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Meg Mitchell Moore is the author of Mansion Beach, a page-turner-y multi POV summer saga with everything you could ask for: a beach, a body, rich people behaving badly but also sometimes not behaving badly, parties, drama and just enough gender-swapped Gatsby to think hard about the meaning of the American Dream. I loved it (KJ here) and I also loved this conversation with Meg, who apparently thinks in multiple POVS and is always just as impatient as I am to feel like the book is done and wonderful when sadly it is… not. #AmReadingMeg: Audio: Great Big Beautiful Life, Emily Henry—Julia WhelanAlso mentioned: Julia Whelan's Thank You for ListeningPrint: The Road to Dalton, Shannon Bowringfrom The Book Shop of Beverly FarmsKJ: Mansion BeachWelcome to Glorious Tuga, Francesca SegalFind Meg at @megmitchellmoore on IG, or visit her website at www.megmitchellmoore.comHEY. Did you know Sarina's latest thriller is out NOW? Rowan Gallagher is a devoted single mother and a talented architect with a high-profile commission restoring an historic mansion for the most powerful family in Maine. But inside, she's a mess. She knows that stalking her ex's avatar all over Portland on her phone isn't the healthiest way to heal from their breakup. But she's out of ice cream and she's sick of romcoms. Watching his every move is both fascinating and infuriating. He's dining out while she's wallowing on the couch. The last straw comes when he parks in their favorite spot on the waterfront. In a weak moment, she leashes the dog and sets off to see who else is in his car. Instead of catching her ex in a kiss, Rowan becomes the first witness to his murder—and the primary suspect.Digital books at: Amazon | Nook | Apple Books | Kobo | Google Play | Audible Physical books at: Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | More paperback links here!New! Transcripts below!EPISODE 450 - TRANSCRIPTKJ Dell'AntoniaKJ here announcing a new series and a definite plus for paid supporters of Hashtag AmWriting. It's Writing the Book, a conversation between Jenny, who's just finished a blueprint for her next nonfiction book, and me because I've just finished the blueprint for what I hope will be my next novel. Jenny and I are both trying to quote-unquote "play big" with these next go-rounds, which is a meta effort for Jenny as that's exactly what her book is about, and we're basically coaching each other through, trading pages, thoughts and encouragement, as well as some sometimes hard-to-hear honesty about whether we're really going in the right direction. So come all in on team Hashtag AmWriting, and you'll get those Writing the Book episodes right in your pod player along with access to monthly AMAs, the book labs, first pages episodes, and come summer, we shall blueprint once again. So sign yourself up at amwritingpodcast.com.All SpeakingIs it recording? Now it's recording. Yay. Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I'm supposed to be doing. Alright. Let's start over. Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay. Now one, two, three.KJ Dell'AntoniaHey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, and this is Hashtag AmWriting, the weekly podcast about writing all the things. Short things, long things, pitches, proposals, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, other things I'm probably not thinking of. We are the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done. And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of three novels, The Chicken Sisters, In Her Boots and Playing the Witch Card, as well as a nonfiction book, How to Be a Happier Parent, former editor of The New York Times Motherlode. You've heard all this. With me today, more importantly, is Meg Mitchell Moore, who has written a book that I think you're gonna find is your summer go to. It is called Mansion Beach, and I loved it. And we'll talk about it in a second. She is also the author of Summer Stage, Vacationland, can attest to both of those great reads. The Islanders, Two Truths and a Lie, The Admissions, loved that one too. They're all great. So, anyway, lots of lots of novels in the family saga, sometimes touch of romance, beach, summer, deep, but also page turnery read genre, which is not a genre because that was too long. But, anyway, Meg, thanks for coming to chat.Meg Mitchell MooreThank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here. This is gonna be really fun.KJ Dell'AntoniaSo I've read some of your other books, obviously, and I felt like this one Mansion Beach was you sort of moving to a different this. It's a little how to describe it. You've got a lot of points of view, which you always, you often do, and a little bit of of a mystery, which actually, I've seen you do before, and then you've got a podcast going on so that you can have different people show show off what's happening. I guess I was hoping you would talk about the evolution of style, um, actually, over your whole career, sort of from, like, I'm writing a kind of a basic book with a couple of points of view and third person close, or maybe first person to these bigger, bigger stories with so much more to so much more to offer the reader. That's a really big question. Start wherever you want.Meg Mitchell MooreThat's a great question. I I don't know if it has been such an evolution. I have always written multiple points of view to the point where it makes me crazy. And I wish I could. I wish I could do one or two. I really wish I could. I've tried it. I can't do it. I just can't. My brain doesn't work that way. It's I can't do it. So even my very first novel, which I published in 2011 it was called The Arrivals, that was a much smaller story. So yes, I for sure, I've evolved plot wise, but I remember, and this was when I was brand new and did not know what I was doing, and I was just trying to figure out how to write a novel. I had so many points of view. And I remember my now agent. Maybe she was not my agent then and was becoming my agent, or maybe she was already my agent, but I remember her saying, we have to take out at least like five of these points of view. And it's still, it still has a lot. I just that's how I think those are the kind of books I like to read, usually, not always, for one thing, but it just. Must be how I think I'm always in everybody's head, and it's really hard for me to restrain that. So this book, I don't think, has any more points of view than any other. Might have fewer than some. It does have a mystery.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah it might, then some that I've read, I guess I I, I saw it as different, maybe in part because of the the use of the podcast to frame things.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah that's new. And then it's a bigger, you know, it's a bigger idea. It's a, it's not a retelling of The Great Gatsby, because I don't like to use that word, but it is inspired by The Great Gatsby. So it has definitely some bigger I was looking at bigger themes, maybe from the start. A lot of times I back my way into the themes based on what my characters are doing. I don't always start with the themes, but this time i i was looking at some of those big whether, what's the American dream and what does success mean, and how does money equate with happiness, and some of those bigger questions. And I don't always do that. I might do it in reverse, but I don't always do that first. So I do think it has bigger theme wise, it's bigger maybe plot wise, yeah. And some of the elements, some of the elements that move it along, are a little different. I was working with a new editor for the first time for this. This is my first full book with my new editor. So I think that had something to do with it too, because I think she was probably pushing me for some of those elements that don't come naturally to me, which I think ended up being good for the book.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, it's a little more thriller. Isn't exactly the right word, but there's definitely a page turning mystery in there. I know here's, this is like a so there's a page turning mystery in Mansion Beach, and the question all along for the reader, like, you know somebody is going to die. But I at least did not know who, but I had an advance, and it came as a as a digital book, so I didn't have the cover and I didn't have the blurb on the back, if a reader has those things, are they gonna know?Meg Mitchell MooreInteresting.KJ Dell'AntoniaAre they gonna know? Who it is that that dies?Meg Mitchell MooreI don't think so. I don't think so. The people I know who have read it both ways, I think have not known.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat's good.Meg Mitchell MooreIt's sort of that white lotus effect, you know, for White Lotus fans out there, where there is a mystery, and you care about the mystery, but you also it matters, but it doesn't matter as much as what's going on with everybody else. So I really like that as a framing device. I like watching it and reading it. And I tried it myself this time. I did it a little bit in two truths and a lie as well. I guess that's my only other one that has a dead body, and a lot of people are mad at me for who the person was who died, which I want. And two truths...KJ Dell'AntoniaDon't give it up.Meg Mitchell MooreNo, I won't. So that was interesting, so I hadn't tried it again, and this time I went in a little nervous, because people had been upset with me, particularly my husband. But I I still, I mean, I had the chance not to do what I did in two truths and a lie, and I still chose to. So I still, for me, it was the right thing, but it was an interesting experience. And I didn't try it again for a couple books. And this time I did also because I was playing with some of the Gatsby themes. I mean, Gatsby has three bodies, so I thought, I mean, I should have at least one, so I won't, yeah, I won't give anything away about…KJ Dell'AntoniaNo, don't.Meg Mitchell MooreWho or what or how, but I did enjoy having that as a device to propel it now that also, I don't think that was in the first draft. I don't think there was a body in the first draft. I mean, there were huge changes in this book, and I think that was one of them. I think we decided we needed the body after one draft.KJ Dell'AntoniaWow. Okay, now I'm deeply fascinated, and of course, I'm trying. So I'm trying to make this interesting and useful for those of you who haven't read the book, although you could also stop, go get the book, and read it, and then listen to this, and then it would be even better.Meg Mitchell MooreThat is true.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah. Okay, so let me just start by saying I am actually not a person who typically likes a book where your whole like, like, the question is, you know, either who died or who did it. So Lucy Foley, I've enjoyed some of those, but it's not necessarily my favorite go to genre, but the thing that made this book work great for me was exactly what you just said, that there's so much more to it. You I could see that this story would exist before you added that and that. I mean, that's so cool. And then I also, I'm not a Gatsby person, so neither of those would like, neither of those hooks is going to grab me. But what grabbed me, I think, was the different women, different versions of the American dream.Meg Mitchell MooreMm-hmm.KJ Dell'AntoniaIs that where you started?Meg Mitchell MooreI started… Yeah, I think so I would. Really, yes, I wanted to really look at notions of success, particularly for women today. You know, it's contemporary. It takes place that, you know, in the summer that is coming out, or that, if you actually match up the dates, and I think I messed up the tides and the moon in some places, but it's the summer. So yes, I was very interested in those questions. I was I wanted to have a love triangle, because I think that's interesting, and that's part of Gatsby too. So it's funny that you say you're not a Gatsby person. I think my first, another change from my first draft, was very Gatsby heavy. I think I tried to, I think it just was, I was trying too hard to to do the same thing. And…KJ Dell'AntoniaIt's kind of a reverse-gendered Gatsby.Meg Mitchell MooreIt is, yes, it's reverse gendered. But what I was doing was just, I was just trying to, I don't know what I was doing, but it was a mess. I mean, I always knew I wanted to play with Gatsby, but I tried to do it too closely. And I tried a little first person with the narrator, which that's how Gatsby is told, but I can't write him. Can't write successfully in first person. So that was a mess. And I remember that my editor probably looked at this thing and said, This is what are we doing? But what she said to me nicely was, you need to, like, don't worry so much about Gatsby at all, like you need to free yourself from those constraints, and you need to write the story. And that was the best advice, because that's when it started to come together. So it's more that Gatsby was a jumping off point, and some of those themes, I was so interested in how those themes are so relevant 100 years later, and they are, so I think I needed that as a jumping off point, but I didn't need to, you know, retell it scene by scene, or try to have the narrator feel the same, or do anything like that. And I had some missteps along the way before I figured that out.KJ Dell'AntoniaIt interests me that this doesn't seem to have taken any longer than your other books, did it?Meg Mitchell MooreUh, I felt like it took forever. My books have come out either with note with, you know, a year and then the next summer, or with two summers in between. This one has, this one has an empty summer in between. So I did need that extra writing time for this. And I remember, I always start out thinking I could do this in a year. I'll absolutely and I always hit. I'm a deadline hitter. You know, I always hit the deadlineKJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, you give them something.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, I was a journalist for a long time. I just, I'm not late on things. I just always, I'm just, I always hit my deadlines, but it might be awful. And so this was nobody actually. I mean, it was pretty awful when I think back to that first draft, and I think that my editor and Agent thought, okay, we can do this. And I looked at it, and I looked at my schedule and my life and my brain, and I thought, I don't think I can do it very well. So we put it off for a year, which gave me not a year's writing time, but maybe six months that I hadn't had. And that made a big difference. So this one took a little longer. Same thing with vacation land. I had the exact same thing happen where I thought it was going to come out one summer, it came out the next summer, but Summer Stage and then the book coming out, if I finish it next summer, will have no extra time in between. So it kind of, I've gone both ways with it.KJ Dell'AntoniaDo you see any like consistency in why? Or it just sort of either happens that way or it doesn't?Meg Mitchell MooreI think I when I try bigger, when I try bigger books, I need more time, as it should be, but I always think I can do it. You know, I'm patience is not, is not my best quality. Impatience is my worst quality. So I find that I'm usually impatient to get something done or to hit the deadline or to put the book out, and I have to slow myself down when necessary, and vacation land. It was a different editor, same publisher, but different editor. I remember her saying, having that talk with me and saying, it will be a much better book. If we put it out the following year, it will be so much better. And she was right. So we needed that time.KJ Dell'AntoniaI so totally relate to this.Meg Mitchell MooreDo you?KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm in the middle of it. Now, if anybody who's listening is also listening to our what the books are writing the books, what the books also like? It's a little mini series where one of my co-hosts is writing nonfiction and I'm writing fiction, and we're trading pages, and we're doing a weekly series of conversations. And this week's realization was, I have always known that I'm writing a story with multiple points of view, but I couldn't start it that way. I had. I had to start it with just this one protagonist. And then I thought, Oh, well, then it'll just be that, and it'll probably be really easy. Look, I've got this all planned out. I'm just gonna write. I'm just gonna, oh, I'll bet I can get, what if I got my agent a draft this summer? Hahaha, it's, you know, it's not good, but I'm so impatient. I want ...Meg Mitchell MooreRight, right. Well, I was listening to one of your to your podcast the other yesterday, and it was the one where you were talking about your story idea starting. How do you, how do you ideate the book?KJ Dell'AntoniaOh, gosh.Meg Mitchell MooreAnd you so you write a book, and then you present it to your agent, and then you sell it, right? So…KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Meg Mitchell MooreThat's your process. So I'm the opposite, where I write, I get the contract first, and then I have to write the book. And I don't know which is harder, because you don't have a built in deadline. You have your own deadlines that you said, but you're writing something that you said. Maybe this will sell, maybe it won't, I don't know, whereas I know it will eventually be published, but I also have that pressure of I have to get things in on time. So what do you think is, what's better? What's worse?KJ Dell'AntoniaI don't know. I envy your... I envy that way. I feel like that would make me feel more secure, more professional. My, my agent, doesn't… she's very against selling a book of mine, at least before I've written it, because she says, I'll, she says I might change it, and then, and then, it won't be what we sold or I won't be happy. So so I don't know if she's I think she's just against it as a general rule, but I know lots of agents that that do it, and I know a lot of of writers that do it. Sometimes I look at this and I'm like, you know, I could do a proposal. Maybe we could sell it. I could get some money. That would be lovely, right? Yeah. But...Meg Mitchell MooreI see, I see your point, and I know a lot of people think that way. I remember a long time ago when I'd either published, I think I'd published no novels. Maybe my book was about to be published, my first novel, and I heard Ann Patchett speak at a conference, and she said, she said that she would never take money for a book she hadn't written.KJ Dell'AntoniaWow.Meg Mitchell MooreAnd I remember thinking, Oh, well, if that's what Ann Patchett says, I guess that's what like, that's how the world is. But I disagree, like I disagree, because for me, first of all, she has a different life situation, but for me to keep income coming in steadily, because this is my only job, I feel like that's the way to do it. And I also feel like other industries, like my husband doesn't only get paid when he goes to the board meeting. He's getting paid every other week for his job that he does for the company that he works for. And so to try to approximate a little bit of a normal salary, I feel like that's the way to do it. But then I also see the other side, and I see why Ann Patchett wouldn't do it, because she's Ann Patchett, you know, so she can take whatever time she needs...KJ Dell'AntoniaSee that's so funny. Because I think, well, you can do this because you're Meg Mitchell Moore, and Meg Mitchell Moore is going to sell and a KJ Dell'Antonia, one of them will, and the others somewhat less, so at least that's my my record at the moment. So I guess we just all see each other differently. My co-host Sarina sells on proposal.Meg Mitchell MooreOkay, so fiction, that's fiction?KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, yeah. She sold thrillers and romances that way. Okay, so she has a bigger track record. But also, I've known people, you know, I guess there's just different ways of of of doing it. And I would not say that I chose this. It chose me.Meg Mitchell MooreInteresting, but there was always that chance. I mean, my agent... If I said to my agent, I don't want to sell till I write, she would say, Great, that might be better for both of us. We'll probably sell it for more, because you might write something really good, but I just don't want to take that. I'm too impatient, you know, I'm just Yes, maybe, if, you know, maybe if I had, you know, had some big blockbuster, and then I thought, Okay, now for two years, it doesn't matter what's coming in, because I'm getting money from that book, that would be different. But, um, that's not how it works for most people.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, and maybe I would feel less impatient with getting this done if I weren't like, I want to get to the point where I know if we're going to sell like, I wrote a whole thing last summer, and it never got to the point that we felt like we could sell it, and I I'm sick of it. I can't write it anymore. I'm done with it. I mean, maybe I'll come back to it, but, yeah, right. And like, I've had, you know, a freelance editor at it who's really good. My agent's been at it. I finished it like three times, and apparently it still sucks. So I'm done.Meg Mitchell MooreSo that's interesting, because I always think that I would not be writing good books if I didn't know if my editor gets a very messy draft, and all of my editors have gotten bad dress and really helped me. And without that step, I don't think I would ever write a book that could even be sold. So I feel like I need to know, okay, somebody else who is better at this is going to be helping me really soon. I just need to get through it.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat's that would be amazing. I don't think my editor cares enough about me to do that. So...Meg Mitchell MooreOh, my editor would absolutely prefer a cleaner draft. Like, no question. I mean, she would be delighted if I showed it to five people and got feedback, but I'm always in a rush. So I'm like, here you're the first reader. Here you go. She's like, thank you.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, that's my agent. I'll be like, Look, I'm done it's great! and She's no... it is great, but you know what would be really great? Poor agent. Yeah, okay. So, so we're we're both impatient, but we're doing this in in very different ways. Well, now I want to hear more about that. How do you go from a first draft with no body, to a final draft where the body, it's definitely one of the things that's pushing people to turn the page. It's not the only thing. So maybe that's the good news of not having started with a body. Also, did you know whose body it was?Meg Mitchell MooreUm, we discussed because, yeah, I mean, we discussed a little bit about it. I remember thinking, Could it be this person? And here's why we wouldn't want that person. Could it be this person? So we had some discussion. I didn't write it. I once I knew who it was. I didn't write multiple versions of it. I always had that person. But, and I guess I just think of it as more of a framing device than anything, and a framing device, you can add the frame later.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah.Meg Mitchell MooreSo the middle was mostly what was happening, was happening, and then there was this framing device and and then there are certain things at the end that kind of came together. And I was like, Oh my gosh, this makes it all come together. But I didn't know that in the beginning. And that was so you may be late.KJ Dell'AntoniaDid you not know how the body became a body?Meg Mitchell MooreAh, that changed. There was...KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, I could see that.Meg Mitchell MooreAnd then I thought, oh my gosh, this is kind of what I needed to pull together all those themes. It was those exciting moments that really don't happen very often.KJ Dell'AntoniaOh, I bet and I mean, I can see it from the outside as a reader. It really did. It made it like your ending is one of those endings that changes the whole, your whole reading experience for the better, right? Not that it wasn't a great reading experience the whole time. You know, sometimes somebody doesn't stick the landing, and then you're like, yeah, no, I don't really want to recommend this. I mean, it was fine, right? But, and sometimes it's just great. It's like, solid. You're happy, yay. Okay, that's a good, it's a good. Yours colors the entire like, if I were somebody who would go back and reread it, would color the entire experience differently.Meg Mitchell MooreOh, Thank you!KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, which is cool, yeah, very cool.Meg Mitchell MooreNow, when I wrote Vacationland, I started with a body, and the body came out. So I had the opposite experience, where I thought I was writing a thriller. The whole time. I was like, this is going to be my thriller. There's a body. And I had it all. And to me, it made sense. It all tied up, and my different editor, but my then editor said, I like everything but the body.KJ Dell'AntoniaWow.Meg Mitchell MooreWe had to keep it was first it was a an important body, and then it was a less important body, and then it became the body of a seal, because I had to have just a scene of children looking at something they found in the water in the very beginning. And so it was a body, and then it was a seals body. This time. I got to keep my body at least.KJ Dell'AntoniaSo I love this also, because you haven't been, um, pigeonholed into a genre that involves bodies or doesn't involve bodies. Has that been a thing as you've as you've gone from book to book where people are like, well, I don't know… Meg, people don't really want you to kill people or the, you know, the opposite. Well, I don't know, people are kind of looking for some more thrills from you.Meg Mitchell MooreWell, Vacationland. I remember that editor said they don't, we don't want this from you. We want, we don't want. We want a summer book. We don't want. We're not looking for a thriller. You know, they had other thrillers. You know what? They're doing their own end of the business, too. So they definitely said that this time. I mean, I feel like I'm not pigeonholed, but categorized as beach as a beach book. But I think within beach books you can do all of those things. Yeah. So if I were to write a giant thriller that I said, I think this should come out in the fall, and it's a big book, I that's when they would probably say, I don't know if your audience, if you have the audience, right, pull that off unless the book is amazing, you know? I do feel like I need to come out in the summer to keep my readers.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, I actually love that. That beach book is a You're right. It's a pretty big genre. It encompasses a lot. It encompasses a lot of of things, the only requirement being that it's, you know, entertaining, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a book requirement anyway. But...Meg Mitchell MooreRight, right. It is interesting because my books also happen to usually take place on beaches, but not all beach books do. So it is, it has become a very big category and competitive like you also want to stand out in that category, because there are so many books with the word summer in the title or the word beach in the title, or this. Actually, this cover is a departure for me, which I love, because I feel like I have done the just the oceanscape or the main or the woman looking at the water. I've had those kinds of covers.KJ Dell'AntoniaIt's your first... It's, it's, it's a cartoony cover. I don't, I don't mean that it, you know that sounds Yeah, it's almost a romancy cover. But there's only one person. First. I'm just so you guys should, it'll, it'll be in the show notes. You should, you should take a look, because you're right. It is a departure. I see, yeah, I see what you're saying there. But this one's, it's a hardback, right?Meg Mitchell MooreYes.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah. Have all your books come out first in hardback?Meg Mitchell MooreThey have, yep.KJ Dell'AntoniaNice, cool.Meg Mitchell MooreHave yours?KJ Dell'AntoniaNo, none.Meg Mitchell MooreNone? Okay, now, what do you now…? Do you think that… that, I sometimes I feel like that's a great thing too.KJ Dell'AntoniaI go back and forth on that. My agent is bummed about it. But for me, it's frankly, much easier to, like, go out to everyone and be like, spend $18 versus be like spend $38.Meg Mitchell MooreI agree.KJ Dell'AntoniaSo I haven't minded. Oh, and I was at the Newburyport Book Festival a few years ago, and they accidentally got my second book only in hard book, because it was, it came out in hardback and paperback at the same time, which there was a moment of about six months when publishers were doing that, and then they stopped and they only had the hardback. And I was like, Oh, I don't even want anyone to buy that. Like that, isn't I would be mad if I bought a hardback...Meg Mitchell MooreRight, right.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd then the next day, I was at the store and was like, hey!?Meg Mitchell MooreRight, yeah, it's interesting, because I do actually love… because I bought your book The Chicken Sisters this weekend, in paperback, and I love, I love paperback, yeah, I love it.KJ Dell'AntoniaFor travel…?Meg Mitchell MooreLighter, yeah, and I think it is appealing. It's so interesting. I mean, I remember Emily Henry's first couple, at least, came out paperback, and then now that she can sell so well, they now they come in hardcover, but I still feel like...KJ Dell'AntoniaI look at them and I'm like, I don't want that that way. Now, I'll just buy a digital version, because I don't that's not…Meg Mitchell MooreRight? Right. It's really interesting. And I know I don't understand the sales end of it, the way that the people who are doing the job do, and the profits and the margin and all that. But I kind of feel like, why isn't everything in paperback right away? You know?KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, no, I feel the same way. And and also people's, especially now we're thinking, we're talking about beach books. Some people's beach I mean, if my beach vacation is an airplane beach vacation, I might bring one hardback, maybe...Meg Mitchell MooreRight.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd maybe, probably not, because I'm a fast reader, I could easily eat that on the plane, and then there I would be. So...Meg Mitchell MooreRight.KJ Dell'AntoniaI don't know.Meg Mitchell MooreRight, yeah.KJ Dell'AntoniaI guess that's what e-readers are for.Meg Mitchell MooreThat's true.KJ Dell'AntoniaWell, I mean, gosh, I could probably talk to you about in depth, about the writing of this for about 12 hours. Because, okay, one one last thought. So listeners, Meg writes like we said, in multiple points of view. Talk to me about how you know when to change the point. You know what point of view a scene should be told from?Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, I don't. I'm it's so much. I do so much rewriting, a lot of that. I mean, I'm just thinking, I just turned in a draft yesterday of, hopefully next summer's novel, and I that is also multiple points of view. It's, I think it's mostly three, it's three adult sisters and they each have a point of view. There might be a couple little scattered things, but when I look back, I think I need to probably adjust, even in the draft I just turned in, I think I'm a little heavily weighted toward one over the other, so I don't always know. I just go on gut and instinct, and then I fix it later, which is how I do almost everything. I just go by instinct, and it's usually wrong And I change it later.KJ Dell'AntoniaSo, you'll, you'll be like, you've written a scene, and the point of view of one person, you realize, oh, either it's the other person's turn to have some more time, or I need their inner thoughts, not this person's inner thought...Meg Mitchell MooreRight. Yeah, its not very organized.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd sometimes you drop in like, you know, a kid on a beach or something, is that when you need something to happen that you that your protagonists don't know? Or just, you just feel like?Meg Mitchell MooreI think, I think it's fun. I just think it's fun sometimes to have this person you haven't heard from and you won't hear from again. But a lot I probably did. I probably do that. It probably gets taken out 80% of the time when I do that, because usually it doesn't make sense. But I just wanted to do it. I did it in my book. I just turned in and the first this scene between the a realtor and her husband, the realtor who's selling this house that these people are in. She doesn't matter to the book, but I just really wanted to write the scene of her and her husband, and I even wrote in the draft. I know this doesn't make sense, and my editor said, Yeah, this doesn't make sense. Like, you either need more of them, or they need to go. I don't know what they're...KJ Dell'AntoniaDo you ever give them away for? Like, you know, here's your pre order bonus. Read this extra scene…Meg Mitchell MooreI should do that. Maybe I'll do that. They'll do that. I have never done that, but maybe I will. But I feel like, I think it might be Anne Tyler. I remember reading an interview. Is she the one who does the strings like she has strings with different?KJ Dell'AntoniaMaybe, i don't know.Meg Mitchell MooreEvery character has a different colored string, and then she pulls down the red one because it's the red, you know, that's how she knows who she's writing. And I thought that was really cool, but I've never done it.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat sounds like a lot of work.Meg Mitchell MooreI guess.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd, like, I would need a different…I need a bulletin board. Okay.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, I don't know where you, where I would hang it from, but it's just seems kind of nice to think, then maybe...KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah it does.Meg Mitchell MooreShe knows if she's done the right amount for everybody.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, The Chicken Sisters is alternating points of view. And I just, I just alternated. And then sometimes that was a problem, and I had to figure out, like, how to get somebody's feelings? Yeah? So....Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, it's confusing. I don't know why I do it to myself, because sometimes I'll just read a perfectly, a book that's just perfectly written in first person. I'm trying to think of an example right now, because I don't even always read that much in first person, but like, Yellowface? … Yellowface. Okay, that book was so, like, simple in a way, but I love I loved it. I thought it was brilliant, and it was all just this point of view, and...KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd didn't you occasionally get, like a newspaper article? I think...Meg Mitchell MooreMaybe, maybe.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat must have been what she did when she had something her person couldn't know.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah. I guess, yeah. I guess, technically, it would be harder to do it all from one because you how do they know everything? But I feel like I get lost, like I have trouble. I literally lose the plot, because I'm just this person's off doing something in their day that might have nothing to do with what's going on. I get really caught up in that kind of stuff, and that's what I have to edit out.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, I'm always trying not to do that. I'll sit there while I'm writing, like, No, do not let them move their coffee cup. They can move the coffee cup in a later draft, if the coffee cup is still here, if they're even still in this coffee shop, if this coffee shop even exists. But I can't seem to stop it. My my like, default mode is, you know, he said while taking a sip and burning his lip or whatever, right? Just, I can't seem to not do it.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, but sometimes that's where you get the gold too, because you wrote all that, and maybe that one sentence is the thing that you needed. So it's just the process.KJ Dell'AntoniaYeah, it is. It's just the process, and it's longer than we hope and slower than we hope...Meg Mitchell MooreAlways...Always. Yes.KJ Dell'AntoniaAnd more, and more revising. Well, do you have any, like, genius words about revision for people? Because it sounds like you do a lot of it.Meg Mitchell MooreI do a lot of it. I think just is so important. It's just so for me, it's so important. I just think nobody gets it right. I hope nobody gets it right the first time. Because if they do, I'm really jealous, but I think for the most part, nobody gets it right the first time. So revision is, I mean, I'd say I spent almost as much time on the revision I probably do as I do on the first draft.KJ Dell'AntoniaDo you still lie to yourself in the first draft and let yourself pretend it's going to be right?Meg Mitchell MooreOh yeah. I always think, Oh, this is the time I did it, I nailed it, and then I get my editorial letter, and it's like, great start. Here's the 700 things that you need to do now.KJ Dell'AntoniaWell, thank you. I feel better. I hope everyone else does too.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, it's a long process.KJ Dell'AntoniaIt really is, all right. Well, this was fantastic. I really enjoyed it.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, me too.KJ Dell'AntoniaAs we hit the end of any episode, we always like to ask people what they've been reading. So I hope I'm not springing that on you.Meg Mitchell MooreNo, I just I always have an audio book going and a regular book going on audio I just started the Emily Henry, the new Emily Henry, which I've never listened to her books. I've always read them, and I know that Julia, the famous Julia Whelan, is always her narrator, so and she's phenomenal. So I'm loving the audio version, which is just funny that I've never done it with Emily Henry before.KJ Dell'AntoniaDid you listen to Julia Whelan's book that she wrote herself?Meg Mitchell MooreMhmm.KJ Dell'AntoniaThat was so fascinating, because it really was different, like I actually read it, but I could feel the… yeah. Anyway, okay.Meg Mitchell MooreOh, you should go back and also listen. It's so it's such a good audio book.KJ Dell'AntoniaI bet.Meg Mitchell MooreYeah, it was fantastic. And then I'm reading a novel called The Road to Dalton that my friend Hannah, who owns the Book Shop of Beverly Farms in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, phenomenal store recommended to me. So I bought it last time I was there, and it is about a bunch of people in a small town in Maine, which is my vibe immediately I was in. But it's very good. So I'm reading that. I can't, I can't remember the author, which is unusual for me, but Shannon something I think [Shannon Bowring].. But it's The Road to DaltonKJ Dell'AntoniaThat's okay. I will find it well. As everyone is gathered, I just finished Mansion Beach. I I really loved it. It was a rare book that I loved even more when I got to the end of it. And, yeah, it was amazing. And also in that, that vibe, that sort of small town Maine and yet, but this is like small island, middle of the Atlantic. Welcome to Glorious Tuga. Have you heard of this one?Meg Mitchell MooreNo. I've never heard of it.KJ Dell'AntoniaOkay, so it's a tiny island settled 300 years ago by a miscellanea of Dutch and British and and African people didn't have any locals. So that's kind of and they have formed the society. It's only open for half the year, because you can't, like, get a boat into it, because storms and currents and whatnot. So this woman has gone thinking that she's going to study the native tortoise population all Darwin, but she gets there and they're like, great. You're a vet. That's what we need. So it's kind of like all creatures great and small meets...I don't even know what it meets yet, I got to come up with that. But it's really a lot of fun. And it's very multi it's multi POV in a really interesting way, because you're with her, and then sort of whenever you kind of get a little interested in someone else, you're like, Oh, why are they doing that? Then maybe you'll switch to their POV. it's really, I really enjoyed it so, so that was fun. So those are my ranks, all right. Well, thank you so much, listeners for joining us, and thank you, Meg for joining me today. Where can people follow you? Where's the best?Meg Mitchell MooreMostly on Instagram @Meg Mitchell Moore, I'm on Facebook, but I don't use it very often and I kinda want to leave it. So…I also just read the Facebook, the Facebook memoir.KJ Dell'AntoniaOh yeah?Meg Mitchell MooreNo, I really want to leave Facebook, but also I know that they own Instagram. So anyway, Instagram is the best place to find me, and I was so happy to be here. Thank you. It was really fun.KJ Dell'AntoniaThis was super. Okay. Thanks everyone for listening, and until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.Sarina BowenThe hashtag am writing podcast is produced by Andrew Perella. Our intro music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Amy Klein is the author of the new book, "The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind." As a former fertility patient, she did 9 rounds of IVF on her road to becoming a parent, and wrote about all of it for the New York Times Motherlode blog in her "Fertility Diary" column. This week on the podcast, Amy and I are talking about fertility, her journey, and the advice she has for others. Read the full show notes on Dr. Aimee's website. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more fertility tips! Do you have questions about IVF?Click here to join Dr. Aimee for The IVF Class. The next live class call is on Monday, October 21, 2024 at 4pm PST, where Dr. Aimee will explain IVF and there will be time to ask her your questions live on Zoom. Join Egg Whisperer School Checkout the podcast Subscribe to the newsletter to get updates Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America's most well known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby-making is what gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.

