Two Writers, No Hook

Recorded 2025-12-29

We talk about yesterday's ice storm, missing our progress targets (so much for complete first drafts by year end 🙁), and what makes a book series good, bad, or ugly.

Next week we'll explore how to decide when to kill a character.

Recorded 2025-12-15

This conversation starts with Canadian stuff. A little reminiscing about SCTV and a discussion of snow clearing, eh?

I deliver most of my progress report but we digress into books for a minute before I come back and wrap up with stats on a decent two weeks work.

A spam call throws us back into Canuck mode as we bitch about phone providers.

Then ⁨ Michael reports his barnstorming results from the last two weeks.

We get into naming characters and I explain that I added a character synopsis feature to NovelWriterExtract, and that leads into my process vs. his, and which genres need more work than others.

Then we get to the question from the last episode: can you fall so in love with a scene/chapter that you won't cut it, even when it needs to be cut?

This leads into editing after the first draft, where it might come as a surprise that we're both going to take the same approach.

Then we set our new writing goals for our next episode, and I rant about Amazon's new gen-AI driven "Ask this Book" feature. As we wrap up, we decide that next time we'll be talking about writing books in series or not.

You can tell these sessions are largely unscripted because we start off this week's check-in with a brief discussion of sports, specifically the NFL and Formula 1. If that's not your thing, skip ahead three minutes.

At three minutes, Michael reports on his progress over the past two weeks. His word count: 5,455. then we digress into how many characters we have and how we track them.

At 5:20 we get to my update, a resounding (for me) 1,888 words, a new record! [yet still well below where I need to be.]

At six minutes that segues into the glitch I had to deal with, discovering I'd used a single character for two distinct, incompatible purposes. By 6:50, this has morphed into a discussion of killing off characters, and by 8:40 we're off to how people get killed off, particularly in movies and TV.

Around 11 minutes, I'm on about how I spent three days updating my NovelWriterExtract tool to pull characters and locations into my generated spreadsheets so I could keep track and not have one person doing two things at the same time. This leads into the genesis of adding scene metadata to novelWriter: story structure methods like The Story Grid (and many others). We compare my software/spreadsheet approach with his half-pad of paper with regular re-writes.

At 16:10 we momentarily get back on track and do some more reporting on our writing progress. Imagine that! Then we're off on the difficulty of naming our characters.

By 22:00 we're working on setting goals for our next two weeks, and how Michael's attempt to get 80K words done in a shadow-of-the-former-NaNoWriMo November, and how he got to the point where he needed 7,500+ words per day to hit that target. The upshot of that is we now both have a goal of hitting a complete first draft, in the range of 80K words each, by the end of the year. There's nothing like being in sync! This means I also have to seriously pick up my pace, right as we come into the holiday social season. This makes my goal—well, let's call it ambitious.

At 29 minutes we talk about how we each select (or build) the tools we use to support our work, and then a discussion of what a first draft means for each of us, which is vastly different.

Just before we sign off, Michael poses a question for me to ponder for our next session.

Recorded 2025-12-01

There's no real topic in this episode aside from keeping each other up to date on progress, although we do mention a webinar offered by Author's Publish (a great resource for authors).

Michael has a 500 word story rejected because it's two words over, but this comes as a surprise. It turns out that the word count in the program he uses differs from the word count in Microsoft Word [MS Word counts an ellipsis character as a word!]. I mention giving a talk on self-publishing to a local writer's group, and Michael talks about progress on his author website.

Recorded 2025-11-17

Every two weeks, author Michael Pinkus and I get together to check in with each other's writing progress and to set goals for the next two weeks. We're in different genres; he's writing mysteries, I'm writing science fiction. We also have differing styles (he's a pantser, I'm a plotter) and use different tools (he hates to type, you can pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands). We thought we'd try posting our update meetings. Maybe showing some of our different processes might be interesting. We're not sure what to call this yet. So far the latest working title is "you'd think two writers could come up with a decent hook."