I say “The Beam” when I clearly meant “Dune.” Did you know what a great series The Beam is, according to me in this episode?)

* How sequels to a book can ruin a book you loved … and the different ways we deal with it.

* Who also wrote romance despite being known for writing some other famous genre?

* The different motivations of various writers and matching what they deliver with what readers actually expect … which became an AI and James Pattern sort of discussion.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* With Emma and I fresh from our Las Vegas trip to the Author Nation conference (and the RAVE bookselling event at its end), we started off by talking about Emma’s new branding, which she lined up in advance of Vegas.

* This led to a discussion of judging books by their covers … which, by the way, everyone actually does.

* We talked about selling books in person, and the unique eccentricities of that market.

* I shared how well-received my “Artisan Author” talk was, making us feel that artistry isn’t dead.

* We shared our experiences hand-selling books …

* … and Bill followed up by asking if we “partook” of Vegas too much, or if we saw other people who did.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* After a looooong time away from the first-draft page, I finished my first book in forever today. I talked about how that felt and what I had to re-learn to do it … and asked the crew whether or not I should “celebrate its completion” like Stephen King talks about doing.

* We talked about tense and voice of prose: first versus third-person narratives, as well as past tense versus present tense. We had a great discussion about suiting the style of narration to the book in question.

* On the topic of following “the rules implied by a certain style of or device for writing,” we talked about my old phrase “put a unicorn in it,” which bridges the at-some-point decision writers need to make about how much they want to follow the rules vs. how much they want the reader to actually understand the story.

* Most of the remainder of our chat today was consumed with talking about our preparations and excitement to hand-sell books in person at the RAVE book event in Vegas two weeks from when we were recording.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

Here’s what we talked about in this episode:

* After a months’-long cliffhanger, we finally got to Emma’s story about how mentoring robotics crosses over into her storytelling. It’s not what you expect!

* Bill has started writing as a result of our goading, after a lifetime of loving to read and on-an-off trying to do pen a decades-in-the-making masterpiece himself.

* Talking Bill through some questions led to a riveting discussion about how all three of us write, from top to bottom …

* Which in turn led to one of the cooler chats I’ve had about how we “discover” things while writing — through runaway dialogue and science for me.

* We ended by discussing how writing a novel is like spinning plates. (Seriously, this is the best-fit metaphor I’ve come up with for it so far.)

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

In this episode, we talked about:

* Do we ever put real people in our books, either as homage or revenge when we’re pissed off at them?

* When a writer is emotional (excited, happy, sad, etc), does the work come out just as emotional, or is it cathartic … or is it Option 3?

* We talked about how Bill still refuses to read poems and songs when they’re in his books, even if one of the narrators is a poet.

* I went on for a bit about my thoughts on how books are better than TV and film for the creator, because the consumer (reader/watcher) fills in the details using their brains rather than us having to specify every little thing.

* Lastly, I talked about how differently I write on my own versus with a collaborator.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

In this episode, we talked about:

* My discovery that I can’t write a branching-narrative story, but not for reasons you might expect.

* Mike asked an interesting question: How would I find the story I wanted to tell in a memoir, if I were to write one about myself? I talked a bit about finding the core “character arc” for the subject in real life and proposed one for myself … then asked Mike and Bill what the main arcs of their lives would be.

* The spun us off into a side question: Does the body of work a writer makes over their lives reflect their own developmental arc in real life?

* … and THAT spun me off into a spur of a spur, wherein I talked about the idea of creators (like myself) warring with the question of truly being ourselves versus being like others in the field … really leaning into our own unique weirdness. It’s truly freeing, being yourself.

* That got us talking about homage versus cheap imitation of other creators, using Mike’s example of others trying to write like Douglas Adams.

* We finished off with a really interesting chat about how Bill, who as a reader follows BOTH the similar-books-in-a-genre, all-you-can-read Kindle Unlimited plan with his reading … AND seeks out highly “artisan” authors from that culling.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

In this episode, we talked about:

* The “Artisan Author” approach, which I’ll be giving a presentation on in Las Vegas in November, and the spectrum between Artisanship and algorithmic thinking … a “quality or quantity first” dichotomy for authors.

* True Fans, and what makes them True Fans

* Creating communities of like-minded people through fandom, and how we signal that we’re part of those communities in the wild: an almost invisible way of forming connections.

* How we make connections by being human and breaking our own rules.

The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.

In this episode, Emma and I really only covered one topic: How to talk to our artistic children about the self-doubt, creative blocks, and general angst that comes with being creative.

I could list all of the sub-details, but there’s really no point. This one got philosophical at the same time as it was dropping all sorts of knowledge bombs. We certainly don’t know everything … but personally, *I* plan to listen back to this the next time *I’m* feeling angst, or when I need advice for my kids with their own existential angst.