Transracial adoptee Matthew shares how he's found clarity and resolved confusion about who he is to find peace. There are insights aplenty on shame, feeling different and a host of other issues that can plague transracial adoptees.Here's the book I mention https://www.amazon.com/Power-vs-Force-Dr-David-R-Hawkins-audiobook/dp/B000KZRMCOMATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, which comes out in January 2023 from Little, Brown. Most recent are the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others) and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Also forthcoming is a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch,The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian, VICE.com, and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica, and Witness, among others. He has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint, and elsewhere.Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast, and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs, and the Tin House, Kundiman, and One Story writing conferences.https://matthewsalesses.com/https://www.instagram.com/m.salesses

 Join Michael in his conversation with Dr. Catherine Musemeche as they discuss her new book, Lethal Tides: Mary Sears and the Marine Scientists Who Helped Win World War II, which explains how the science of oceanography helped US armed forced prepare for the battles in the Pacific. Mary and her team were the hidden figures behind some of the great successes of the Pacific campaign.GuestDr. Catherine MusemecheIt takes a decade of training to become a pediatric surgeon. Catherine Musemeche has been one for twenty years.Dr. Musemeche has been an associate professor of surgery at major medical schools and hospitals and has cared for thousands of critically ill and injured children from newborns to teenagers. Her books include:HURT: the inspiring, untold story of trauma explores the topic of injury from the viewpoint of doctors, rescuers, patients and their families. HURT walks us through the development of today's advanced trauma centers and demonstrates in graphic detail why they are essential in surviving complex injuries.SMALL: Life and Death on the Front Lines of Pediatric Surgery, Dr. Musemeche's riveting account of life as a pediatric surgeon published by University Press of New England in 2014 has been nominated for the PEN American/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Award.Dr. Musemeche is also the author of “Wake-Up Call,” which was excerpted on the NPR website and included in At the End of Life: True Stories of How We Die. Read an Interview about “Wake Up Call.”Catherine Musemeche is a guest contributor to the New York Times Motherlode column. Her essay, “Lessons,” appeared in the journal Creative Nonfiction, Sept. 2015.HostMichael ZeldinMichael Zeldin is a well-known and highly-regarded TV and radio analyst/commentator.He has covered many high-profile matters, including the Clinton impeachment proceedings, the Gore v. Bush court challenges, Special Counsel Robert Muller's investigation of interference in the 2016 presidential election, and the Trump impeachment proceedings.In 2019, Michael was a Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught a study group on Independent Investigations of Presidents.Previously, Michael was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice. He also served as Deputy Independent/ Independent Counsel, investigating allegations of tampering with presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport files, and as Deputy Chief Counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee, October Surprise Task Force, investigating the handling of the American hostage situation in Iran.Michael is a prolific writer and has published Op-ed pieces for CNN.com, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Hill, The Washington Times, and The Washington Post.Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelzeldinSubscribe to the Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/that-said-with-michael-zeldin/id1548483720

In this episode of complicated conversations we are joined by KJ Dell'Antonia. KJ is author of the instant New York Times bestseller, The Chicken Sisters, a Reese Witherspoon book club pick. She is the former editor of The New York Times Motherlode as well as the author of the nonfiction book How To Be A Happier Parent. Her second novel, In Her Boots, is out now. Listen to our spoiler-free episode and pick up your copy of In Her Boots! * We discuss Rhett Smith, aka Maggie Strong, her pen name, and what inspired her. Listen to hear what the book Eat, Pray, Love and Monica Lewinsky have to do with it! KJ shares whether she has her own inner superhero. (01:13) * A mother as the nemesis in the novel? Yes please! We discuss mommy issues and the complicated parent-child relationship. (04:23) *We talk about a scene with Rhett and Louisa and what KJ learned about how much time she considers how she appears or presents to others…what will people think? (07:45) * KJ talks about how she reconciles her different identities - lawyer, journalist and writer - and different versions of success. (11:21) * We talk astrology of course and yet another author tells us about her obsession with tarot cards. (14:56) * KJ shares what she's loving right now and why she supports other authors so enthusiastically! (17:20)

Before contemplating how to be a happier parent, we should think back to when we decided to become parents. We probably envisioned the fun of playing with our children, laughter and conversations around the dinner table and pride and joy in watching our children grow and learn. But, for many of us, we find those images replaced by days of rushed meals (or just a snack bar in the car), hectic drives from one sports event or music lesson to another and exhausted family members spending more time with their tech devices than with each other.   Writer KJ Dell’Antonia, former editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, wanted to find out what had happened to happiness and what it would take for parents to find the joy they longed for. As she explains in her lively discussion with Marti & Erin on how to be a happier parent, KJ learned that joy comes with small changes – not by doing more, but by doing things differently. And she learned that when parents are happier, kids are too!   WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO BE A HAPPIER PARENT? When are you happiest in your life as a parent? When are you least happy – and maybe sad, angry or resentful? What small changes could you make in your daily life to try to create more genuine happiness for you and your children?   WANT TO LEARN MORE? ❉ KJ Dell-Antonia's Blog: Check out Dell'Antonia's book reviews & recommendations ❉ When Parents Disagree about the Best Way to Raise Their Children tip sheet by Marti Erickson ❉ Encouragement: The Power Tool of Parenting tip sheet from St. David’s Center ❉ Loosening the Reins When Children Become Teens and Young Adults tip sheet by Marti Erickson ❉ Recognizing & Managing Parental Stress tip sheet from St. David’s Center

Whether your kids are in preschool or high school (and beyond!) they have something to learn from How to Be a Person. Hilariously written and superbly illustrated, this book teaches us all how to be more self-reliant while also reminding us to help others along the way.About our guest: Catherine Newman is also the author of the memoir Waiting For Birdy. She is the etiquette columnist for Real Simple magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times Motherlode blog, and editor-in-chief of the James Beard Award-winning kids cooking magazine ChopChop. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts with her family.About our hosts: Jenn Curtis, MSW, Educational Consultant, author, and speaker, owner of FutureWise Consulting. Cindy Muchnick, MA, Educational Consultant, author, and speaker. Check out their new book, The Parent Compass: Navigating Your Teen's Wellness and Academic Journey in Today's Competitive World: www.parentcompassbook.comLearn from Smart Social's resources: Join our free newsletter for parents and educators: https://smartsocial.com/newsletter/Register for a free online Parent Night to learn the hidden safety features on popular apps: https://smartsocial.com/social-media-webinar/Become a Smart Social VIP (Very Informed Parents) Member and unlock 30+ workshops (learn online safety and how to Shine Online™): https://learn.smartsocial.com/Download the free Smart Social app: https://smartsocial.com/appLearn the top 100 popular teen apps: https://smartsocial.com/app-guide-parents-teachers/View the top parental control software: https://smartsocial.com/parental-control-software/Learn the latest Teen Slang, Emojis & Hashtags: https://smartsocial.com/teen-slang-emojis-hashtags-list/Get ideas for offline activities for your students: https://smartsocial.com/offline-activities-reduce-screentime/Get Educational Online Activity ideas for your students: https://smartsocial.com/offline-activities-reduce-screentime/2020 Ultimate Guide To Child Sex Trafficking, Human Trafficking, Sextortion, & Online EnticementSubscribe to our podcast on:Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1269872857Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/ps/Ikvg45xcfqi3cz5vxy7vsryf3uqYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/user/SafeSmartSocial/videos

Tricia Elam Walker--novelist, essayist, playwright, picture book author, and assistant professor of creative writing at Howard University--and KJ Dell’Antonia--novelist, essayist, nonfiction book author, cohost of the #amwriting podcast, and former editor of The New York Times’ Motherlode blog--are no strangers to writing across literary genres. In this episode, they join Eve and Julie to discuss their writing processes and how they’ve navigated the shift from writing everything from essays to novels and plays. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.

