Write Away

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Show Notes:

*9 Things Career Authors Don't Do https://amzn.to/3hsbjxF

*Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking https://amzn.to/3lfxZ6o

This post contains affiliate links.

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Show Notes:

*9 Things Career Authors Don't Do https://amzn.to/3hsbjxF

*Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking https://amzn.to/3lfxZ6o

This post contains affiliate links.

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Links:

*Dean Wesley Smith's Depth in Writing https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/courses?query=Depth

*Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain https://amzn.to/2WJBM1d

*Intro to Scene and Sequel https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/

*The War of Art by Steven Pressfield https://amzn.to/2CygEE8

This post contains affiliate links.

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Links:

*Dean Wesley Smith's Depth in Writing https://wmg-publishing-workshops-and-lectures.teachable.com/courses?query=Depth

*Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain https://amzn.to/2WJBM1d

*Intro to Scene and Sequel https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/writing-the-perfect-scene/

*The War of Art by Steven Pressfield https://amzn.to/2CygEE8

This post contains affiliate links.

Show Notes: Career Author Events https://www.thecareerauthor.com/events Karen Docter’s W Plot http://www.karendocter.com/workshop.php Passion Roadmap https://passionplanner.com/products/passion-roadmap Clifton Strengths https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx Atomic Habits https://amzn.to/3err3yl This post contains affiliate links

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Links:

*Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist by Sally Hogshead https://amzn.to/2ZQ3Pgf

*Dear Writer, You Need to Quit by Becca Syme https://amzn.to/38zKsMi

*Becca Symes' Write Better Faster 1.0 https://betterfasteracademy.com/wbf-beginners/

This post contains affiliate links.

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. And I’m recording this July 7th, 2020. So what have I done in the last week? Well, I published a romance book with my co-writer and it went sub-200 in the Amazon store, which is wonderful. We also put up our first preorder in surprisingly a year. We were at a point where we were doing preorders with every book, but then between health issues and family issues, we stopped, and I was shocked to see it was a full year.

I’m a huge fan of preorders. I like knowing exactly when things are going to go out. I’ve also had really good luck with them with rank in the Amazon store. The books that we’ve done in our popular series with preorder have gone below 100 in the Amazon store. And the books in the same world where we haven’t done preorders, haven’t gone that low. They’ve stayed maybe more in like the 200 or 300 range for a little bit longer. And that’s just an interesting piece of information. The sales are virtually the same every book and that is what really matters to me.

So this week I want to talk about Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster 1.0 class, which I took in May. A lot of people are familiar with it. It’s become really popular in this last year, but if you’re not, it’s basically a class on personal productivity.

And what makes it different from reading a book on productivity, is that Becca is a Clifton strengths certified coach, and she uses that training and a combination of personality tests to help students pick apart their personal productivity makeup. She does personal coaching, but the Write Better-Faster course is a series of lessons that help you understand how the elements of the personality test results interact in different realms.

So you start by taking three different tests. And for my session, it was a form of Myers-Briggs, a form of the D.I.S.C (the DISC test) and the Clifton strengths profile. And then she starts digging into an overview of those results and what they mean generally, and then specific realms and topics that writers deal with and how their results influence that.

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to go into detail about my personal results and what I’ve learned about me and how I work. I find specific accounts of, these kinds of classes or experiences super interesting for one, but it also helps me decide when I’m trying to figure out if a class works just to hear how other people’s experiences went in detail.

Some of the topics that Becca goes over once you’ve got a general handle on your personality profile are goals, time management, energy management, your environment, story creation, the process of writing, editing, and habits. She starts the class out by asking the students to identify what their essential pain is. Like what’s the thing that either keeps them from writing or is making writing feel difficult or whatever is the thing that keeps bothering them.

And when I started the class, April had been my least stressful and most productive month in, I don’t know, a year, two years. And so I was just like, well, I’m just going to try and maximize my ability, but then May took a horrible, just downward turn emotionally. And I only wrote a third of what I’d written the previous month and I was kind of flailing, but I couldn’t pinpoint an essential pain, but we did get some really good things out of our one-on-one. But what I’m going to do now is go over the personality profiles and then the Clifton strengths.

And in between, I’ll talk about kind of the things I learned throughout the class and also in the one-on-one. So the first test was the D.

You can find full show notes and transcripts on our website at http://www.writeawaypodcast.com

Links:

*Krisp.ai https://krisp.ai/get-krisp-now/?ref=cryscain

*The Motivation Myth by Jeff Haden https://amzn.to/38d0LhQ

*Becca Symes' Write Better Faster 1.0 https://betterfasteracademy.com/wbf-beginners/

*Tami Veldura https://www.tamiveldura.com/

This post contains affiliate links.

Hello, friends. I’m your host, Crys Cain. I’m going to apologize first off if the audio is a little weird. I’m recording in the middle of the day, which I try not to do because houses in Costa Rica don’t have insulation. All we have are windows with screens in them. Because air flow is more important than sound proofing.

We don’t have AC or heating, and my neighbors can be rather loud. Lawn work and yelling and talking, dropping things. So I am using Krisp.ai, which I totally signed up as an affiliate for because I planned on mentioning it today. It’s really good for phone calls, Zoom calls, anything you do from your computer.

It does some voodoo magic on the back end between your microphone and your recording system and kind of filters out some of that background noise, but it does also kind of mute the voice a little. So this may sound a little different from other weeks.

I have skipped—I have purposely not looked to see how many weeks I have skipped a few weeks. And the reasons for that were… I did really good. I recorded a few interviews ahead of time, and then I slacked off and I got to a week where I didn’t have an interview and I meant to record a solo episode, but then my electricity went out and there was a storm. And by time the electricity came back on so that I could possibly record, I was exhausted.

Next week ended up having my kid unexpectedly. I let a lot of things get in the way by putting off recording until the last minute. And then I just let it go several weeks. I think it’s been over a month. And I was starting to feel down on myself. Because the longer you let something go, the more guilty you feel about it, the less you want to think about it.

And then I realized that part of my resistance was that I didn’t have social energy. I was being quiet in my Slack groups. I wasn’t WhatsApping my friends as often, and I just did not want to expend what little energy I had on scheduling interviews and then having the interviews.

Well, if that’s the problem, I have to change the format of the podcast if I want to continue it. So I had three choices, three options.

* I could force myself to get back on the wagon. I could continue the format, but risk burning out, spending energy I didn’t have.* I could change the format and continue my personal momentum, but risk weakening what I was trying to build with the podcast originally.* I could just stop podcasting.

None of these would be terrible choices. The common knowledge best choice would be to, buck up buttercup, get some interviews in, keep on keeping on. But that didn’t feel like the right choice for me.

By changing up what I was doing in each podcast episode, I am trading the consistency of my time for the consistency of the content. I still want to do interviews, but I’m not going to pressure myself to make them happen.

There’s a lot of things going on in my personal life separation, divorce—that is a giant mental and emotional drain, whether you are thinking on it or not actively, The COVID second wave is hitting Costa Rica, and so there’s a lot of concerns with that. We started to open up quite a bit. We’ve been able to go out and eat at restaurants. My little area has had zero cases of COVID. We’ve been very lucky, but a lot of out-of-towners have been coming in from the city. And there’s some areas that are getting really bad. There’s this uncertainty about when it will stop being safe down here. All of that is filling my subconscious.

I made the choice to do a solo episode. And then of course I have procrastinated probably over a week on t...