Two Writers, No Hook

I start with my progress. Not a lot of new words (but many words replaced). Organizing scenes into chapters and discovering places where I can optimize. Draft 2 is now maybe 10% complete (instead of the 90% I had hoped for) so I moan a little about how everything in this process takes much longer than initially expected. Michael talks about how it took him five years to get his current work to the editing phase. I talk about blowing past my target word count (80K) and guess I'll wind up in the mid 90's.

Michael started a new story, is at 12,119 words. He did a 500 word story for a competition and found that the diversion threw him off his main story, and that he's finding getting back into it more of a challenge than he expected.

My goal is simple: keep at it.

We digress into editing, wrapping up my story, confusion in dialog. Before getting back to Michael's goals: 5-10K new words in his story.

The topic for this episode is dialog vs. exposition and we talk about the role of each in our different genres.

Next Episode: Mentors and Learning.

Books we mentioned: Plot Twist by Harlan Coben and Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott

Recorded 2026-09-21

We start talking about a heart balloon that unhelpfully is out of frame. It's the first day of fall and we talk about birthdays briefly.

I start reporting with Michael telling me why he skims my newsletter. Then I do a dump of my very productive two weeks, including a bunch of non-writing stuff. Michael has sent his manuscript to an editor, is putting finishing touches on his website, aiming to have it finished by the end of October. He woke up early the day before, sat down, and wound up writing 5,000 words of a new story. This after about a week of downtime not being sure what to do next.

Michael gives me an overview of the opening of his story and I ask him what the spark was that got him started on it.

We talk about Michael's writing pace, which is a fast start and then slower as he gets to the ending. Since we're both consuming Harlan Coben's latest book, Plot Twist, I contrast that with Coben's pace which is to start fast and pick up the rate exponentially as he approaches the end.

Michael's Goals: finish his website, continue writing his new story, hoping to get feedback from his editor by the end of this month(ish). We digress into how there are lots of authors who talk about the writing process, but not about editing. My goals carry over from the last episode, get through the second draft of my novel.

On to where we get our inspiration from. My characters, at least in my current novel, are synthetic. I might lift a characteristic from someone I know, but none of my friends would think I modelled a character on them. Michael tends to take a set of attributes from people he knows, so there is a larger set of similarities between his characters and real people. I contradict myself, because I have another novel on the back burner that's a fictionalization of real life experiences, and there the problem is to alter the characteristics of real people so that they become distinct characters in the book.

This leads into a discussion of the challenges of letting people you know read your drafts, and how you tend to not get the kind of feedback you are looking for.

For our next episode, how we manage dialog vs. exposition.

Recorded 2026-09-08

We start talking about beverages while recording, and the cliché of the alcohol-fuelled writers labouring over their manuscript.

Then we move to updates. I feel like screaming this: I have finally finished the never-ending edit round! Michael goes over the chronology of his work on his novel. He's taking another pass at his last few chapters and is close to finishing his edit. His website is also almost ready.

There's a little digression into reviewing the endings of our stories, and then about our beginnings and how they've changed as the work evolved.

Michael has three goals: finish the edit, send it to his editor, and read Harlan Coben's book Plot Twist. My goal is to get my missing scenes done.

On to our hook: scam messages that come in. Where they come from, how to spot them, and what to do about them. We talk about how their pitches try to suck you in with glowing praise, even for books that don't exist yet. I give my number one tip for detecting a scammer: if it's from a free-mail account (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) then it's a scam. Period. We talk about how these organizations get your information.

I rant (gently) about being controlled by our devices and then set up for next episode's hook: Where do we get inspiration for our characters?

Recorded 2026-08-24

In this episode we dive right into progress (relatively speaking, less than a minute of chat). I edited 32 pages, two over my minimum goal, and just ten pages short of finishing this pass (my real goal). We had a discussion about the "start on second draft stretch goal" Michael added to my list in the last episode. I didn't get where I wanted because it took an entire week to revise one single scene, so if I break down my progress it was just one page in the first week, and thirty-one in the second. The upside is that resolving the problems with that scene have pointed me in the right direction for solving some other issues.

Michael joined a peer-reviewed writing battle without fully realizing that he was one of the peers. We digress into a discussion about the challenges in doing critiques, and people who are skilled in one form of writing and less good in others. Then we return to Michael's progress report. Although he didn't hit his five chapter goal, he did take another pass at seven others.

On to goals: Michael wants to finish his edit by the end of the month (six chapters). For me, finish the edit and start filling in missing scenes. We chat a bit about book series versus book serials, and how you carry characters across books.

Then we get onto this episode's topic: Staying on Track. Do we get bored with writing or need a break, and how do we deal with that. Some of this is the difference between writing as a dream and writing as a job, and how it takes real effort to get through the aspects of the work that we're less fond of or less skilled at.

Next episode: reviews, critiques, and scammers.

Recorded 2026-08-10

We start with a very brief mention of an AI tool that purports to write for you. Surprisingly it's not called "Slopomatic."

Enough of that, we go to progress reporting. I report being on page 242, 28 pages edited since our last episode and two short of my goal of 30. In "stuff other than writing", I've done work on an end-to-end publishing workflow, and set up a project manager to track it. I report that editing has been easier, and has been giving me more confidence that a lot of it is honing in on getting the right words in the right order.

We have a side conversation about writing tools and subscription services, lifetime memberships, and market forces.

Michael reports signing up for a writing challenge that was a bad fit: two three hundred word stories, a word limit he finds impossible. He hit three chapters edited, short of his five chapter goal, but reworked another four, so we'll call that seven edited.