Episode 47   Guest Interview with KJ Dell’Antonia – author of How to be a Happier Parent   KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of the viral New York Times essay Why I Didn’t Answer Your Email, the former editor of the Times’ Motherlode blog and the author of the book How to Be a Happier Parent. Her debut novel, The Chicken Sisters, is a timely, humorous exploration of the same themes she focuses on in her journalism: the importance of finding joy in our families, the challenge of figuring out what makes us happy and the need to value the people in front of us more than the ones in our phones and laptops, every single time.   How to be a Happier Parent is an encouraging guide to helping parents find more happiness in their day-to-day family life, from the former lead editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog.   KJ’s links:   Website: kjdellantonia.com Instagram and the #BooksThatWon’tBumYouOut series: @kjda https://www.instagram.com/kjda/?hl=en Twitter: @KJDellAntonia https://twitter.com/KJDellAntonia Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kjdellantonia   To find out more about Samantha or to join her – Website – https://www.samanthadayconsulting.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/samanthadaysleepconsulting/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/samanthadaysleepconsulting/

Amy Klein is the author of the new book, "The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind." As a former fertility patient, she did 9 rounds of IVF on her road to becoming a parent, and wrote about all of it for the New York Times Motherlode blog in her "Fertility Diary" column. This week on the podcast, Amy and I are talking about fertility, her journey, and the advice she has for others. Read the full show notes on Dr. Aimee's website. Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more fertility tips! Join Egg Whisperer School Checkout the podcast Subscribe to the newsletter to get updates Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh is one of America’s most well known fertility doctors. Her success rate at baby-making is what gives future parents hope when all hope is lost. She pioneered the TUSHY Method and BALLS Method to decrease your time to pregnancy. Learn more about the TUSHY Method and find a wealth of fertility resources at www.draimee.org.

If you – like us – are prone to parental guilt, struggle with pandemic parenting, and wonder if it’s possible to satisfy your own soul while raising kiddos then this is the episode for you! Dive in and join Yael for a candid discussion with KJ Dell’Antonia, former editor of The New York Times Motherlode Blog and author of How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute. KJ offers practical advice for pandemic parenting, on mindset shifts to increase parenting satisfaction, and in raising happy, healthy, capable, and resilient kids. Listen and Learn Why happier parents make for happier kidsWhy you can be happy – even when your children aren’t4 things happy parents do wellHow to find success with kids and chores How to approach screen time                            Why not accommodate your kid’s every whim                              About KJ Dell’Antonia DJ Dell'Antonia KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute and a regular contributor to the New York Times, where she covers the personal and policy aspects of parenthood. Her research, interviews and reporting on the topic are geared towards helping all of us figure out “how it’s done” in the bits of family life we find most challenging. KJ is the former editor of The New York Times’ Motherlode blog and co-host of the #AmWriting podcast. An attorney and former prosecutor, KJ is a graduate of Kansas State University and the University of Chicago Law School. She lives in Lyme, New Hampshire with her husband and four children. Resources Diana's free resource "My Summer Map for Kids"How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute by KJ Dell’Antonia“Why I Won’t Sacrifice My Sanity to My Kid’s Online Schooling” WBUR April 27, 2020 Commentary by KJ Dell’Antonia“What Happened to American Childhood?” The Atlantic April 17, 2020 Article by Kate Julian“Turn Your Demanding Child Into a Productive Co-Worker” New York Times April 30, 2020 Article by Michaeleen Doucleffkjdellantonia.comInstagram and the #BooksThatWon’tBumYouOut seriesTwitter: @KJDellAntoniaFacebookKJ’s irregular emails about creative family life: http://followkj#AmWriting PodcastThe Chicken Sisters by KJ Dell’Antonia (released June 30, 2020) 141. Educating Our Kids at Home with Julie Bogart75. Mindful-Self Compassion with Dr. Christopher Germer 113. Self-Compassion for Parents with Dr. Susan Pollak24. Choosing Both: Straddling Meaningful Career and Parenthood with Dr. Yael Schonbrun

Many parents who are with their kids 24-7 are starting to wonder how to make this extra family time work. KJ Dell’Antonia, former lead editor of The New York Times Motherlode blog, joins host Krys Boyd to provide strategies for moms and dads who must now be both parent and teacher. Her book is “How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute.”

Amy Klein is the author of The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant without Losing Your Mind. Amy wrote The Fertility Diary column for The New York Times Motherlode blog for three years and writes frequently about health and fertility for publications like Newsweek, Slate, and The Washington Post. Amy and I talked about her fertility journey, what the much-discussed "baby boom" may look like for people seeking fertility treatment, and the transitions The Trying Game went through before ultimately becoming this compassionate guide about fertility.    

More words, better words, in less time? Sometimes. In this episode, finding your own path to write faster.If only we could write as fast as we type! You could set your clock by our book production, right? Not so. This week we’re exploring how to write faster with Sarina in the lead. Finding your own patterns, prewriting and avoiding that “stuck” feeling by finding tangible ways to explore your characters and book without doing battle with words dominate our conversation as we riff on ways to up our daily word counts without ending up with something that’s destined for the cutting room floor file. Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 30, 2019: Top Five Reasons to Be on Instagram. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.LINKS FROM THE PODCAST2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, Rachel Aaron#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Jess: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement Jodi Kantor, Meghan TwoheyKJ: Podcasts for book recommendations: What Should I Read Next? with Anne Bogel and Get Booked, from BookRiotSarina: 100 Deadly Skills: The SEAL Operative’s Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation, Clint Emerson#FaveIndieBookstore NEWSJenny Lawson, author of You Are Here, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Furiously Happy, will be opening Nowhere Books in San Antonio with the former GM of Book People. We love it when a new indie is born. This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.The image in our podcast illustration is by Jordan on Unsplash.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ:                                        00:01                    Hey writers, are you whispering to yourself that this might just be your year to make NaNoWriMo happen? Or maybe planning to do it again? Then, do yourself a favor and invest in Author Accelerator's Inside Outline coaching now, so that you've got a structure to free you up to use those 30 days in November to write something that really works. It is no fun to 'win' NaNoWriMo with 56,000 words and then realize 35,000 of them don't serve your story at all. Trust me, I speak from experience. The Inside Outline really works. Find out more at authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.Jess:                                     00:36                    Go ahead.KJ:                                        00:36                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                                     00:36                    All right, let's start over.KJ:                                        00:36                    Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.Jess:                                     00:36                    Okay.KJ:                                        00:36                    Now one, two, three. I'm KJ Dell'Antonia and this is #AmWriting. #AmWriting is the podcast, your podcast we hope, about writing all the things, short things, long things, fiction, nonfiction, genre, new and creative genre, proposals, pitches, emails to potential agents. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your work done.Jess:                                     01:26                    And I'm Jess Lahey. I am the author of the Gift of Failure and an upcoming book about substance abuse in kids. And I think I'm on like day 31 until my deadline, so I'm completely insane. You can also find my most recent work that I'm super excited about The Smarter Living Guide to How to Help Your Kids Succeed in School This Year, which was super fun to write. And my first foray into the guides at the New York Times.Sarina:                                 01:53                    I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of several USA today bestselling romance novels and my newest one will be called Moonlighter coming on October 22.KJ:                                        02:04                    And I am KJ Dell'Antonia. I am the former lead editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, the author of the book How to Be a Happier Parent and of a novel forthcoming from GP Putnam and Sons next summer about which you'll just be hearing so much later. And now that we are providing (by email) show notes every week, I'm going to invite everybody, first of all, to head over to our website and sign up so you can get the show notes and consider supporting us by signing up for the #Writer'sTopFive emails. But the real reason that I wanted to bring that up, is that every time Jess introduces herself on the artificial intelligence transcript app that we use to start out before our lovely assistant Marisa goes through and makes it all much, much, much better it says, I'm just lucky. I thought that was glorious. All right, we have a great topic today. Sarina, kick us off.Sarina:                                 03:16                    Today we're talking about writing faster, which of course you know is an art and a science. Jess laughs because she's up against her deadline, but the truth is...Jess:                                     03:29                    Jess laughs cause she's losing her mind. And KJ texted yesterday something about the fact that you just can't get as much done in a day as you think that you can get done in a day. And that's my life right now.KJ:                                        03:44                    Before we talk about writing faster, which I think is doable and there are strategies and I can't wait to hear them. I just want to say that I'm having two struggles this week. And one is that - I just can't do as much in a day as I think I can. You'd think I'd know that by now, but I don't. And the other is that I also can't make all the people happy. So yeah, apparently I have learned nothing in my life because I'm still trying.Jess:                                     04:15                    Well your book was not called How to Make Everybody Happy, it's just how to be a happier parent. So how are we going to write faster? Someone give me the keys to this car. How do we write faster?Sarina:                                 04:59                    I came about this topic listening to lots of fiction authors (because that's mostly who I'm talking to during a week) talk about how to write faster. And every once in awhile, a so-called friend of mine will post, 'I wrote 11,000 words today.' And I will feel nothing but rage, because I have never once written 11,000 words in a day and never will and that's fine. But it really got me thinking about why is my pace, my pace? And what does it mean about my habits that has brought me here? And is there any way for me to increase that pace? So my average pace, like on a longterm basis, is about 1200 words a day. And that is up from about a thousand words a day. And so some people would look at my pace and say that I was flying, right, because 1200 words a day, you can on average write four books a year. But to someone else, that pace is like turtle pace and what the heck is wrong with me? So, this discussion is really more about writing faster for you and not becoming a speed demon. Because I don't actually want to write 11,000 words in a day. But anyway, more on that in a second.KJ:                                        06:22                    I was listening to someone else on a different podcast, say exactly that same thing - about the people that can write 11,000 words in a day or whatever. And what that person said is, 'I probably, maybe could write 11,000 words in a day. However, the final 9,000 of them I would just have to throw away the next day. So, the gain would be zero. And that was her process.Jess:                                     06:50                    I actually had a really good experience this week. I got more written in a day than I had in a long time. And ironically, our listeners will be just tickled to hear it was while I was traveling. But I figured out why - it wasn't just that I was trapped on an airplane for a cross-country trip (which part of that obviously it had to do with it). But I realized that my laptop, (normally when I write at home, my laptop is plugged into a monitor that mirrors my laptop) so that I've got this nice big monitor and I can have multiple documents up at once. Which is great because my laptop keyboard stinks. But what I realized was that the fact that my laptop computer keyboard was broken, freed me up from editing as I wrote. So what I did was I was just typing, typing, typing, knowing full well that the edit was going to be a heavy one. But all I was doing was getting the chapter structure out. And I wrote 5,000 words that day on planes and was it messy? Absolutely. But something about being freed from that impulse to edit as I went was really good for me. And that's not something I had tried recently.Sarina:                                 08:10                    I have so many thoughts. The first one is I want to find you a bluetooth keyboard and ship it to you FedEx. So a couple of years ago, my father (foolishly, I might add) challenged me to a typing competition. He was laboring under the delusion that he was faster at typing than I was. So we had to settle it of course, as one does. And I clocked out at 95 words a minute. Beating him handily. I don't remember how badly and to save his feelings will not say right now. So if I told you a minute ago that my average pace is about 1200 words a day and if you put those two things together, it might lead you to believe that I can work for 12.63 minutes a day and be finished. But of course, I don't work for 12.63 minutes a day. And so, that led me to ask myself, what am I doing with all of that other time? So you just made a point that some of your time is spent fixing the B. And it made me want the following: (which I do not have) a tool that if I were just going to sit down and write for a couple of hours and then if I could look back at a video of what that page looked like as I went, I am 100% sure that I will type a thing and fix it, and type a thing and fix it, and type a thing and fix it. Because when I'm in the document and I'm composing chapter seven or whatever, and I'm looking at chapter seven and I'm writing it and there's dialogue and there's speech tags and all this stuff, I am constantly tweaking. Like, 'Oh look, there's two paragraphs that both start with the word I, let's change it.' And I just used that word two paragraphs ago, let's fix it. And that is my method. I am a fix-it-as-you-go kind of writer, because I just detest having a giant, horrible, messy chapter that I have to go back and rip to shreds for two days after I've written it. So at first, in my little quest for how to write faster, I listened to a lot of good advice about how to dictate things. And I tried, and I failed so spectacularly, because it turns out that the first way that something comes out of my mouth is never the way that I want it to. And that my process as an author, did not lend itself to dictation. Because sure I can dictate a lot faster than I can type, but I don't actually want that output. And what comes out of my mouth on the first round is not what I want to see on the page when I'm done. So I spent all this time trying to figure out why I couldn't get a dictated product that I was happy with. And it turned out, software wasn't my problem, the equipment wasn't my problem, the fact that Dragon stopped supporting the Mackintosh product was not my problem. None of it was my problem, except that I don't ever use the first thing that comes out.Jess:                                     11:50                    You write more dialogue, I don't tend to write dialogue. But do you find that dictation is helpful for dialogue?Sarina:                                 11:58                    You know, there's something that's more helpful for it. And that's this - the first part of writing quickly or learning to improve your pace is to understand what's holding you back. So, there might be people who don't type 95 words a minute and who are paralyzed by the blank page and who actually need that moving dictation. The eyes off the page to get that work out faster. In order to solve the question of how do I personally increase my pace you have to find out which personality type you are in terms of how it gets onto the page. So I just articulated mine to you right now, but a year ago I could not do that because I didn't actually know what was holding me back. So, then I set about trying lots of other things that weren't dictation based. So there's this book that I discussed with KJ once called 2k to 10k (and of course we'll put the link for that in the show notes.) And this author has a very analytical mind. I can't remember how quickly she wants our 10k to come. I don't even remember if she was advocating for a one day 10k or not, but it doesn't really matter. Because she was using similar analytics to figure out what her process was. So in her book, one of the things she says you should try is to make a nice journal of how your writing is going. So, if you sit down at 8:00 AM for 90 minutes, you should write down what time of day it is and what day of the week it is and how many words you got. And then you should do the same thing every single time you write and then you will see a pattern. I believe she thought she was the best in the morning, but that turned out to be wrong, she was most efficient at night. So, by analyzing your own ability to get words on the page, you can learn a lot about how to not waste your time. Which seems obvious in review, but was really meaningful to me when I figured that out. And then another thing she does in this book is actually the tool and technique that saved me, which she calls pre-writing. And this is where all the acceleration happened for me. She gave it a name, pre-writing, for something that I was sometimes already doing. Which is - I'll have a day where I'm finishing up a scene, and it's a great scene, and I love how it came out, and I will turn the page because it's done and I'll still have time and I'll still have energy left and I won't know exactly what happens next. Like my outline might be good, I might know the next bit of conflict is that my characters are going to have an argument about a thing and I already know what's at stake, but I don't know maybe where they're having it or what other little thing needs to happen first or just the really granular bits. Like how does that chapter start and how do they get into the argument in the first place? So this is where pre-writing is really important for me. So I close out that document, because that's the document where I'm gonna change every sentence that I write, and I open up my notebook, and I just start short-handing what's gonna happen. Like we start the scene here, and there's the problem, and here's the solution, and wait, we get into an argument. Oh wait, it's about the dog, the dog does it. There's this discovery on the page that's so free.Jess:                                     15:42                    Wait, can I ask you a question though, because I thought, (especially since you tend to co-write) weren't you guys doing that as part of your planning process for the book anyway? Or was that something that you were doing on your individual chapters without sort of talking that much to each other since you had like a big, overarching outline?Sarina:                                 16:03                    Right, that's exactly it. You know what happens next conflict wise, but you don't know how the scene unfolds.KJ:                                        16:10                    Yeah, I do something like this, too. What it looks like is something like, okay they're in the car, maybe they're in a coffee shop, then I sort of drudge along, just hit return and start again, yeah they're at the bookstore. You know, he comes around, oh, nonfiction section, perfect. I mean it literally looks like that. And then the next day when I go to that it also percolates in your head and sort of starts to turn into a scene, or it does for me.Sarina:                                 16:49                    Yup, and also dialogue, as well. When you just start blurting out onto the page the things that they're going to say to each other, you don't have to write the blocking. So you can quickly get to the heart of what is accomplished via that dialogue, like what plot is unfolding as people interact. And you don't have to worry about being consistent with body language, or that everybody blinks too much, or everybody's staring at each other too much, or all these little things that you find later that are too overwhelming. It's just the dialogue lines, no punctuation, no nothing. And that's when you figure out what's really happening in the scene. And then you take this God-awful, ugly piece of note taking you just did and then you go into your little perfectionist document and you write the scene in a way that pleases you. I'm just far more likely to fix fewer things when I do it that way because I'm excited that I've just solved the problem of what's happening.KJ:                                        17:58                    I think I could write faster if I could also write shorter. I could write less if I was more disciplined about what you just said. Which is what do they need to say to each other, why is this here, why does this need to be here? Because you know, frequently I'll have those two people in the bookstore or whatever, and there's all kinds of clever things they could see,or talk about, or do. And if I would just focus on why they need to be there and if I only wrote in one clever thing, then later on I wouldn't have to take out five clever things and that would speed me up overall.Sarina:                                 18:39                    Yeah. And that's where organization comes into play, because you can stash those clever things someplace else. Like, if you really like your note taking system, if you're comfortable with it, then you can just sticky-note it somewhere that 'Hey, this funny joke, that book we saw on the shelf, actually maybe plays into a theme that you're trying to develop.' So those little clever things can get set aside to percolate later.KJ:                                        19:13                    That's sort of a different question of working faster, I guess. Right now we're just trying to talk about getting more words on the page while you're drafting. But getting the right words on the page is good, too.Sarina:                                 19:26                    And then that whole idea about time of day, I haven't had much luck identifying a particular time of day that I'm better at getting words onto the page. However, I have noticed that the time of day that I get them out to the page has a very direct result on how I feel about everything. So, if I'm able to produce work in the morning, then I'm invincible. And if I sort of avoid it all day and end up writing it at 10:30 at night, then I'm just like on the treadmill and it hurts. So, that's another part of habits and how you get those words out and when. So sometimes I will even do the pre-writing step the night before. Like I'm feeling okay about the work for that day and I kind of know what's happening and let me just sit down and spew it into this notebook and then I will open it up in the morning and everything is less terrifying.Jess:                                     20:29                    That's what I think would help me the most. Yesterday I wrote for 14 or 16 hours, but it was obscene. And the thing that kept me from stopping is that I know that getting back into the flow is my problem. So I need something to help me. So that when I sit down in the morning, or after a break or whatever, I'm not like, 'Okay, what was I doing? Where am I? What am I doing next?' And sometimes I'll highlight things in the document and then just write really quickly, 'Here's what you were thinking about next.' And that can help me overcome that little hump, but it's also just a mental roadblock. When you have a document that's as big as a book, it's really hard to sort of wrap your brain around sitting down and diving back in. But after about 15 minutes or so, you're like, 'Oh, okay, I'm back in. This is good.' But I would love to eliminate that 15 minutes at the beginning.Sarina:                                 21:24                    Totally. For me, sometimes it's not 15 minutes, it's like three hours. And part of the reason for the three hours is that we're always convincing ourselves of something. I think writers are so guilty of this. Like in order to dig a ditch, you don't have to go back outside in the morning and convince yourself why that ditch should be dug. You know, the shovel is right there. But, with authorship there's a lot of doubt that comes into the equation and some of that doubt is necessary. So I like to think of it as like an in-breath and an out-breath. There are days when you just need to shut your inner critic off and just get that scene onto the page because that is what we're doing today. And then, maybe the next day you actually have to reverse the process and you have to invite your inner critic to the table and re-look at that scene that you did yesterday and make sure you're still going in the right direction. And so that requires a lot of emotional control of your inner critic. And my inner critic is not so easily manipulated as that some days.Jess:                                     22:31                    Well, I'm in that place with the book where I have these wild vacillations between like, 'I've totally got this, it's going to be so easy, I'm on the downhill slope.' And then not even seconds later, the enormity of what a book is will hit me and I'm like, 'I don't know that I'm doing anymore.' It's this crazy emotional place and it's so funny to me that I can vacillate so quickly between the two, but there we are.KJ:                                        23:14                    One was one of the hosts of Marginally was saying that she had read Wendell Berry. He had written that every day of farming, he would wake up, and lay in bed dreading like, and then he'd get out there and 15 minutes later he'd be like, 'Oh yeah, because I love it.' And you know (as someone with this small farm) recognizing that everybody has that 15 minutes. I mean, I think ditch ditch diggers do,too. You know, they know why they have to dig the ditch, but they're still like, 'Oh geez, not the ditch again, the same ditch, why didn't I finish that ditch yesterday?' You know, I think everybody's like that. And then you get out there and you're like, 'Alright, you know, I'm in the flow, I can see the progress, the ditch is getting deeper or whatever. Ditch digging might not be the best comparison. Anyway, I think we all have that feeling of get the butt in the chair and getting things going.Jess:                                     25:10                    The good part about this part in the process is I can overcome that, 'Oh my gosh, I have no idea what I'm doing.' If I just take a breath and sit back and go, 'What are you talking about? You've got this, you're fine.' But there were times with my first book when I couldn't break out of that. So that's good, that's getting better.KJ:                                        26:42                    Well as long as we're just talking about trying to get the work done as opposed to getting it faster. I also had a moment this week where somebody else was trying to get me to do something and that person was in a hurry and needed this urgently. My fresh morning time had already been taken up by a doctor's appointment, so my day was already not going great and I was gonna concede. You know, I was going to do this thing. And then I was just like, 'Wait, wait.' And I was being angry at the person in my head and I said, 'Who is doing this to you? You or that other person?' And I had to admit it was me. While they wanted me to do that at 10 rather than 11, they weren't necessarily going to know. So, I firmly put my little butt in the chair and did my own work for that first hour and a half and then I did the thing that the other person was asking of me.Jess:                                     27:51                    I achieved something elusive earlier this week. I was having a really good day of writing and I achieved the elusive writer's high. I've never experienced runner's high, even after years of distance running that's never something I ever got to. But I did have writer's high the other day it was really lovely. And I put on some music and I kind of danced in my chair a little bit while I wrote. It was lovely. It exists.Sarina:                                 28:16                    Well, let's spend another moment on the day when you can't find your writer's high. I have days when I just don't feel close enough to my characters or my topic. And sometimes those are the nights when I won't read anything before I go to sleep. So, instead of being tense about it - there's this funny part from Cheers (and I'm totally dating myself), where Norman, the interior decorator, would tell people, 'I've programmed myself to dream about your space.' And I love that line so much and I actually feel like I can turn that on a little bit with fiction. Where I will go for a walk, or I'll take a drive, or everyone knows how wonderful the shower is for writing thoughts, but I will just think about my characters in an unforced way. Or I will look for pictures on Pinterest of the coffee shop, or the attic bedroom, or the resort where they might be staying. I'll just do something that's tangential to figuring out the scene without actually worrying about what happens next in the scene. So we're not stuck, we're marinating. You're honoring the cogitation that has to happen before you're actually ready to go on. And yeah, it's true, I won't be getting any words on the page at that time, but I'm also not going to take flight from the problem. So, if you can find a way to allow yourself to think about your topic without actually saying 'What happens, what happens next?' then sometimes wonderful things happen that way.KJ:                                        30:10                    I love that. We're not stuck, we're marinating. You're also just finding other ways to keep your butt in the chair, right?Sarina:                                 30:19                    Yeah, or even out of the chair.KJ:                                        30:21                    Or you know, keeping your head in the game, then. Something, come on, do something.Sarina:                                 30:25                    Yeah, definitely head in the game. Once I drew a picture of the floor plan of the bar owner in my story. I didn't actually need the floor plan. I just drew it because it kept me thinking about him in a way that was not confrontational to what chapter 11 was going to do.KJ:                                        30:50                    I love the idea of you like having these confrontational, mental... And you're so right, sometimes you just can't get them, you can't figure out why they would do what it is that you need them to do, or what they would do instead that still makes things move. And it is a confrontation.Sarina:                                 31:14                    Yup. And some books are faster than others, obviously. People who think that my writing pace is fast, should remember that I'm writing books in essentially two series, where the world building has been established in previous books and some of the characters are already known. I just wrote an email 10 minutes ago to my assistant asking her to go through six books and pull out every reference to the youngest brother in this family. And then to go deep diving for mentions of the deceased father, because he's going to become important. And I will just reread every line about those people. So that falls under the category of what cannot be rushed. So, it's amazing that there are people who can write 11,000 words in a day, but I would still posit that on novel that I want to read again and again has some parts that have to take a pause after those 11,000 words. Because reviewing your own work for theme and motif is something you can't rush, basically. I always need to go back and find like, 'Oh, look how many times I mentioned lost sheep.' So, being lost is a theme of this book, and the sheep is the motif, and where have I underutilized this image and what was I thinking? That kind of thing, it's lovely to write fast, but if you give yourself permission to have to go back and think about all these things, then you'll end up with something that you're really happy with whenever you do finally write the end.KJ:                                        33:03                    So I think when I talk about write faster, I would just like to get another couple hundred solid words a day. I would like to spend a little less time hovering over the keyboard and a little more time with my fingers moving. But not 11,000 words.Jess:                                     33:27                    I think a good marriage for me in a day is a little bit of time spent smoothing out stuff I've already written and just pounding out new stuff. But I can't do both for really long periods of time because it's different, mentally taxing tasks for me. You know, getting a ton of words on the page is tiring in one way. And editing stuff I've already written is tiring in a different way. And for some reason for me, if I do a little bit of both, I can last longer.KJ:                                        33:58                    I will just sort of point out to myself, that I've done NaNoWriMo. I have won NaNoWriMo and I'll just bask in the glory of that for a minute. And it is the book that eventually became The Chicken Sisters. So, I can write 1600 words in a day. I typically don't, but I could. So some of write faster might also be make more space. I was getting up early on days when, in a normal month, I might not get up early. I was pushing things aside that I might not have pushed aside. So, making the space - I guess that's not writing faster, that's just writing more.Jess:                                     34:45                    Well, there's a really fun activity that I used to do with my students for NaNoWriMo when I gave them space to do NaNoWriMo in November, obviously. There's a little workbook that they used to produce and I'm not entirely sure that they still do. And there's a big page at the beginning of the workbook and it's got a big picture of basically what looks like your no button, KJ. It's like a big like stop button. And you're supposed to pretend to hit it, because that's your inner editor. You're supposed to silence your inner editor and so we would actually do it for fun. We would put the page on the desk, and we'd all slam the desk and say, 'That's it.' Our inner editor, we've just shut it off, so that we can move forward without having to worry about going back and make everything perfect. And that allowed the students to let go of that perfectionism a little bit and just allow the words to flow more and to become part of the process, instead of part of the editor. So that was a fun thing.KJ:                                        35:41                    You touched on this, but do you separate your editing days and your writing days or your editing blocks and you're writing blocks? I've been in a deep editing space, cause I just turned in essentially the final edit of The Chicken Sisters and I'm having a hard time. In fact, instead of getting into deep writing on my new project (for a lot of reasons), but including the fact that I'm in editing mode, I'm going back over the probably first third to a half of the book that I already have, and making it match where I know I'm going. Whereas in in the past, when I've written things I have not gone back. I've just gone forward the way I knew I was going, and then gone back and fixed it. So how do you manage that editing versus writing space?Sarina:                                 36:35                    I go back a lot. I really am a big fan of going back to the beginning, and printing it out, and reading it, and scribbling in the margins, and then doing an edit even before I've hit the 50% Mark. And Elle Kennedy doesn't like to do that. She likes to write the whole thing and then go back and fix it, but I feel too out of control. It's like there's dishes in the sink kind of feeling. One way that that benefits me is that I just printed out a book that I had just finished and I had exactly four days to do the final revision and the result was totally as expected, which is that that first 25% did not require very much of me because I had already been there so many times. The second 25% was okay, the third 25% was a disaster, and the last quarter was great because I had already figured all my stuff out. And I was able to write the last quarter of the book, even if I hadn't fixed the 50 to 75% part yet, I knew what was there and it was all fresh.KJ:                                        37:45                    I think it's just too soon for me. I'm only on my second hopefully publishable novel (I've got some tucked away). So it's too soon for me to sort of say, 'Oh, this is how I do it.' But, some part of me doesn't want to spend too much time going back and polishing the first 25% because at least in the first book there were things that I needed to go back and change. I don't think you're polishing anyway. It's somewhere between polishing it and revising. I want to revise to get the plot consistent, and the character development consistent, and the things that I know are happening consistent, but I don't want to spend too much time on it because there's a pretty decent chance that somewhere the final third of the book, something will happen that will cause me to go 'Oh, yeah. I really got to go back and and insert this, that, or the other, or pull out this, that, or the other, because that has changed. So it's an interesting balance.Sarina:                                 38:50                    I still take that risk. I'll polish the heck out of things even if they're gonna get changed.KJ:                                        38:57                    You have permission. Well this was, I am going to write faster, or better, or more, or something.Jess:                                     39:08                    I always just benefit from hearing how strategic Sarina is in her thinking about her writing.KJ:                                        39:14                    I think it's just good to take some time and think strategically. So I love that. But let's switch gears, who's been reading?Jess:                                     39:23                    Actually, can I go first on the book? Because that's exactly what the book I've been listening to is about. So, I had very high expectations for Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey's book 'She Said'. And oh my gosh, it's so much better than even I thought it would be. And here's why I love it so much. Of course, I love the background stuff, you know part of the story of this is that they had to get to people like Ashley Judd and Gwyneth Paltrow without going through agents and publicists, the people who it's their job to protect these people. So they had to do a lot of that and there were things I was looking forward to reading in this book. For writers, this book is a masterclass in investigative journalism. And I'm not talking about like sweeping ideas, I'm talking about nuts and bolts. Here's how they kept this document secret in the New York Times system, where they keep work in progress. Here's how Megan Twohey handled someone who's answer on the telephone said one thing, but clearly meant another. It's brilliant. And they really take you into the room, they take you into the page one room, they take you into the meetings where they were. I'm talking about the tiny, minute details that could either make the story credible or make the story fall apart. And I learned a ton and I also just got that juicy behind-the-scenes dishing on the guts of investigative journalism. And I was just blown away by the book. Absolutely blown away by the book. And if you get a chance and you see it in the store, turn it over and look at the blurbs on the back. Cause frankly, that's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Instead of having blurbs on the back, they have quotes from women about the Weinstein case, or Trump, or whoever. And it's attributed to She Said. It's so brilliant, it's just a fantastic book. Kudos to them, I'm so impressed. They just deserve for this book to be a runaway bestseller.Sarina:                                 41:38                    Sounds amazing.Jess:                                     41:39                    Yeah, it's just so good. Sarina, what have you been reading?Sarina:                                 41:45                    Well, I'm still in an editing hellscape of my own creation, but I have been flipping through this hilarious research book. Which is not meant to be hilarious, but it's called the 100 Deadly Skills by Clint Emerson, retired Navy SEAL. And it's the subtitle is The SEAL Operatives Guide to Eluding Pursuers, Evading Capture, and Surviving Any Dangerous Situation. And he is not kidding.Jess:                                     42:14                    This is like the last book I can picture you reading. I'm so intrigued.Sarina:                                 42:19                    I know, but it's for fiction naturally. So now I know how to bar myself in a hotel room.KJ:                                        42:43                    That's awesome, I love it. Well, I have not been reading. I actually have started something I'm excited about, but I'm gonna finish it before talking about it. So what I have to offer everyone instead, (and I'm actually really excited about this) I have found two fantastic new podcast, specifically for book recommendations. I can't believe I did not know about these, and maybe you guys did, but I am absolutely in love with, What Should I Read Next with Anne Bogle, who's also known as the Modern Mrs. Darcy. I want to be a guest on this podcast so bad, you guys. What she does is she has one guest and she asks them what they've enjoyed lately, what is not for them, and what kind of reads they want to to have on their bedside table, and then she gives them three recommendations after having this sort of glorious 40 minute long talk about what they like about books, and what they don't like about books. I love it, it's such fun to listen to. And on a similar note, I also came across the Get Booked podcast from Book Riot and this is two hosts and they don't have a guest. Instead, people write them in and they say something like, 'I have a really hard time finding the right thing to read on a plane. I need it to be distracting like maybe with dragons, but I really hate it when it involves, you know, the gender politics, what can I read...' These questions are so specific and then they launch into their book recommendations and it's so much fun to listen to.Jess:                                     44:21                    That's cool. That's how I use Twitter when I've got a student that has very specific interests, and a very specific reading level, and is a reluctant. I go to Twitter and I say, 'Okay, fifth grade reading level, basketball, a kid who's from central America, Go.' And then you know, I get all these cool recommendations. I love that.KJ:                                        44:41                    I believe, Jess, you said you have bookstore news. So instead of a fave indie bookstore this week, we're going to lay out some indie bookstore news for people.Jess:                                     45:05                    It's very cool. This is newly public news from Jenny Lawson. She wrote Furiously Happy and Let's Pretend This Never Happened and a fantastic coloring book for people when they're anxious. Anyway, she's just wonderful and she is opening a new bookstore in San Antonio. She signed her lease just recently. It's going to be called Nowhere Bookshop and she has secured the former head of the CEO of The Book People Bookshop in Austin, which is a fantastic bookshop, as the general manager of her bookshop. That will be opening goodness knows when, but either later this year or early next year. So that is huge news. San Antonio is going to have a new bookstore, and I believe also a bar, but don't quote me on that. It's gonna be a combination bookshop and other things. And that's just really exciting, especially since I have a date at a speaking engagement in San Antonio coming up. So I'm praying that she gets it done in time.KJ:                                        46:10                    Alright, well let's call it guys. We got places to be, we got words to write.Jess:                                     46:29                    Absolutely. Alright, everyone, until next week, keep your butts in the chair and your head in the game. This episode of #AmWriting with Jess and KJ was produced by Andrew Parilla. Our music, aptly titled unemployed Monday was written and performed by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their services because everyone, even creatives should be paid. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at amwriting.substack.com/subscribe