Future goals: Michael wants to finish edits, and to dictate a short story for audiobook release. I'm shooting for another 30 pages, maybe more as I'm 50 pages or so from the end.

We talk about both of us getting over a wall of low productivity. I talk about how productivity and happiness are strongly correlated for me. I talk about cycles of productivity and then the ADD challenge of managing which projects I work on during those productive periods. We talk about to-do lists. We talk about the folly of measuring ourselves against others. We talk about how these conversations have helped us both keep on task.

Next episode: Combating Tedium

Recorded 2026-07-27

We start by trying to not talk about the weather, without success. We do manage to limit it to a mere minute and 38 seconds. If you think climate change is a myth you probably want to skip that bit.

On to progress. I report a pathetic 16 pages of editing and 880 words into a new short story. Michael read the short story I've been bugging him to read for the last three episodes. He's making progress on his editing, tightening the story up. He's starting to gain some momentum in the process and is enjoying that. He's ten chapters away from the finish line. We discuss handing the work to an editor and our trepidation over the feedback we will get. We talk about reading our reviews.

The discussion of what a good review is takes us into a side trip into story structure and plot.

Back on track, we set our goals for the next two weeks. I go for another thirty pages edited. Michael's goal is to finish the edits on his book and to launch his website.

We get onto our topic: timelines. I talk about jumping around in my novel, because the story starts with a crisis, but then I need to step back to explain how that crisis got set up. Michael talks about placing a story into a known time period and getting the context right, something I need to do with another story that's set in the late 1990's. We talk about how different authors have approached timelines, and time travel stories that change the course of future events.

Next week's topic: breakthroughs and the excitement of a breakthrough and the wall that comes before it.

Recorded 2026-07-17

As usual we start off topic for a few minutes before getting into progress reporting. I've gone through 68 pages of my most recent edit, well over my goal of 50, the first time I've truly killed a goal in the past few months. As a follow-up to our last episode, I came very close to killing one of my darlings. Fortunately I found a fix that let me keep it. Michael edited four chapters in full, and is in a second cycle through the fifth. We decided he's 4.5 chapters toward his 5 chapter goal. After Michael reports, I remember to mention that I wrote a little piece of flash fiction.

This takes us into a side discussion of the sort of feedback Michael gets in his feedback and how sometimes it doesn't make sense to him.

I mention that I'm thinking of writing stories based on new technological developments that I see in newsletters and we discuss where we get ideas from.

We get back on track and set some goals. I go for another 30 pages of edit, Michael is aiming to get his word count down to 90K and plans to edit five chapters over the next two weeks. We talk about how editing can be such a slow process.

This episode's topic: finding our style. Michael starts by trying to identify what he means by style: style as in method of writing, style of prose, and genre as a style. Michael writes mysteries because those are the kinds of story he enjoys. He talks about having difficulty writing for a competition that wants something in a different style (genre). I talk about why I primarily write science fiction. We talk about some of our methods, how we keep track of our story ideas.

Next episode: dealing with timelines.

Recorded 2026-06-29

First up is progress reporting. We laugh about both being in a miserable space at the same time. I start, having gone through 50 pages of my latest edit, 30 pages more than the (low) goal we set last episode. I complain about how slow it's going, and I've made some progress on the developmental part of the edit.

Michael also had other things interfering with his writing time. Still he made some progress on editing. The coming week is the same with a major wine report due to come out.

We have a discussion about the different challenges we face when editing and how we keep track of the changes we make while editing.

On to goals. Michael plans to edit five chapters. I'm aiming for another 50 pages of edits done.

On to this episode's topic: Killing our Darlings. We talk about what constitutes a "darling" and whether or not darlings happen more often for a seat-of-the-pants writer vs. one who is a plotter. Then we move into how we'll feel when our editors advise us to kill a darling.

Michael seems baffled by the idea that people read a few chapters of a book in a bookstore before making a purchase.

We digress into a side discussion of implausible plots.

Next episode: finding our style.

Recorded 2026-06-15

I jump into progress reporting because I have very little progress to report. My frustration is palpable. Michael shares that he's felt the same way several times with his current work.

Michael has edited nine chapters. He's cut 470 words from his novel.

We talk about working on other projects in order to keep the flow going, reading other people's works for inspiration, how we hone our prose, and how a contest judge can either get or miss what we're doing.

This takes us into a discussion of themes on our work, themes in literature, and the varied ways a reader can react to our stories.

We cycle back to progress when editing and how a negative word count is good, and the pains in cutting prose we like to make the overall work better.

We move on to this week's topic: Character Development. I talk about how a character develops as the work progresses. We talk about writing character biographies to establish who they are and how specific we are when defining our characters, in terms of physical descriptions. Michael talks about creating characters that mirror his own.

Next episode: Killing our Darlings

Recorded 2026-06-03

This episode we managed to limit our usual weather update to 36 seconds.

I update progress, which is "not much," and talk about attending WisCon and the impact it had on my work. In terms of actual progress, I'm still putting in my last round of minor edits in and dealing with moving from theory to practice for my developmental edit. Michael has written over 1800 words in two short stories and has gotten one chapter edited.

Goals: Michael: 5 chapters edited and "write a little". Me: Get into the dev edit. Do some critiques. We discuss the wisdom of doing critique work and about the similarity in writing courses.

Self-doubt: I talk about recovering from doubt by returning to the desire to finish a story I like, how my relationship to fun is finishing something and putting it out for the world to see. Michael has fun with the creative process of writing, but finds the editing and submission aspects to be work, and not fun.

We talk about formulaic writing, writing to hit the beats in your chosen genre. which Michael finds challenging. We compare writing to software and other types of work.

Next week: character development.