Joshilyn Jackson doesn't just write best-selling thrillers. She narrates them, too. Should we?Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 23, 2019: Top Five Steps to Burn Chart Success (a How-to). Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.LINKS FROM THE PODCAST#AmReading (Watching, Listening)Jess: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, Emily NussbaumKJ: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David EpsteinJoshilyn:Gretchen, Shannon KirkThe Better Liar: A Novel, Tanen Jones Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman#FaveIndieBookstoreLittle Shop of Stories, Decatur, GAOur guest for this episode is Joshilyn Jackson. She is the author of:Never Have I Ever The Almost SistersThe Opposite of EveryoneSomeone Else’s Love StoryA Grown-Up Kind of PrettyBackseat SaintsThe Girl Who Stopped SwimmingBetween, Georgia, Gods in AlabamaMy Own MiraculousDon’t Quit Your Day JobWedding Cake for BreakfastThis episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.The image in our podcast illustration is by TKTranscript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ:                                        00:01                    Hey all. As you likely know, the one and only sponsor of the #AmWriting podcast is Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps writers all the way through their projects to the very end. Usually Author Accelerator offers only longterm coaching and they're great at it, but they've just launched something new inside outline coaching, a four week long program for novelists and memoir writers that can help you find just the right amount of structure so that you can plot or pants your way to an actual draft. I love the inside outline and I think you will too. I come back to mine again and again, whether I'm writing or revising. Working through it with someone else helps keep you honest and helps you deliver a story structure that works. Find out more at www.authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.Jess:                                     00:57                    Go ahead.KJ:                                        00:57                    This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                                     00:57                    All right, let's start over.KJ:                                        00:57                    Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.Jess:                                     00:57                    Okay.KJ:                                        00:57                    Now one, two, three.KJ:                                        00:57                    Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia,Jess:                                     00:57                    and I'm Jess Lahey.KJ:                                        00:57                    And this is #AmWriting,Jess:                                     00:57                    with Jess and KJ.KJ:                                        00:57                    #AmWriting is our podcast about all things writing. Long things, short things, book proposals, entire books, short articles, blog posts, YA, pitches, whatever we can think of. And as I think most of you know, #AmWriting is really the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done.Jess:                                     01:43                    I'm Jess Lahey, I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and an upcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids. And I write for the Washington Post and the New York Times and various other outlets.KJ:                                        01:53                    And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of a novel forthcoming next year and also a parent-y type book How to Be a Happier Parent, former lead editor and writer for the New York Times Motherlode blog But I saw someone in one of our reviews accusing us of having a nonfiction focus on parenting writing. To which I was like, 'What?' I mean that has certainly been our professional writing, I guess our guests probably see it that way. But not today.Jess:                                     02:27                    Not today. I'm so excited. Can I introduce? Cause I'm super excited. Today our guest is Joshilyn Jackson. She is a New York Times and USA Today best selling author of nine novels, including one that I am (spoiler) not finished with, so be careful - called Never Have I Ever, it is so good. But one of the big reasons we wanted to have Joshilyn on today is that she does something that almost no one really does, which is narrate. She narrates her own fiction audio. And we know a lot of people, including ourselves who narrated our own nonfiction, but fiction is a whole other game. Not only does she narrate her own fiction, she's really, really good at it. She's won a bunch of awards. She was nominated for an Audi award, she was on Audio File Magazine's best of the year list, she was an Audible All Star for the highest listener ranks and reviews. I mean that's huge. And then I also have to add, because near and dear to my heart, she also works with an organization called Reforming Arts. And she has taught writing and literature inside Georgia's maximum security facility for women. So we have that in common as well. Welcome so much to the show, Joshilyn. We're so excited to talk to you.Joshilyn:                              03:56                    Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here.Jess:                                     03:59                    We love talking to authors, but one of the topics that has come up a lot for us is narrating audio books. Not only because Sarina Bowen (one of our frequent guests and sort of almost another host) has a podcast about audio books. Specifically, I'm a huge audio book fan and we've been talking a lot lately about people who choose to narrate their own fiction cause it's really hard. So we would love to talk to you about that today, but we'd love to start with sort of just how you got started with writing. What's your story?Joshilyn:                              04:40                    Oh, I've always wanted to be a writer. When I was three, I published my first novel using the Crayola stapler method. My mom helped, and to be fair, it wasn't a very good book. Yeah, I'm dating myself, but when Walden Books came out with Blank Books, I was in middle school and I would buy a Blank Book and write a novel into it and the novel would be just however many pages the Blank Book was. And I was a huge Stephen King fan. I would write these books, I remember one was called Don't Go Into the Woods and all these girls who looked a lot like girls who were kind of mean to me in middle school, one by one went into the woods and never came back. It's terrible, but really derivative Stephen King novel.Jess:                                     06:54                    Alright, so let's skip ahead to your adult life. How does writing become a part of your adult life?Joshilyn:                              07:02                    I mean it's my job, is that what you mean?Jess:                                     07:08                    Yeah, exactly. In terms of your professional work. I know one little thing about you that I would love to interject here, a bit of trivia. You got plucked out of a slush pile. How did that go down?Joshilyn:                              07:22                    Yeah, I didn't know any better. So what I did was I loaded up 160-something query letters into a shotgun, pointed it at New York, which is of course insane, don't do that. If you're getting ready to query a book query 10 - 15 agents, if you don't get a 20% return of agents saying let me see a partial or your manuscript, your query is not good enough and it doesn't matter how good the book is. So to shoot off that many at once is just to burn all your lottery tickets when you don't know if your query is good enough and is representing your book to a point where somebody is going to take you seriously. Out of the 160-something queries I got one request to look at the work and that was my agent.Jess:                                     08:12                    Wow. And that was the one that got pulled out of the slush pile?Joshilyn:                              08:31                    There's thousands of those they get everyday. And it wasn't the best query, but he was interested in the idea. So he asked me to send the manuscript, and I did, and we ended up working together.Jess:                                     08:42                    And how did that first that first book deal go for you? How did that all come about?Joshilyn:                              08:47                    Oh, it was a long time coming. So, he was my agent and he was interested in me. We had a couple of phone conversations, I sent him some short stories I'd had published. And he shopped two nonfiction book proposals, a children's book series, and two novels for me. At that point I was pretty ground down about it. That's a lot of rejection, and a lot of years, and a lot of work. So I just quietly said to myself, 'You know, I'm not gonna break up with my agent. I'm not going to have this big dramatic thing. I'm just going to stop sending him stuff, I'm gonna stop calling him, I'm gonna stop bothering him because I've done nothing but cost this guy money. So, you know, I'll just let it go and New York can suck it. I'm going to write cause I can't imagine not writing, but I'm done trying to be published. I was butt hurt, I picked up my toys and went home. And that Christmas he sent me a present, and a letter, and it was like his family Christmas letter. And at the bottom, he had written a little note just to me and he said, 'When am I gonna see something from you again? You really are one of my favorite writers.'. You don't say that to somebody who's never been published. You say you're so talented. You say you have so much potential. You say, I think we can sell this. You don't call an unpublished person, one of your favorite writers. So I sent him the manuscript I'd been working on and he sent it out, he said this is going to auction. And he sent it out to I think eight places like saying, this is an auction, you have two weeks. And we had a preempt in two days and he made me turn the preempts down. I was not going to turn that preempt down, I was so excited. It was an offer of actual like folding for a book I'd written. And he was like, no, we're turning this down. And I was like, okay, technically I'm the boss of you and we're not turning it down. He said, 'It's cute that you think that, but I'm the one who understands this industry and we're turning it down. We turned it down and he sent word out to the other houses that we had turned down a preempt. And everybody had 48 hours to get their best offer in and five of them showed up to bid.Jess:                                     11:27                    That's fantastic. I emailed with shaking fingers in return when I heard that we had a preempt that was for an amount of money that I was like, 'Whoa.' I remember typing back. 'Oh, okay. I trust you.' But in my head I was like, I totally don't trust you, we should accept this. I saw that you were part of a book called Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors in the Day Jobs They Quit. So what was the day job you quit?Joshilyn:                              12:07                    It's a job that I called tote monkey. I'm dating myself again, but there was a car parts place that had these dot matrix printers and when the stuff was all down on the floor from the printer, I would take a huge stack and peel those rinds off and then separate it like white, blue, pink, goldenrod, white, blue, pink, goldenrod. And then I'd file each of those colors where they had to be filed. And by then the dot matrix printers would have other huge stacks lined up and I'd just take them and peel them is all I did.Jess:                                     12:43                    Were you so sad to have to quit that job to become a professional writer?Joshilyn:                              12:48                    I had dropped out of college to be an actor and eventually was starving and had to take this day job. I called my father and I said, 'I want to go back to college.' And he said, 'You can go back to college until you get a B, I'll pay for it until you get a B.' So I went back to college and I never got a B, that job taught me that I didn't want to be doing that job.Jess:                                     13:18                    So the acting stuff leads us to the big questions that I'm dying to ask you about how you got started narrating your own audio work. And did that start from the beginning? Was that something that you specifically trained to do? Please tell us all about it. Because, and I have to sort of spoiler here is that some of the conversations we've had is about like, Ooh, that's kind of interesting. I wonder what it would take to be able to narrate our own fictions. So what does it take, Joshilyn?Joshilyn:                              13:48                    I don't think it's necessarily a good thing most of the time when authors read their own books, to be honest. Because it is a really specific skill set. And I did go to school in theater and I did live off the grid for awhile as an actor and a playwright. And most of the time when I made money, it was doing voice acting and I got some pretty good gigs. I've done voice acting for local commercials and radio spots. But I've also done stuff for a documentary that PBS was doing, stuff like that. So I had a theatrical background and when my first novel came out, while the narrator of that novel is a wildly, promiscuous murderess and people always think that your first novel is autobiographical, which of course my first novel was, but as you know from earlier, it did not sell. This was my third novel, so it wasn't autobiographical. I am not a wildly, promiscuous murderess, for the record. And I wasn't sure how much I wanted to be associated with her anymore than I was. You know, with a debut, that's the first question you get - so how much of this is your life? And so, I didn't really want to do it. My second novel, I figured I had that distance. Plus I also thought Arlene should sound really young and I don't think I've ever sounded particularly young. She has to sound young for you to forgive her. But my second book, I really thought I could do it. So I went to my editor and I said, 'You know, I used to be an actor and I've done a lot of voice acting, do you think I could read the audio book?' And she said, 'Oh, no, don't do that.' And I said, 'Okay, but I really have done it before.' And she was like, 'You know, I was with Warner Books and they were the most theatrical of the audio books. Some audio book companies want a real straight read with just very light differentiations between the voices and some of them want it to be really theatrical.' This was a very theatrical one that wanted big differences in the voices and they put musical tracks in and stuff. So I said, 'Well, can I audition?' And my editor said, 'Yes, you can audition, but you're not going to get hired. But, sure.' So, I had a friend named Darren Wong, he's actually an author, too. He wrote The Hidden Light of Northern Fires, which is a great book. And he used to run an audio book magazine called Verb, it was an all audio magazine. So he had a home studio and an edit board and professional grade equipment and he helped me edit it and set levels. So it was a really good recording and I did a fight scene with five different men having a fight. And I did a comedic scene so they would know my timing and I did straight narration with energy so they knew I could get them through the landscape descriptions or whatever. And then after I turned that in, like two weeks later, my editor called and she was like, 'Oh yes, you can read your audio book.' So I started reading my own and the first one did well. And so after that, the next time we got a book contract, they had a little clause in there that said, I had to read the audio book, it was already in the contract and I thought that was really flattering. And now I read for other people who aren't me, too.Jess:                                     17:32                    I had heard that actually because as I said, our frequent guest, Sarina Bowen, has a podcast called Story Bites with Tanya Eby. Tanya has her own studio and they tend to really pick apart narration. Especially since Sarina picks the narrators for her books and she's very picky about that and they raved about your narration. So they were one of the reasons we found out about you.KJ:                                        18:03                    You were episode three of their Story Bites Podcast. You'll want the rest, but if you want to taste it for free that's one way to do it.Jess:                                     18:22                    Well, and Sarina also raved about The Almost Sisters. That was a book that she really enjoyed and we trust her judgement. What I meant was you guys have read The Almost Sisters, I have not yet. I'm going to now though because the first of Joshilyn's books that I have read is Never Have I Ever, and I am so deep in and what I wanted to say is I'm listening to the audio and I also have the hard cover of the book, as well. And one of the things I wanted to say about your narration there is you have two very different women in particular that are sort of at the heart of this book. And I have to say that what I was struck by from the very beginning is your depiction of Rue, one of the two sort of main-ish characters. And you do such a brilliant job with her because I'm not even sure what it is you're doing because I don't have the technical words to describe it, but there's something in her voice that renders her a completely different human being than your protagonist who has such... I've heard for various audio book narrators that they'll often have recordings of their characters or are you able to do that just sort of as you go through?Joshilyn:                              19:56                    I don't use recordings, I do use my husband. I met him doing black box theater. We were working at a regional repertory theater together. The first time I ever saw him, he was learning to stage sword fight - that is hot. So we've known each other since we were teenagers. I was 18, I think he was 19. And he is a theater guy, his masters degrees is in stage management. So when I'm getting ready to do an audio book, I go through and set voices with him and he says, 'No, that's not right.' Or, 'Oh, that sounds just like her, but can you take it just a little deeper? Drop your register just a little bit.' So he works with me on the characters and it's good to have that because my voice sounds different in my head. So he's sort of my feedback loop. And then I'm an outside enactor like I was never method, where you go inside, and try to find some memory, and attach it. I've always been like, if you put your body and face into the shape, you'll feel the thing that your body is in the shape of. So the way I set characters is with a stance and a facial expression. So if I get into a certain position and hold my face a certain way, that voice just comes out because that's what I have the character attached to. So I'm sure it looks bizarre to my sound editor and director when I'm in there doing a scene with a bunch of different people talking as I fold myself into different shapes and make these weird facial expressions, but it works.Jess:                                     21:30                    That's really interesting. What that reminds me of - I was lucky enough to see Bradley Cooper play The Elephant Man. And at the very, very beginning, he walks out to the middle of the stage to center stage as just a guy, as Bradley Cooper. But he becomes the character by changing his body shape, that's how he does it. And he does it right in front of you so that you can see it happen. And it's a really cool thing. I think you should totally set up some videos so we can see what it looks like. .Joshilyn:                              22:00                    I would rather not see it myself. I don't want to feel self conscious about it because it works and maybe I don't want to see that.Jess:                                     22:10                    Well, so the next question I have then is now that you do all this narration, do you hear your characters as you write them?Joshilyn:                              22:19                    I guess, but I always have. And I mean, the kind of stuff I'm talking about with setting voices, that takes a lot longer for a book I didn't write. For a book I did write, I know what these people sound like in my head and I just try to approximate that with the voice and the range that I have. Which you know, is getting harder as I get older. In another 10 years I probably won't have the vocal elasticity to do my side gig anymore. So I'm trying to do a few more because I love it. I'm doing a few more a year than I used to, just to be able to do it while I can. Because you really do need some good elasticity and I'm not willing to give up drinking or fried food entirely and coddle my vocal chords to try and get another five years out of them.Jess:                                     23:11                    Can you tell ahead of time when a line is not going to work? KJ and I talked about this because we were lucky enough to be able to record our nonfiction books. And other friends and advisors have done the same - where you hit a line (and I used to be a speech writer as well) and I remember specifically I wrote a speech for a governor and we got to rehearsal with the prompter and there was just a line and he was like, 'This is never gonna come out right.' It's just not coming out of my mouth right. Do you ever hear that when you're writing or do you just not worry about that?Joshilyn:                              23:44                    I definitely it when I'm writing because I read aloud to myself as a writer. Like especially dialogue, I'll read it out loud while I'm writing. I mutter and talk while I'm writing. And if a paragraph doesn't sound right or I'm having trouble with it, I'll read it aloud and sometimes I edit aloud. I'll just change it mid-sentence to make it sound better and then just write down what I heard myself say.Jess:                                     24:12                    I will say, over my 20 years as an English teacher, I have told my students over and over and over again, if you want really good editing, if you would like to really get your paper clean, you've got to read it out loud.Joshilyn:                              24:24                    So smart. And just speaking as an audio book reader, as a person who reads them aloud, and I listen to them obsessively. You can tell the people who don't read their work aloud from the people who do. Not that it's that huge of a difference where now the book's not good or anything like that. But like people who read them aloud have so much less unintentional, internal rhyme. When you're just looking at words, you can write a sentence like Mike took the bike down the street with his friend Rike and they ate a pipe. You don't hear it cause it's visual and you don't see it. But then when you were listening to an audio book, I'll hear a string of rhymes and I'll be like, 'That person did not read their book out loud.'Jess:                                     25:07                    Well, and actually when we interviewed Steven Strogatz about his book that just came out recently about calculus that's just beautiful. He said that he dictates when he writes and he found his last line of his book because of the rhythm, cause he was walking at the time. And so that rhythm then made it into his writing because it was spoken in the first place and not because it was just his fingers dancing across the keyboard. So I find it fascinating. And Sarina Bowen also uses dictation software as well and our guest Karen Kolpe that we interviewed just recently also uses dictation software. So, I'm always curious about the difference between dictation and just writing with your hands and being able to hear those things and how that changes your work. So that is fascinating to me. It had never occurred to me that maybe I would be writing in rhymes unintentionally.Joshilyn:                              26:02                    Yeah, I've never tried to use dictation software, but maybe I should because I listen so much. It's weird; I tried to be a playwright for a while and I'm not a very good playwright to be honest, because I'm not willing to leave that room. Like a play should be a framework where a director can come in and do things and then there's room for actors to come in and do things so that it's a different play every time. And I'm just obsessively (and I'm not saying I have control issues, but I have control issues) and writing a play, I've just always felt I was trying to lock stuff down and make it be the way it is in my head. And it felt like the whole front of my head would heat up. Whereas when I'm acting or when I'm writing a novel and I am in control of what I do, even though of course you're being reactive, I feel like it's coming from the occipital lobe. It feels like it comes from a different place in my brain.Jess:                                     27:08                    That's so interesting. There was an interview a long time ago that I heard with Michael Ondaatje and he said he does not hear his work at all, he only sees it. And it's very difficult for me, I don't hear my work either. I do nonfiction though, so maybe it's different. But for me it's very visual and not sound related. So it's always fascinating to get into the head of someone who writes differently. Like I just don't hear it.Joshilyn:                              27:34                    Yeah, that's interesting. If I'm engaging it just in the terms of the visual, it's not going to get where I need it to be.Jess:                                     27:45                    One of the things you did for for this most recent book (a central thing in this book is scuba diving) and this was something you had never done before, right?Joshilyn:                              27:56                    No, never.Jess:                                     27:59                    So how did you even, not having had the experience, I just assumed when I listened to the book that Oh, that's something she does and isn't that cool? She knows what the words are, but how did you even know that was going to be a thing if you had never done it before?Joshilyn:                              28:15                    Amy was always a scuba diver, I wanted the metaphor. The ocean was so perfect for what I was doing in terms of like, (if you've ever dropped your sunglasses off a boat, you know the ocean can hide anything) you're never getting those back. In terms of being like this massive place where you can put things that you are just gone forever and also being kind of an entity with its own breath, so that your secrets are sort of housed in this living system. There were lots of metaphors that I wanted that scuba diving gave me and so I watched YouTube videos and did some interviews and I was like, I'm not getting this. I went to my husband and I said, 'Hey baby, it's about time for my midlife crisis and I need to learn to scuba dive for this book. I think my midlife crisis is going to be scuba diving. Would you like to have it with me?' He'd already had his midlife crisis - he learned to play the bass and joined a band. But he was like, 'Yeah, I'll do yours with you. That sounds really fun. If the other choice is an oiled cabana boy, I say scuba diving.' So we started diving and it really changed the book. I knew that Amy (Amy's my narrator, the protagonist, the scuba diving instructor), she's the one who has sort of the dark past and she's entirely reinvented herself. And you know, I wanted that baptismal imagery - go into the water, come up a different person. She's very self-destructive after she does this kind of terrible thing, she almost doesn't survive it. she has so much guilt. And then she sort of navigates her own understanding of grace and she reinvents herself and finds a life she can sustain. But I needed something to be the pivot that she uses to save herself. And I tried a bunch of different things and scuba diving was also in there. And then after I was diving, I was like, I don't need anything else. This is what saves her. Because it's so, it's like yoga plus plus - it is meditation, it is prayer, you cannot project into the future, you cannot worry about the past, it grounds you entirely in the present. You actually use your own breath. Like once you have a good technical ability to dive, once you've practiced enough and you're not fussing with your equipment all the time and you really understand how to get neutrally buoyant in the water, you actually change levels in the water and aim yourself just using your own breath. So it's your breath inside the ocean's breath. It is, it's also like super fun.Jess:                                     31:02                    I loved the idea of someone finding freedom in an activity that many people would find completely claustrophobic and closed in. So there was something really interesting about scuba diving as a metaphor. (as I also scuba dive) Something that a lot of people wouldn't be able to bear because it would feel too close. For her, it's exactly that that gives her the freedom. I really loved that metaphor. Well, one of the things I wanted to say about this book - so KJ and I talk all the time about people's ability to a) stick the landing on books, and b) surprise us. Well, the surprise thing I can attest to because I was listening to it as I was before I went to sleep last night and I had headphones on and my husband was reading something else and I got really upset and I said, 'Oh, well, duh. I figured that out a while ago.' And then you totally tricked me, you completely messed with my head. I thought I was ahead of you and you were so ahead of me. And I love that. I mean, the ability to be surprised is huge, it's especially huge for me because there's so many books (KJ can attest to this) that I have thrown. I've joked about throwing books across the room because I get so angry at formulas that make me feel dumb as a reader. And you made me feel like - you had me.Joshilyn:                              34:45                    Oh good. I'm glad I enjoy a plot twist.KJ:                                        34:49                    How much of that do you set up ahead of time and how has that evolved over the course of nine books?Joshilyn:                              34:59                    So this was my first book that is really leaning hard into domestic noir.KJ:                                        35:05                    I would agree that this is twistier, and I can actually only go back to The Almost Sisters, but that one's pretty twisty, too.Joshilyn:                              35:15                    Yeah. I always use the engine of a murder mystery or a thriller (sometimes to greater degrees than others) plot twists because I enjoy it. But, really the only thing that's changed in terms of genre is the stakes and the pacing. The stakes are super high, I don't know how to explain it, it really is just about stakes raising. It's still my voice, my kinds of fierce, female characters who act instead of reacting, my thematic things I'm always interested in, you know, I'm always writing about redemption and motherhood. So, I would agree with you. But for me, the plot is the thing that comes last. The plot is the cookie. I understand what I want to address thematically very, very well. I understand these characters down to their bones. Sometimes I think about characters for years before I write them. I've been thinking about Rue and for a vehicle to write Rue for more than seven years and she was a hard person to place because she's difficult. You wouldn't want a place in your life. She's a nightmare, but she's a very interesting nightmare. So, I know the characters, I know the stakes, I know the themes, and the plot is the cookie. I try to play fair, too. Like something will happen and it'll really surprise me and then I go back and edit and put in clues and foreshadowing and I'm good at it. I have a facility for this. I think as writers, we all have things that we're good at and things that we really struggle with. I'm good at crafting those kind of plot twists. That's the thing that comes easily to me, because it's fun and I'm surprising myself, too. And I try to play fair so that at least some readers will catch onto what I'm doing. Or if you go back and read it a second time, you're like, 'Oh, right there. She practically tells me right there.' But you slide it into these little moments where you're describing a car and nobody's paying attention or you know, there's all kinds of tricks you can do to misdirect. It's like a magician's sleight of hand with coins. They do everything, they just got you looking at the wrong place when they do the thing.KJ:                                        37:35                    I'm at the stage of a revision where I have a list of about six things that I just need to go back and make sure are properly set up. And it doesn't take that much, you know? I did read something recently where a character very suddenly took a turn that I really was like, 'What, what?' There was like one warning of this and none of the warning came from the character. So it yanked me, and you have to find that line where you've given people enough preparation that they aren't pulled out of the story by wait a minute, is this consistent with what happened before?Joshilyn:                              38:22                    Flannery O'Connor says you have to get to an end that feels inevitable, yet surprising. And I love her.Jess:                                     38:36                    It's so funny you guys are saying that about fiction because that's what I'm working on right now. Even in nonfiction where I have two chapters and they're sort of two chapters that really go together and one was submitted with my proposal, so I wrote that a long time ago. And then the other one I just finished. So I have them now side by side because I need to plant seeds for one in the other, in order for the reader to be led a bit down a path and for things to at least feel like I've prepared them a little bit for what's coming next. And I love that part of the process. I love it. You know, with nonfiction it's not really about hints, but it is, it is anyway, it's narrative hinting, even though it's nonfiction. I love that.Joshilyn:                              39:23                    Yeah. I think that's really actually cool that that translates into nonfiction. That's really interesting.KJ:                                        39:33                    If there aren't a bunch of through lines, then you just get a bunch of different stories.Jess:                                     39:47                    Well, and it's funny that you were talking about hearing and I said I don't hear my work, but that's actually not true because I always try to end on a major chord. You know, there's that sort of resolution to a major chord at the end where your reader can go, 'Ah, okay. Yeah, it feels good.' And so I do hear that little bit. I try to come back to a major chord at the end of a chapter so that I leave my reader feeling at least not like they're, you know, hanging there on a dissonant note and that I've just dumped them off the edge. So there is a little bit of sound there.KJ:                                        40:20                    Let's hope we've left our listeners on a major chord at this point. It's think it's time to shift gears and talk about what we've been reading.Jess:                                     40:32                    Please share with us - you first.Joshilyn:                              40:35                    I always have a book and an audio book going. And can I do a little commercial for Libro FM? So the way I get my audio books is through a service called Libro FM, which it's just like any other subscription service. You know, you get a credit every month, and your credits never expire, and it costs exactly the same, but it benefits your local independent book seller. You choose the store you want to shop through. So of course I'm all over that. So I was listening to Gretchen by Shannon Kirk and this is some next level WTF. Like I loved this book. It is so smart. Like I don't even know if it's a thriller, it verges on horror. But, then I loved the character so much and the character of Gretchen - I dream about, it's really good. It's about a young woman who's on the run with her mother and they have hidden identities and they move into this little shack. And then they have to leave and they're on the run again. And the girl next door is named Gretchen and she finds herself involved in this (puzzles are a big metaphor) game with Gretchen that has these very far reaching consequences.Jess:                                     42:02                    I'm on their website right now getting this book, I'm so excited.Joshilyn:                              42:08                    And then the book I just finished reading with my eyes is called The Better Liar by Tanen Jones. It doesn't come out till January. Here's what I liked about it - it's a thriller, it's suspense, which I really like, but it's fun. Like the plot is fun and twisty and sinister, but she's doing something so smart and so emotionally resonant just under the surface. I went to it for like a fun, twisty read and it is - I got that. But at the end I was not just like, 'Whoa, what the twists.' I was like, 'Whoa, Holy crap.' There was an emotional surprise. It's about a woman who has to appear with her, estranged sister to claim her inheritance and she has reasons for needing the money. And when she goes to find her sister (who's a troubled person) she finds her body, but she meets somebody else who looks like her sister, but who has secrets of her own, and they go to try and claim this inheritance. It is great.Jess:                                     43:26                    Oh, that is a great premise. I'm going to have to buy that one, too.Joshilyn:                              43:32                    I just finished both of those and I just started Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman and it's great so far, which is completely unsurprising because I've never read a Laura Lippman book and gone, 'Oh well that was disappointing.' She's so good and I'm loving it so far.Jess:                                     43:49                    Okay. KJ, you're up. What have you been reading?KJ:                                        43:52                    I have not been reading anything, to be honest. I'm in the middle of something that I like, but I'll wait until we finish it. I'm in the middle of Range by David Epstein, which we've talked about before. I'm rereading, I'm doing a lot of rereading right now. I have a list of like fresh books I read this year and I was thinking I should make a list of books I actually reread, too.Jess:                                     44:17                    I have been joking around on our text trio that I have been (because my brain is so occupied right now with getting to my deadline and this book) that I've been doing a lot of re-listening. And my re-listening choices have been Sarina Bowen books. And so every once in awhile I'll text Sarina with some observation about some characters she wrote like eight years ago. And it's just really comforting.KJ:                                        44:46                    It occurs to me that I did forget to mention that I might have just read a book called Never Have I Ever by Joshilyn Jackson.Jess:                                     44:57                    I was just about to say that exact thing.KJ:                                        44:59                    So, I did just read an entire novel. Which normally would've been what I put on #AmReading. And it is great, and it is twisty, and it is turny, and it is satisfying, it's really satisfying.Jess:                                     45:16                    I really, really love it. And while I have you, I do have to ask you one quick question, Joshilyn, did the title come first or did the premise come first?Joshilyn:                              45:25                    The premise came first. In fact, I had almost finished the book with a completely different title that I don't remember, it wasn't a great title. And my friend Sarah Gruin was like, 'Why aren't you calling this Never Have I Ever? I was like, 'Oh, I don't know. You're so right. That's obviously the title. Nevermind.'Jess:                                     45:48                    I love that because ever since I started the book that was kind of one of my first questions. I wrote it on the inside flap - which came first, the cover or the title or the premise - because it's great. Both of them are great. I also have been listening to Emily Nussbaum, who's the television critic at the New Yorker. She has a book called I Like To Watch and it's all about being a television critic, which is something I don't think I would do, but I'm fascinated by the job. I'm fascinated that the job exists and I'm a huge fan of Emily Nussbaum to begin with. So I'm loving this and this is a book that you can read in chunks because it's sorta like essay, more essay format. And it's really lovely, which is not surprising because Emily Nussbaum is a lovely writer, so I recommend that so far, I'm not done with it either. Alright. An independent bookseller?Joshilyn:                              46:42                    I live in Decatur, Georgia and we have so many Indies. They're my favorite things to visit when I travel. I live like four blocks from EagleEye, so that's my walk up and get a book independent. And then down on the square there's a store called Little Shop of Stories, which is a kid's shop. It's like an independent that just sells children books and a lot of YA, but they have

The burn chart mindset, whole book project management, and a how-to for finding a progress tracker that works for you. KJ’s an avid user of burn charts. Sarina uses a desktop variant (and has her own style). Jess doesn’t entirely see the appeal. What’s the difference between a burn chart and to-do list? Maybe nothing, if your to-do list goes all the way to the end of your project—and maybe everything, if you’re not paying attention to the difference between what you’ve got on your list, and what has to be done by when and by who in order to meet a deadline. This week on the podcast, KJ tries to talk Jess into the burn chart mindset, Sarina talks whole book project management, and we all come down to a how-to for finding a progress tracker that works for you.Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 9, 2019: Top 5 Reasons You Need a Burn Chart. Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email.LINKS FROM THE PODCASTPacemaker PlannerKJ’s Burn charts: Happier Parent, left; The Chicken Sisters revision, right.Sarina’s Pacemarker chart, left and burn-up columns, right.#AmReading (Watching, Listening)KJ: The Beautiful No, Sheri Salata (As you consider this one, you might want to take a look at KJ’s Goodreads review here.)The Writer Files (a podcast)Sarina: The Rest of the Story, Sarah DessenJess: Daisy Jones and The Six, Taylor Jenkins ReidDani Shapiro’s Family Secrets (a podcast)#FaveIndieBookstoreNorwich Bookstore, Norwich, VTThis episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship.Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.)KJ:                                00:01                Hey all. As you likely know, the one and only sponsor of the #AmWriting podcast is Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps writers all the way through their projects to the very end. Usually Author Accelerator offers only longterm coaching and they're great at it, but they've just launched something new inside outline coaching, a four week long program for novelists and memoir writers that can help you find just the right amount of structure so that you can plot or pants your way to an actual draft. I love the inside outline and I think you will too. I come back to mine again and again, whether I'm writing or revising. Working through it with someone else helps keep you honest and helps you deliver a story structure that works. Find out more at www.authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline.Jess:                             00:57                Go ahead.KJ:                                00:58                This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing.Jess:                             01:02                All right, let's start over.KJ:                                01:03                Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers.Jess:                             01:06                Okay.KJ:                                01:06                Now one, two, three.KJ:                                01:15                Hey, welcome to #AmWriting podcast.Jess:                             01:18                I'm Jess Lahey. I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and some articles you can find if you Google my name and a forthcoming book on preventing substance abuse in kids.Sarina:                          01:28                I'm Sarina Bowen, the author of 30 romance novels. The next one will be called Moonlighter.KJ:                                01:35                And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent, former lead editor and writer for the New York Times Motherlode blog and author of a novel forthcoming next summer, a beach read. And if you are a regular listener, you might've noticed a little difference in our introduction today because we are now #AmWriting The Podcast and now with more Sarina.Jess:                             02:01                Now with more Sarina and you may have noticed some weird hesitation in our voices as we were doing the intro cause it's been a couple of years doing the regular intro and I'm happy to make a change.KJ:                                02:11                Yeah, this fall we're sparking it up. There's going to be three of us sometimes. We're going to do lots of interviews, we're going to do some great new projects that we are excited about. But today we're just doing a podcast on one of my favorite dear to my heart topics, which is the burn chart.Jess:                             02:33                This is very timely because in the #AmWriting Facebook group, someone posted just a few days ago, could someone please explain this whole tracking software burn chart thing. And we've talked about burn charts a couple of times because KJ likes them. And because I've never really used them, I wanted to know more about how to use them, especially, you know, with this deadline looming. But you and Sarina are so good at planning your time I think it's something I could really learn from.KJ:                                03:03                Well that was something I was thinking about was I thinking, is there a difference between a burn chart and a to do list? And the answer is not necessarily, If your to do list goes all the way to the end.Jess:                             03:19                Well, where are we now? KJ, you still use burn charts? Sarina, do you use burn charts?Sarina:                          03:24                Well, I use a thing called Pacemaker and I can't wait to hear how much like or different it is from KJ's burn chart.Jess:                             03:32                Okay.KJ:                                03:32                And this is perfect because that is clearly a software thing, right?Sarina:                          03:37                Yup.KJ:                                03:37                Yeah. So I, I'm the paper burn chart. You, you are the digital version. All right.Jess:                             03:44                And I'm the one who just sits in the chair and hopes that I get enough words on the page to meet my deadline in October.KJ:                                03:51                Yeah. Well I mean I hope you're doing a little bit more than hoping, but if not, Hey, we've got time. We've got time to like rein you in. All right, so a burn chart is a physical manifestation of two things and one is the amount of time that you have to go towards your deadline. And the other is your is tangible markers of your progress towards that deadline. So just to really make it incredibly easy. If for some reason you knew that you had to write 10,000 words and it doesn't matter what they say, just that you just have to write 10,000 words and then you have five days in which to do it. Obviously at the end of every day you need to check off that you have written 2000 words. That would be very easy. You would make one side of your chart, 2000 words, 4,000 words, 6,000 words that you know, and then the other side, the days. And then you would draw a little straight line. And if you got there you'd be right on your line. And if you wrote 2,300 words, you'd be a little above or below your line depending on how you want to measure it. And so really the key is that you have divided the work that you have to do up into measurable....Jess:                             05:28                achievable...KJ:                                05:28                Well that's an interesting piece of it. So when I created my burn chart for The Chicken Sisters revision, I had exactly 30 days and I had 27 chapters and I went through and I had a list of the chapters. So I wrote out the chapters and I thought, well, these are in pretty good shape, so I ought to be able to do these together and this one's not in bad shape so I sort of tried to chunk them together. And it turned out that after two days I was dramatically wrong. But what was really good because I had sort of drawn this line of where I thought I could get to and I very quickly realized I couldn't do nearly as much as I thought that I could. So I was able to sort of quickly rejigger the chart right away. And if I hadn't been able to rejigger the chart, I could have quickly asked for another two weeks because it was immediately clear that I was only going to be able to manage one chapter a day, tops. And some days I wasn't even able to manage that, but fortunately it turned out to sort of all zip along at the end. So you have to be able to define an achievable goal, yes. But that's kind of problematic because if you've got 30 days and 40 chapters and all you can do as a chapter a day, then there you are. You know, your deadline is not gonna work.Jess:                             07:00                Yeah.KJ:                                07:00                So that's part of the reason to create a burn chart.Jess:                             07:02                Well, and the nice thing about your burn charts, KJ, having looked at them many times with great envy is I remember when you were writing How to Be a Happier Parent, you had these very pretty burn charts that have an X axis and a Y axis and a line that goes down to zero. And by the time you're done, your little line meets the bottom line and you're down at zero and it looks all pretty. And I remember seeing one of those and thinking, Oh well wouldn't that be satisfying?KJ:                                07:31                It is satisfying. Yeah I've got the Happier Parent one here now. And that was one where I divided the work into chunks that were sort of only coherent to me because it might be outline this, and draft this, and revise that. But as long as I got through, I think I was at a three chunk a day plan, cause I had a pretty solid idea of what I could and couldn't do. Now on The Chicken Sisters chart I also made a funny mistake. I did the axises wrong. It's hard trying to think how to explain it, but the way that I did it, it wasn't satisfying. So if I, if I achieved more than I thought I would achieve because I had put the chapters all along the bottom there wasn't sort of, if I marked that I had colored it in, it didn't look good. It didn't look like I was doing something. So I turned it sideways.Jess:                             08:36                It needs to look really satisfying. You either have to be coloring - we'll put all these pictures up on the website - but it needs to look satisfying. You need to be either creating a long bar of color or you need to be reaching some zero end point.KJ:                                08:51                Yeah. And you can burn up. So you could have like if its the first day of the month and you need to get one chunk down or one chapter done so you put the day on the up and down axis and the achievement and then you sort of color it in and the next day you get and see you can go up or you can, as I did with Happier Parent, you can count down because I needed to cross things off. So I started off at the upper left hand corner and I burned down.Jess:                             09:25                Okay. That makes sense.KJ:                                09:27                I checked things off. But in Chicken Sisters I did the axis backwards. I ended up burning up, burning up was more satisfying.Jess:                             09:41                Okay.KJ:                                09:42                So how does this compare to doing it on Pacemaker, Sarina?Sarina:                          09:45                You know, it's kind of similar. With Pacemaker you tell it what you're doing. So, drafting as opposed to revising and and then you tell it how many words you need to go.Jess:                             10:00                Was this designed for writing specifically?Sarina:                          10:02                Yes.Jess:                             10:03                Oh, okay.Sarina:                          10:04                And then you give it your deadline. What I do enjoy is that you can finesse a little bit with telling it when you're not going to work. Like I had two trips this month and I was able to tell Pacemaker that I would not be writing on those days. And the nice thing about that is that it's always recalculating. So right now it tells me that on this project I have 11 days left and over those 11 days I have 15,800 words to go. And so it very handily lets me know that I need to write 1,317 words each day to get to my target of 90,000 total words.Jess:                             10:56                So if you do that or don't do that, do you tell the app or is it integrated with whatever you're using to write?Sarina:                          11:01                No, It's not integrated. It's just a satisfying thing to open up the Pacemaker window and enter my new total word count.Jess:                             11:10                Is it on your phone or on your computer?Sarina:                          11:12                It's a desktop app, which I admit is not very 2019.Jess:                             11:16                Okay. ,KJ:                                11:18                But this would work really well for either drafting - and I'm assuming if you get to 80,763 words and you write the end, you're going to count that.Sarina:                          11:32                Of course.KJ:                                11:33                It would work really well for that or for revising where you could put in the number of words that you have.Jess:                             11:43                How does it work for revising specifically?Sarina:                          11:45                Well, I was just doing a revision on something else and I would have entered it the same way where I would have just told it how many words were left in the unrevised part of the document or rather how many were in the revised part. But it's actually kind of flexible. I think you can instead just tell it how many revision words you've covered that day. You can make it do a lot of what you might want to do.Jess:                             12:12                Okay. So what happens if, like today for example, my plan is to submit the chapter I'm working on right now to my agent by the end of the day. I was feeling really good about it yesterday and then I dove back into the beginning and I said, Oh heck, this stinks. I have to redo. You know, what ended up being a whole morning's worth of work. And I think I can still get it done. But how does a program like that account for the fact that what you've got is not always what you think you've got? Or can it?Sarina:                          12:42                Obviously it can't, but it just recalibrates so I like to keep things so that my daily word count than I need to accomplish is 1200 words or lower. Like I, I feel good about life when that line marching across the screen says you have to do 1200 words every day to stay ahead. And now yesterday I didn't write anything, but I did a lot of thinking about what was wrong with this book and what I needed to do to fix it. So today when I opened up the window, it said, guess what, honey? You've got to do 1300 instead of 12, just to keep your head above this ocean and and so obviously I slipped there a little bit, but you know, if I put up 1500 words today, which let's face it is not an insane number, then it'll start to go back in the right direction.Jess:                             13:37                Okay.KJ:                                13:37                So I guess it just depends on what it is you're needing to measure. I mean, I admit my burn charts tend to be sort of like complicated multi page affairs because for example, if I was doing what you are doing, Jess, and if I had chapters that needed to go through phases, so you need to draft it, then you need to send it to your agent, then you're probably gonna revise it, then you're going to send it to your editor. When I'm doing that, I allow time for those other people's involvement. So, if I were where you are...Jess:                             14:14                ...you would be in a total panic.KJ:                                14:16                I would be in a total panic, utter and total sympathy and props for you. After I was done breathing into the paper bag under my desk, I would come out and I would make a list and I mean that's the thing, you just want to use the list.KJ:                                14:29                I'm looking at my How to Be a Happier Parent and I listed the chapters and then I checked off: had I outlined it, had I drafted it, had it gone to my agent, had I revised it. I actually was not sending chapters to my editor so I didn't have that as a piece. And there was a point when I sort of had estimated the percentage that things were drafted and things were a little crazy. But I was allowing for for that process so that when the last chapter that was going to my agent was going to my agent, I would be on say, revising the first three chapters. So I made these really sort of monstrous multi page lists. And then what I did was to figure - each one of these is going to take me three hours, let's add up all the three hours, and then divide it by the amount of time that I have left and, and sort of lay it out there. And one of the reasons to do that is so that you can see if you're going to be able, because sometimes you set a deadline you can't hit. And it's so much better to recognize that five days into working with your burn chart when you're like, wait a minute, I'm seven chunks underwater or 12,000 words underwater. Then you can reach out to everyone else involved because when it's a visual reminder, you can't fool yourself. You can't every day go 'I worked really hard, I did everything I possibly could because there are circumstances when everything you possibly could isn't going to get you to October 1st with, with the book.Jess:                             16:24                Well, and that's why we changed this deadline to begin with. I mean, I hit May and realized, Oh yeah, July 1st is not gonna happen. And I actually went to my agent before she had planned to come to me on May 1st and I got to her before that to say, yeah, we need to change this. But my little sort of clue to myself when something is done - mine's a lot simpler than yours in the sense that what I do is keep that all those chapters on the left hand side of my page in Scrivener. I close the folder when that chapter is done or out or off to edit. The nice thing for me is I can see, all the time, on the left hand side of the page things that I need to put cues for, where I'm headed. Oh, don't forget that in chapter seven, I'm going to say such and such. So I have sort of a nice low visual cue on the side, but it's really pretty simple for me. I don't really have a strategy as involved. Right now I'm in the 'just keep my head down and keep plowing through' and I always worry that if I take time to do things like make a very fancy burn chart, which would be a wonderful procrastination strategy for me right now, that I'm just using up time on something when I should just be sitting at my desk writing the words.KJ:                                17:39                Well that is a know yourself thing and it's probably helped by the fact that you've written this kind of book before.Jess:                             17:46                What's really weird about that though is that I don't have a burn chart for Gift to Failure. Every once in a while I look around and I think, did I really write that book? Because I don't remember how that even happened. It's like that labor thing with childbirth and labor, you know, the only reason you do another one is cause you forget what it was like the first time around.Sarina:                          18:08                I experience that too, I've had to go back into my own books a lot this month to see what I said about certain secondary characters and, and there'll be a joke in there and I'm like, I don't really remember where that came from.KJ:                                18:26                Yeah, I'm having that too. Sarina, one thing I was thinking of when I was looking back at my 2017 journal because I wanted to find the How to Be a Happier Parent burn chart. And I could see all the different places where I'd put up goals and where I'd listed what the different chunks were and sort of re-revised again what I needed to do. And for me that's a keep your mind on track thing. Sarina, I know that at the beginning of a big season of writing, you'll be like, I'm shooting for three books and a serial and these are my different deadlines. And I imagine you sort of sticking up giant post-its to put the different deadlines places. And I feel like it's almost a different kind of big burn chart cause again, it's that visual.Sarina:                          19:30                It is and actually I was just doing that last weekend and it's so much harder than figuring out how many words you can write in a month. What I was struggling with is project management really. So I have this book that I need to turn into my editor on October 9, but having that editorial date set up was a to do list item that had to come into my life sometimes between deciding to write the book and choosing a publication date for it. Because once I finish a project, there are all these other people that have to be involved and that's where all the stress comes from. So for this book I had to hire a cover designer and we had to establish a date for that and I had to hire an editor because my previous editor is leaving the business and I had to hire both male and female narrators. And this morning I woke up to the knowledge that I hadn't asked my audio engineer to do the post production on the audio book yet. So it's all those deadlines that really make me crazy because you can't sit there quietly with your bar chart in your notebook and you're not in control of your own destiny up to a point. So I've been really struggling with that lately.Jess:                             20:55                That would be panic inducing for me. I mean the idea that on top of writing this book, I also need to be out there figuring out who my narrators are and what my post production stuff is going to look like. I mean, it's a much more complicated picture and I think the analogy of project management is really apt. I think that works. Anyone who's worked in the business world and had to keep together some large project like that with many sort of that many headed Hydra situation. I think that's a really good comparison.KJ:                                21:25                Well that is the world the burn chart prompts from. You know, the original use of a burn chart is techies developing software and they would put it up in a group workspace and maybe everybody's pieces would line and basically what they would do is set up targets. You know, everybody needs to have written their chunks of code to achieve this piece of creating the like button for Facebook or whatever. And then, those are going to go off to the bug checkers while we move on. So that's where the burn chart idea came from. So it can be perfect for managing a lot of moving parts and keeping track of whether your other people are doing what you need. Like, right now I've revised and somebody else has my revision and I'm pencils down and I can't do anything. But I'm still very aware of the day that my editor is expecting to have this revision back. You just can't have any illusions when you've written it down. And I don't think you have any illusions. It's almost just a question of whether or not it's satisfying for you to see it laid out or if it's useful. And if it's not, it's not.Jess:                             22:56                I'm also one of those people that I can be completely gung ho about something on one day and I'm all excited and I charted out and for like two days I'll track my progress and then I'll forget. And then it's over. For me, when I'm not focused on the process itself, I tend to lose track of the other details. But I like looking at your burn charts, they're very pretty. And I love looking at Sarina's charts cause her charts are gorgeous and I'm very impressed by all of it. For me, right now I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm in such a state of panic.KJ:                                23:31                I just have to say that the idea to me of being where you are without this checklist, visual reminder of what still has to be done. Like, I would lay awake at night mentally drawing little boxes and creating a to do list. And I think some people are just like that. I have another friend and she's exactly like that. Like in every project there's that phase where it's all so amorphous, you can't make the list.Jess:                             24:04                That's how I am at the very beginning. But now I have a mental picture of where each of the chapters are.KJ:                                24:12                Yeah. And once I get to the point where I can make that list I need to make the list. You know what it's like? It's like that whole David Allen's Getting It Done book where he's just like some of us just need to write it all down. And if that frees your brain to go, Oh, okay, it's somewhere, it's somewhere, like I'm not going to lose that.Sarina:                          24:39                I'm definitely in that camp.KJ:                                24:40                It sounds like you're not, Jess. I mean, it is somewhere, it's in your Scrivener and that's enough to make your brain go, okay.Jess:                             24:53                Well, and actually that's a good point. If I was using Microsoft Word for this, and I had no central location where all the chapters were in folders. Like the very first thing I did at the beginning was arrange all of the research into the various chapters and then I had the outlines. And so for me, Scrivener has been invaluable because it allows me to quantify to a certain extent where I am with each chapter and that's what gives me some peace - is being able to see those chapter headings with those folders, with that stuff, with the text I've already created and maybe the fragments that I've cut out - that to me is sort of burn chart-y. Kind of, without the end point.Sarina:                          25:32                Jess, do you know the trick about you can import your own icons for those left hand column?Jess:                             25:40                No, I did not do that, but I'm sure I could spend a good two hours on that this afternoon instead of finishing this chapter.KJ:                                25:45                That sounds like a good rabbit hole. Oh, I want this one to look like a little folder.Jess:                             25:50                That's the problem with Sarina. Sarina's got all these pretty little add ons for things. So for example, she's the one who taught me how to use Link Tree in Instagram and she spent the $6.99 to get the very pretty version. And I have the basic version. I was very tempted to go for the pretty version. And then I thought through the process of like getting all those icons and making it look pretty and I said, and we're sticking with the basics because I knew I couldn't go there. It would've been a very fun little endeavor, but not today. Anyway, things are going great. I did have a dream night before last that you guys will appreciate. So, as you guys know, my deadline is in October and I have scheduled a vacation starting the day after I hand it in. And my in-laws are going to be there and my husband's going to be there and I'm speaking at a spa at Canyon Ranch and so it's like a built in vacation. But also I'm working while I'm there and it gives me a place to relax at the same time and I want it done so that I can focus on the relaxation part. And I dreamed the other night that I was at Canyon Ranch and I could not relax and I couldn't figure out why I couldn't relax. And I was thinking and thinking and then I realized it's because I never turned my book in. It was horrible.Sarina:                          27:11                So did you also forget to put your pants on because that's pretty much the same chain.Jess:                             27:20                Well actually what's really funny about that is the day after I turned in Gift of Failure was the day that I went horseback riding and got thrown from the horse and bonked my head and did really forget that I had written a book. When Tim was leading me back from where I bumped my head and got the concussion and he was trying to see what was happening with my memory and he quizzed me on my book and what it was about and the names of my children and I did not know any of those things. And so really it was sort of like a little bit of a throwback to the day I completely forgot that I'd written a book at all, even though I had written the whole book and handed in it on time, no ahead of time. I think a whole day ahead of time. That's exciting.KJ:                                28:06                Well you're taking anxiety dreams to a whole new level.Jess:                             28:09                We did have someone on the Facebook on the #AmWriting Facebook page who announced that she handed in her manuscript with, I think she said 28 minutes to spare and she was very happy with herself. Does anyone have anything else to say about burn charts? We will put pictures on the website so that people can see what they actually look like because you guys do some beautiful work when it comes to that kind of stuff. I'm very impressed.KJ:                                28:35                It is a pleasure, it's an indulgence. We're recording in the last week of August and I think by the time this is live, it's just going to be the first week of September. But this is the week for me when I need to put all my September charts together and things like that. Sarina has already done hers, she was showing them to me.Jess:                             29:02                Sarina's the one who has already gotten us our 2020 agendas. So of course she already has her September charts.Sarina:                          29:10                I'm ready.KJ:                                29:12                And some things just don't lend themselves to burn charting. Like if you're drafting, Pacemaker sounds like it would be better. It's almost like you only need a burn chart if it is complicated and it's only satisfying if it is complicated. If you're just drafting then, stickers on a day. I didn't do a burn chart for Chicken Sisters until I was revising. I didn't do a burn chart for drafting it because it wasn't like that. It didn't have that many moving pieces. Unlike when I was doing the nonfiction and it was going to the agent and it was moving all over the place.Jess:                             29:53                Well, and I'm looking at my calendar right now and I do stickers. I'm using the polar bears that Sarina gave me in the middle of summer, which makes perfect sense. I'm using my stickers. I think my stickers are for 1200 words or something, but most days I'm double or triple stickering simply because I have to, or getting negative numbers because I'm editing. But really stickers are kind of irrelevant for me now. It's about time and progress and feeling good about where I am.Sarina:                          30:22                Awesome.Jess:                             30:23                Yes. Gold stars. The other thing that was a big deal for me was I canceled and rescheduled a lot of things that I just couldn't do. And I've said no to blurbing some things and I've said no to interviews. But when I got my last contracted piece out to the New York Times, I have a few edits to do, that was sort of a big, dust my hands off and say, whew, now I'm just focusing back on the book stuff. So that was a big deal too. But anyway. Alright. Do we want to talk about what we've been reading?KJ:                                30:56                We did.Jess:                             30:56                Alright. I can't go first cause I haven't thought yet.KJ:                                31:00                Oh, okay. I can go first because I have thought and it is actually kind of funny except I have to flail through my phone to go back. So I read a book called The Beautiful No and Other Tales of Trial, Transcendence, and Transformation. The author is Sheri Salata and she was the executive producer of the Oprah show for a long time. This is what I'm going to say about this book. In my opinion, there are three kinds of people. Well there are three reactions when someone tells you that they've seen an animal psychic, right? And the first one is WTF. I mean that's number one. The second one is sort of an amused interest and open to the possibility that you might sort of learn something in that process with some humor and a fair amount of, you know, a bucket of salt and some sort of personal, I'm taking something from this cause it's cool but I'm not entirely bad. Right? So that would be the second. And the third one is all in, baby, animal psychic, tell me what my dogs are thinking. So this book, The Beautiful No, this is a book for people in category three. And if that is you, this is the book for you, go for it. That is what I've got to say.Sarina:                          32:46                I'm stuck on....is animal psychic a metaphor here or?KJ:                                32:54                No, not even a little bit. And I have had someone look me in the face and say, I have called an animal psychic and I am a two person. I am okay, that's a really interesting thing that you've done and I would love to hear more about it. And if in the process you felt that you gained something, I would love to know about that. But if we can also kind of laugh at the idea, that would be good too. That's me. I am a two. I am not one, I'm not gonna cross you off my friend list. But I'm also not three and this is really a book for three. You need to be all in with the animal psychic to enjoy this. Although I have to say I kind of couldn't put it down.Jess:                             33:47                Well that's an interesting review.KJ:                                33:51                It's not exactly a negative review, nor is it exactly positive, it's just very specific.Jess:                             33:57                Alright. Sarina, what you got?Sarina:                          34:00                Well, I read a pile of books in July, but August for various deadline reasons does not look the same. I am very slowly reading The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen and she writes beautiful, measured, contemporary YA novels. And this one I'm certain when I'm able to give it more time, will not disappoint.Jess:                             34:21                You're going to have to tell me at some point, I've never gone down the Sarah Dessen rabbit hole and I know you're a fan, so at some point you're going to have to tell me your favorite one so that I can start with that one. So I've had a weird reading month. I felt like I couldn't start a new book that would really suck me in because then it would be really tempted to listen a lot. So I have been listening to something that has completely sucked me in, but it's episodic, which is Dani Shapiro's Family Secrets podcast and it's essentially juicy family secrets in bite-sized chunks. And it's completely addictive, but you also have an end point, which is exactly what I have needed. I also have to say, you know those books that you feel like enough people told you that you would really like it, so you really keep sticking with it? And then finally you just throw your hands up in the air and say, forget it. I'm going to give up because I just can't do it. That's how I felt about The Snowman by Jo Nesbo. I tried so hard with that book. I really, really did. I just could not care less. So that's where I was with that one. But I also do have one to recommend. A couple of our guests recommended Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and in audio form it's absolutely delightful. It's that book that's about an imaginary rock band during the 70's and set in Los Angeles. And they have a different voice actor for every character and they're all well-known actors. It's a little bit like Lincoln and the Bardo in that sense. Really, really good audio book. But again, it's something that I can listen to in chunks instead of getting completely sucked in from a narrative perspective. So anyway, that's what I've been listening to Family Secrets by Dani Shapiro. You've got to listen to.KJ:                                36:20                Yeah, I wanted to throw a podcast out there too. The new one that I tried because I wanted to listen to Jenny Nash. When I'm feeling stressed about my writing, I like to find a podcast that Jenny has been on and just listen to it. I don't even necessarily really listen, it just makes parts of my brain start thinking. Anyway, she was on a podcast called The Writer Files and I discovered that that was going to be a new podcast for me. I really like it.Jess:                             36:51                She always puts things in ways that are hopeful and optimistic and reality-based, things that feel like they're huge and I can't get my arms around them. Suddenly Jenny has explained them in such a way where I'm like, Oh, I could totally do that. I love listening to her. Sarina, I don't think you've ever done an indie bookstore shout out. Do you have one that you could do for us?Sarina:                          37:15                I'm sure if I did, you have would have already covered it since we cover the same ground here.Jess:                             37:20                Yeah, that's true. But you've been places we haven't been.KJ:                                37:25                I don't think we've ever shouted out our local bookstore where I need to pop in today. Our current local bookstore since we've got one that closed fairly recently and another that's going to open soon. But you know, let's shout out the Norwich bookstore.Sarina:                          37:38                Oh definitely.Jess:                             37:39                They're worth shouting out again, absolutely. Cause they're so great.KJ:                                37:43                I mean always brilliantly curated. One of the things I love about them is that they have a website where I can order the book and then when it comes in, I pop in and I've already paid for it and it's ready. They wrap it in brown paper and put it up on the shelf like I was ordering. So I find that kind of amusing in case I don't want anyone to know that I'm reading The Beautiful No, which maybe I don't.Sarina:                          38:13                Do you know how I order from there? I just email Liza the owner and I say, could you please get these three books for me? And then she emails back a week later and says they're waiting and then I go in and pay.KJ:                                38:26                That would be easier. I should do it that way. I do it on their website and every single time the website says that is not your password. You need to create a new password. And I have written this password and it is the password.Sarina:                          38:38                I guess my method circumvents that and I think, what's the point of shopping local if you can't just fire off an email. But I will say the adorable thing about it is that I did some months ago email and say, Hey, could you please get me Barron's Guide to Colleges? And the email that came back said, Dear Sarina, I can't believe that the child for whom you were just buying picture books needs this Guide to Colleges. I know. And she was right.Jess:                             39:19                That's really sweet actually. I have to say, I was looking through pictures recently and I found a picture of my 15 year old when he was an infant asleep on that bear that they used to have at the Dartmouth bookstore. That used

Before contemplating how to be a happier parent, we should think back to when we decided to become parents. We probably envisioned the fun of playing with our children, laughter and conversations around the dinner table and pride and joy in watching our children grow and learn. But, for many of us, we find those images replaced by days of rushed meals (or just a snack bar in the car), hectic drives from one sports event or music lesson to another and exhausted family members spending more time with their tech devices than with each other.   Writer KJ Dell’Antonia, former editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, wanted to find out what had happened to happiness and what it would take for parents to find the joy they longed for. As she explains in her lively discussion with Marti & Erin on how to be a happier parent, KJ learned that joy comes with small changes – not by doing more, but by doing things differently. And she learned that when parents are happier, kids are too!   When are you happiest in your life as a parent? When are you least happy – and maybe sad, angry or resentful? What small changes could you make in your daily life to try to create more genuine happiness for you and your children?   Related resources: Book by KJ Dell’Antonia Blog by KJ Dell’Antonia When Parents Disagree about the Best Way to Raise Their Children tip sheet by Marti Erickson Encouragement: The Power Tool of Parenting tip sheet from St. David’s Center Loosening the Reins When Children Become Teens and Young Adults tip sheet by Marti Erickson Recognizing & Managing Parental Stress tip sheet from St. David’s Center

Hunter talks to KJ Dell’Antonia about How To Be a Happier Parent. Find yourself constantly irritable? Wish that you could enjoy parenthood more? That’s the place my guest, author KJ Dell’Antonia found herself in. So she set out to find the answers to frustrating struggles like chores, discipline, screen time, and more. Join in on this fun conversation about how to get through the toughest parts of parenting and find yourself happier on the other side! Some big takeaways from this episode include: 1. Discipline is teaching. 2. Why you should want your kids to screw up on your watch. 3. Activities and sports really are more demanding these days. KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of How to Be a Happier Parent and the former editor of the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. She continues to write on the personal and policy aspects of parenthood for the Times and other publications and is the co-host of the #AmWriting podcast. Website: Kjdellantonia.com Fan of the Mindful Mama Podcast? Support it by leaving a quick review -----> Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher (or wherever you listen!) ABOUT HUNTER CLARKE-FIELDS: Hunter Clarke-Fields is a mindful mama mentor. She coaches overstressed moms on how to cultivate mindfulness in their daily lives. Hunter has over 20 years of experience in yoga & mindfulness practices. She has taught thousands worldwide, and is the creator of the Mindful Parenting course. Download the audio training, Mindfulness For Moms (The Superpower You Need) for free! It's at mindfulmomguide.com. Find more podcasts, blog posts, free resources, and how to work with Hunter at MindfulMamaMentor.com.

Want to be a happier parent? KJ Dell'Antonia is the former lead editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, who over the years has asked and answered plenty of questions about parenting. She says the one she was most intrigued by was 'why isn't it any fun?' She has advice for looking after kids as they grow into their tweens and teens.

Want to be a happier parent? KJ Dell'Antonia is the former lead editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog, who over the years has asked and answered plenty of questions about parenting. She says the one she was most intrigued by was 'why isn't it any fun?' She has advice for looking after kids as they grow into their tweens and teens.

Five years of editing the Motherlode column for the New York Times taught KJ Dell’Antonia this: family should be a source of joy, not stress. But what if the rigors of parenting and the chaos of daily life are preventing you from experiencing the happiness you deserve? In this episode, tune in as Exceptional Parenting Podcast host, Stefanie Boucher, speaks to KJ (author of the newly released book How to Be a Happier Parent) about the simple shifts parents can make in order to reduce stress and find more pleasure and contentment in family life. Listen now to discover:- The four things happy parents do really well- How to address common struggles, like getting kids to complete chores or homework- Why kids’ sports or extracurricular activities should be kept in check- Why it’s okay to put yourself firstAbout Our Guest:KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of How to Be a Happier Parent and the former editor of the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. She continues to write on the personal and policy aspects of parenthood for the Times and other publications and is the co-host of the #AmWriting podcast. KJ lives in New Hampshire with her husband, four children, and assorted horses, chickens, dogs and cats.

“Soak up the good”: KJ Dell’Antonia, author of How to Be a Happier Parent and the former editor of the New York Times’ Motherlode blog, on Gen X’s particular parenting style, “disasters” vs. “situations,” and her #AmWriting podcast. The post Ep 41 Parenting Author KJ Dell’Antonia appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .

Five years of editing the Motherlode column for the New York Times taught KJ Dell’Antonia this: family should be a source of joy, not stress. But what if the rigors of parenting and the chaos of daily life are preventing you from experiencing the happiness you deserve? In this episode, tune in as Exceptional Parenting Podcast host, Stefanie Boucher, speaks to KJ (author of the newly released book How to Be a Happier Parent) about the simple shifts parents can make in order to reduce stress and find more pleasure and contentment in family life. Listen now to discover:- The four things happy parents do really well- How to address common struggles, like getting kids to complete chores or homework- Why kids’ sports or extracurricular activities should be kept in check- Why it’s okay to put yourself firstAbout Our Guest:KJ Dell’Antonia is the author of How to Be a Happier Parent and the former editor of the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. She continues to write on the personal and policy aspects of parenthood for the Times and other publications and is the co-host of the #AmWriting podcast. KJ lives in New Hampshire with her husband, four children, and assorted horses, chickens, dogs and cats.

As a mom of four and a beloved parenting writer at the New York Times, KJ Dell’Antonia found herself asking the question that plagues most modern parents at some point in our lives: Why does this have to suck so much? In her hopeful, solution-packed book, HOW TO BE A HAPPIER PARENT, KJ draws on interviews and research, including her own, to offer not just an answer to that question (it’s not all our fault), but ideas parents can use to shift their family lives away from the stress and towards the joy we hoped we’d find. Unlike so many anxiety-inducing parenting books on the market, HOW TO BE A HAPPIER PARENT does not demand that parents add more to their already busy lives. Instead, it focuses on improving problem spots and savoring the lovely modern lives we already live. KJ Dell’Antonia offers parents reassurance about the things they’re getting right and suggests doable changes to improve daily routines. She touches on: · How parents can fill mornings with more joy · The guidelines parents can set so that children are more likely to help with chores · What children can learn from sibling relationships · How to improve family dinners, kid sports and vacations. HOW TO BE A HAPPIER PARENT reminds mothers and fathers that a satisfying family life isn’t about hauling kids around and eventually dropping them off at destination: success. It’s about finding happiness—real happiness, the kind you look back on, look forward to, and live for—along the way.

Is a mother only as happy as her unhappiest child? In our experience, yeah, pretty much. And studies (referenced below) back that up– although they also suggest many parents also derive their greatest happiness from their child-raising.  So how do we separate out our own sense of well-being from our children’s struggles? And in a more everyday sense, how do we find happiness in the daily slog?  We talk it out with guest KJ Dell’Antonia, former lead editor of The New York Times’ Motherlode blog and author of the brand-new book How to be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute. KJ says the key is finding simple, concrete solutions for what isn’t working– and letting go of some of the rest. As KJ puts it: When we’re not putting all our energy into getting our kids to eat and study and do everything exactly the way we want them to, we can put it into a much more positive place. Nobody’s saying that you have to live in denial of your kids’ reality. But we think disengaging from our children’s struggles just enough so that our happiness isn’t directly pegged to theirs is the key to happier, more effective parenting. Here’s links to other research and resources discussed in this episode: Jordan Schrader for Alcalde: Parents’ Happiness Linked to Their Least Happy Child’s Claire E. Ashton-James, Kostadin Kushlev, Elizabeth W. Dunn: Parents Reap What They Sow: Child-Centrism and Parental Well-Being Julie Beck for The Atlantic: Study: Parents Only as Happy as Their Unhappiest Child “Welcome to Holland,” by Emily Perl Kingsley and Shakespearean voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg’s book The Second Circle, which Amy says has influenced her more than any book she’s ever read. Read its excerpts on parenting here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

KJ Dell’Antonia, mother of four and hockey mom extraordinaire, chats with us from New Hampshire about all the things she learned writing her new book “How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute” (August 21, 2018: pre-order now). I’ve admired this week’s guest for a long time. I would often share her New York Times Motherlode blogs on our #naptimereads. We’re breaking down some of the parenting “challenge spots” (her phrase, mine would be "moments that make me want to laugh-cry"), including chores, discipline, screen time, and getting ready in the morning. I also share fabulous #atomicmama listener tips for how to be a happier parent! xx Ellie Knaus, mom-in-chief Join us on Instagram| Facebook| and our private Facebook group. Show Notes, including more on our guest: atomicmoms.com.KJ Dell'Antonia's Official WebsiteSubscribe for next week's episode on the Apple podcast app or Stitcher.

Too often the everyday experience of being a parent feels like a race against a clock you didn't set. We frantically hurl ourselves through morning routine, drop-off, work, pick-ups, kids' activities, grocery shopping, dinner, housework and homework duty. My guest on this episode of the podcast asked herself what it would take for this whole thing to suck a little less so we can get more joy out of the life we've chosen with the children we love. I'm joined by esteemed parenting writer and editor, KJ Dell'Antonia, whose work you may know from the likes of Slate and the New York Times Motherlode blog. She's got a great new book out called How to Be a Happier Parent, realistically subtitled Raising a Family, Having a Life and Loving (Almost) Every Minute of It. Show Notes Love our work? Please check out our Patreon Campaign! Become a patron of the show for as little as $1 per month

THE FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO RAISING A LITTLE PRINCESS: How to Raise a Girl Who’s Authentic, Joyful, and Fearless – Even If She Refuses to Wear Anything but a Pink Tutu (a TarcherPerigee paperback; on sale November 11th, 2017) by Devorah Blachor. In this title inspired by her viral New York Times Motherlode piece “Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps,” Blachor offers insight and humor to all those who cringe each morning when their daughters refuse to wear anything that isn’t pink. Using personal anecdotes and playful essays, Blachor explores how mothers can raise their daughters in a society that pressures girls and women to bury their own needs, conform to unrealistic beauty standards, and sacrifice their own passions. With amusing – yet reassuring! - interviews with the formerly princess-obsessed, THE FEMINISTS GUIDE TO RAISING A LITTLE PRINCESS tackles important concepts while offering comic relief to concerned parents of budding little princesses. The author is based overseas, however, is available for interviews and willing to call in from Skype.. Below my signature, you will see a q&a with the author. Please let me know if you would like to schedule an interview, or if you need anything else from me. I look forward to hearing from you! Check out the TarcherPerigee Blog About the Author: Devorah Blachor is a New York Times Motherlode columnist and also writes for The Huffington Post, McSweeney's, The Hairpin, Redbook, Mommyish, Good Housekeeping, and The Rumpus, among other websites and magazines. Blachor's husband Matt Rees is an award-winning journalist and novelist. Their children Cai and Mari provide endless material for humor and essays. In Conversation with Devorah Blachor, author of THE FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO RAISING A LITTLE PRINCESS, Devorah will talk about the following: 1. What inspired you to write The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess? When my three-year-old daughter Mari started loving pink and princesses, the irony was great. Here I was, a committed feminist who favored oversized frumpy clothing and who wished the entire beauty industry would sink into the earth in a puff of silicone vapor. And here I had a walking toddler advertisement for tulle and sequins. I took my anxiety over what this might mean for Mari, and I turned it into a tongue-and-cheek satirical article called “Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps”. It was published in the New York Times Motherlode and it went viral. I realized I wasn’t alone. There were lots of mothers like me, who were committed to raising strong and independently minded daughters, and who were flummoxed by their daughters’ passion for tiaras and pink tutus. I started diving into this subject and that research evolved into the book. 2. Why did you want to steer your daughter away from pink and princesses and all things girly? The culture of “pink for girls” is antithetical to what we would want for our girls and boys. We don’t want our kids to be limited by other people’s perceptions of what they should and shouldn’t be. We want boys to play freely with dolls if that’s their desire, for example.. And if girls are encouraged to play with toys that are traditionally associated with girls, what does that mean for them as they grow up? Will they be less likely to pursue “male” professions like pilots or engineers? My fear was that the pink culture would restrict my daughter before she even reached adolescence. I had a deeper fear too. I spent many years living with long-term depression. I associated the “feminine” with my depression. I thought the strictures and expectations of being female had contributed to my losing my spark when I was a teenager - a spark that I didn’t get back for many years. I didn’t want that to happen to my daughter. 3. How – or why – did she gravitate towards it anyway? If you’ve ever met a toddler, you’ve probably noticed how strong-willed they are. I mean, they are REALLY determined. Meanwhile, as parents of toddlers, our energies are depleted. We’re absorbed with potty training and toddler aggression and getting them to eat foods that aren’t exclusively star shaped, and a whole host of other hilarious challenges. In the end, Mari’s love for princesses proved greater than my resistance to them. 4. Is it possible for parents to embrace their children’s princess obsession while also helping them reject the sexist messages that accompany so many of these princess-centered stories? For a full answer to this question, get back to me in about ten years. For now, my answer is: We can certainly try. Particularly as they get older (like, I certainly never had these conversations when Mari was three), we can show our daughters how destructive messages are buried in the stories of the regressive princess. Luckily, we can use the newer princesses to point out positive qualities as well. Moana is an amazing character, for example. In her bravery and her quest to save her people, she possesses the qualities we find in the heroes of Greek mythology. Merida demonstrates resilience, from Elsa we learn about overcoming fears, and Anna teaches us the enormous power of acceptance and forgiveness. We can totally use this whole princess thing to our advantage. 5. Why do you say that parental instinct should be honored more than the advice of others (including relatives, articles and books by parenting experts)? There is so much out there - the tips and the articles and the well-meaning relatives and the strangers on the street who tell you to button up your child’s sweater. Not to mention the “mommy wars” and the debate over parenting styles. The subtext of so much of this noise is judgement. Parents - and mothers in particular - constantly get the message that they’re doing it all wrong. If you listen to too many “experts”, you might lose your own voice amidst the noise. If you need advice or counsel, you can always choose a few people or sources you genuinely trust. But you can absolutely listen to yourself most of all. No one knows your child better than you do. 6. How can we help our daughters navigate a society that idealizes perfection? Most parents have had the experience of their child coming home from school, upset by their own mistakes or shortcomings. Maybe they got into trouble with the teacher, or did something that made other kids laugh, or didn’t perform well on the soccer pitch. These are precious moments of parenting, when you can give your child a ton of love and acceptance and let them know it’s ok not to be perfect, and that it’s definitely ok to make mistakes. In general, it’s great to tell your kids stories of people who failed and kept trying, because we want them to not get beaten down by failure or fear of failure. Equally important is what happens at home. When my kids act “unlovable” - when they test me and fight with each other and are needy and obnoxious - in those moments, I sometimes want to lie down or run away or drink wine. And while I can’t pretend I’ve never poured myself a glass in times of stress or yelled at them, I know that the way I handle these imperfect moments are important. Because if I can stop and breathe and accept my children when they are behaving in “unlovable” ways, they get the message that they don’t have to be perfect to be loved. It’s tricky. We’re all doing our best. And we should go easy on ourselves as well - as parents and as human beings, we shouldn’t expect perfection from ourselves either. 7. In your book, you interview a number of women who used to be princess-obsessed as girls. Did their obsession have any negative lasting effects? It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, because I was curious to know how it all turned out for girls who were obsessed with princesses. This “Princess Culture” is a relatively new thing, because Disney only started marketing the princess brand in 2000. The first generation of girls who fell down the “Disney Princess rabbit hole” are coming of age now. When I finally reached out to some of them for my book, I was heartened. Every single one seemed like an engaged, intelligent and interesting person. And they all had a good and humorous perspective on their princess days. 8. What do you hope readers will take away from your book? Accept your children, who will not be the people you expected but will be fabulous anyway. While you’re at it, accept yourself. And don’t forget to laugh. This parenting stuff can sometimes feel heavy and overwhelming. But if you have the right perspective, a lot of it is actually quite funny. Particularly very small little girls who are very passionate about princesses. http://www.devorahblachor.com/

Author and New York Times Motherlode columnist Devorah Blachor talks about her new book, “THE FEMINIST’S GUIDE TO RAISING A LITTLE PRINCESS: How to Raise a Girl Who’s Authentic, Joyful, and Fearless – Even If She Refuses to Wear Anything but a Pink Tutu.” www.DevorahBlachor.com

https://bryanaiello.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jl-mixdown-1.mp3 “If parents back off the pressure and anxiety over grades and achievement and focus on the bigger picture—a love of learning and independent inquiry—grades will improve and test scores will go up.” Jessica Lahey is is the author of the book "The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed." Her work has also been published in the, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. She also hosts a show on Vermont Public Radio called #AmWriting with Jess & KJ” Her column, "The Parent-Teacher Conference, is published bi-weekly at the New York Times Motherlode blog, and examines the intersection of education, parenting, health and politics. Visit her website http://www.jessicalahey.com/ follow her on twitter: @jesslahey other notes from the show: Free range kids Age of Opportunity "permit when you can protect when you must" The brain of opportunity   Email the show at: me@bryanaiello.com follow me on twitter: @bryaiello Some of my fiction can be found at: www.bryanaiello.com My novel Compounded Interest is available for purchase on amazon.com Support the show through Patreaon  

In a climate obsessed with performance and perfection, how can we teach teens that mistakes, missteps and failure are part of learning and growth? Follow: @rrlamourelle @bamradionetwork @jesslahey #edchat #parenting JoAnn Boaler has been a professor at Stanford University since 2010. She has written several books including Mathematical Mindsets. Jessica Lahey is an educator, writer, and speaker. A former middle and high school teacher, Jess is a correspondent for the Atlantic, a commentator for Vermont Public Radio, and writes "Parent-Teacher Conference" advice column for the New York Times Motherlode blog.

Kathryn interviews Tracy Slater, author of “The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World”. When she took a short-term job teaching English to businessmen in Japan, Slater had no intention of falling in love. “The Good Shufu” chronicles her leap of faith as she tries to build a life in Japan, undergoing multiple fertility treatments all in a language and culture she can hardly understand. Slater has appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and the New York Times Motherlode blog. Kathryn also interviews educator Steve Mariotti, author of “An Entrepreneur's Manifesto”. In 1982 Mariotti left a business career to become a teacher. Frustrated by his rowdy classrooms, Mariotti found he could motivate his students by teaching them how to run a small business. This was his inspiration for bringing entrepreneurship education to low-income youth through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

Kathryn interviews Tracy Slater, author of “The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World”. When she took a short-term job teaching English to businessmen in Japan, Slater had no intention of falling in love. “The Good Shufu” chronicles her leap of faith as she tries to build a life in Japan, undergoing multiple fertility treatments all in a language and culture she can hardly understand. Slater has appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and the New York Times Motherlode blog. Kathryn also interviews educator Steve Mariotti, author of “An Entrepreneur's Manifesto”. In 1982 Mariotti left a business career to become a teacher. Frustrated by his rowdy classrooms, Mariotti found he could motivate his students by teaching them how to run a small business. This was his inspiration for bringing entrepreneurship education to low-income youth through the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

English, Latin and Writing Teacher, NHCorrespondent -- The Atlantic, The New York Times  Coming of Age in the Middle: http://jessicalahey.com Twitter: @jesslahey My bi-weekly New York Times column, "The Parent-Teacher Conference" My author page at The Atlantic My commentary page at Vermont Public Radio The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed HarperCollins (August 2015)  Download on iTunes Segment I – Background and Inspiration   Tell your story. Where are you from and how long have you been teaching? What classes have you taught?    – Jessica is finishing her book, The Gift of Failure, which resulted from an article she wrote for The Atlantic.   Who has helped you in your journey to become a master teacher?  – Mr. Potts, her high school English teacher, was a really cool guy but was also an amazing teacher. He is now the head of the English department at her high school. She quotes him in the book and has so much respect for him.  It is important for other teachers to know that we all have had setbacks in the classroom. Identify an instance in which you struggled as a teacher and explain what you learned from that experience. – In 2011 she wrote a piece called "Things Fall Apart" about one of those times when she taught something and she felt her students really knew it. But when it came time for the evaluation, it turns out they didn't know it. She realized that she could get frustrated or freak out, but she decided to reverse engineer the entire thing -- the test, the unit. They went back and figured out what went wrong.  It turned into a great experience because she realized what she did wrong and the students realized what they failed to do as well. What is the challenge in teaching three different subjects?  – There is a huge challenge in changing gears with three different preps. Yet, the most challenging aspect in middle school is the huge difference in ability levels -- based not on smarts, but on the neurological connections that happen in the brain. Some kids are able to handle symbolism and metaphor, yet some are still thinking concretely.   What is one thing that you love about the classroom?    – The moment where a kid that has been looking at you blankly for two years, and then suddenly you will see it click. A student will move from a literal interpretation of just words on a page to realizing that there is so much more underneath those words.  Segment II — What book do you recommend to a teacher that wants to develop?                 What is one thing a teacher can do outside the classroom that can pay off inside the classroom? -- She takes them outside the classroom, especially for writing.   the question that is in her mind and she puts on her tennis shoes. Running, biking, and walking have all helped her think through the challenges of teaching. Teaching can be very taxing, but there is nothing more important than your health.  Is there an internet resource that you can recommend which will help teachers grow professionally? --  The New York Times Learning Network, the NPR education podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman's Beautiful Minds at Scientific American, Rebecca McMillan's Creativity Post, Annie Murphy Paul's Brilliant blog, and Ed Yong's "Ed's Up" newsletter.  Provide a writing practice that is effective?  –  All writing is done in class and it is a lot of repetition of the basic skills. Do you have a thesis? Is there evidence to support that thesis? What structure would best support your thesis? She does not do a lot of creative writing in the classroom.  Update the cannon. What books belongs in the classroom?  Jessica is a fan of the classics. Middle school teachers are in a weird spot because often the books she wants to put in kids' hands are "mature." That said,

Managing challenging behavior is part and parcel of being a classroom teacher. In this segment our guests explore the drivers of disruptive behaviors, discuss traditional methods of responding to disruptive students and offer proven strategies. Follow: @docrappaport @jesslahey @NancyFlanagan bodymindchild @bamradionetwork Dr. Kaye Otten is currently a behavioral and autism specialist for the Lee’s Summit R-VII School District in Lee’s Summit, Missouri and co-author, How to Reach and Teach Children with Challenging Behavior. Dr. Nancy Rappaport is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of School-Based Programs at the Cambridge Health Alliance and co-author, The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding & Teaching the Most Challenging Students. Jessica Lahey is an educator, writer, and speaker, a formermiddle and high school English, Latin, and writing teacher, and is currently a correspondent for the Atlantic, a commentator for Vermont Public Radio, and writes the bi-weekly "Parent-Teacher Conference" advice column for the New York Times Motherlode blog. Nancy Flanagan is a retired teacher, with 31 years as a K-12 Music specialist.