Podcasts about writers

If you've read the craft books, listened to hundreds of podcast episodes, and studied all kinds of writing advice—but still sit down at your desk wondering, okay, what am I actually supposed to work on today?—this episode is for you.Because at some point, learning more about writing stops being the missing piece. You need a process that helps you figure out what your specific story needs, what to work on next, and how all the pieces fit together.In this bonus episode, you'll hear from three writers who had spent a lot of time learning about writing, but still struggled to turn everything they'd learned into a clear path forward.You'll hear from Josie, a self-described chronic over-learner who had studied every major plotting method but kept running into dead ends while trying to outline her novel. Emily, who wrote 35,000 words of her romantic fantasy before getting stuck in a middle she couldn't see clearly. And Nefer, who spent five years caught in a cycle of line editing when she knew her manuscript needed much bigger changes.Three writers, stuck in three completely different ways.But what got all of them moving forward again was the same thing—and it wasn't more craft advice. It was having a process that helped them figure out what their specific story needed, what to work on next, and how all the pieces fit together.In this episode, you'll hear:[03:29] How one writer went from cobbling together different plotting methods and running into dead ends to creating a detailed scene-by-scene outline she could confidently write from.[08:02] How one writer who stalled at 35,000 words finally gained clarity on the entire shape of her story—including the middle that had felt impossibly murky.[12:33] What happened when one writer zoomed out of her line-by-line prose to focus on the big picture of her story first—and how doing so gave her the clarity to move forward.If you've spent months, or even years, learning about the craft but still feel unsure what your novel needs from you next, there's a good chance you'll recognize yourself in at least one of these stories.And if this episode makes you realize a clear process might be the thing you've been missing, Notes to Novel is open for enrollment through September 4th.It's the same process Josie, Emily, and Nefer used to make the progress you'll hear about today. Inside, I'll help you develop your story's foundation, create your cast of characters, and map your plot into a scene-by-scene outline so you can write your draft with clarity and confidence.

Hour 2- CJ Stroud and Lane Kiffin

Kim Murphy joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about unburdening herself from decades of shame, her often absent and unpredictable mother, what we owe or don't owe our parents at the end of their lives, gaining a level of remove from the character versions of ourselves, the push and pull of dependence and disappointment, hoping our parents will be different, getting raw and vulnerable on the page, molding lived experience into a narrative arc, depicting the younger versions of ourselves, the motivation and accountability of a writing partner, making art from a messy childhood, working with vulnerable and difficult material, creating her own imprint and becoming an indie author, and her new memoir Unmothered: A Memoir of Parental Neglect and the Search for Love and Belonging.   Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story   Also in this episode: - the divided self - writing with metaphor - having your family's blessing   Books mentioned in this episode: The Memoir Project by Marian Roach Smith Deep Memoir by Jennifer Selig   Kim Murphy is the author of Unmothered, a memoir that explores the long shadow of maternal absence, the quiet work of self-parenting, and the ways women learn to survive--and eventually soften--without the care they needed. Her writing traces the intersections of trauma, identity, resilience, and healing, with particular attention to the enduring impact of childhood emotional neglect and abuse.   A longtime writer and communications strategist, Kim spent more than three decades as an independent contractor crafting narratives for government agencies, nonprofits, and Fortune 500 organizations, translating complex material into clear, easy-to-understand content.  She is the author of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: 25 Years of Healing and Educating and co-author of The Best Friends' Guide to Getting Fit. Her work has also appeared in Ritz-Carlton Magazine. When she's not writing or hanging out with her husband, Kim plays Mahjong, pulls weeds from her flower garden, and walks the beach while listening to podcasts and audiobooks.   Connect with Kim: Website: https://kestrelhousepress.com/ On Instagram: @kma_copy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-murphy-593b01/   Purchase Book: https://books.by/kestrelhousepress – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book. More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank   Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

How do you identify your writing weaknesses? And, even more importantly, how can you tell if something really is a weakness? In this episode, I share five ways writers can recognize recurring craft problems, strengthen weak areas, and distinguish poor execution from intentional writing style. Every story presents its own challenges. Struggling with one beginning doesn't necessarily mean you're bad at beginnings. But when the same problem keeps cropping up across multiple stories, that's information worth paying attention to. We'll look at how to identify writing weaknesses by listening to your story sense, noticing what you consistently avoid, comparing patterns across multiple stories, and learning from beta readers, critique partners, editors, and reader reviews. We'll also talk about the important difference between the inner critic's generalized judgments and the specific diagnostic nudges that can actually help you improve your writing. But identifying a recurring pattern raises another question: Is it actually a weakness? Writing craft is largely the study of patterns that work. But not every departure from those patterns is a mistake. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy made unconventional choices that became part of their distinctive styles. The real question is whether your choices effectively communicate what you intend. In this episode, we'll talk about: • What writing weaknesses actually are • 5 ways to identify recurring weaknesses in your writing • How to distinguish your inner critic from your story sense • Why patterns across multiple stories matter • How to use feedback without surrendering your own judgment • When breaking writing "rules" becomes a stylistic strength • How to turn weak areas into stronger writing skills Read the transcript: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/identify-writing-weaknesses/ LINKS & RESOURCES Want More? WRITING MASTERCLASS: Flat Character Arcs: From Transformation to Integration https://kmweilandstore.com/b/flat-character-arc-class  If character arcs are one of the areas you'd like to understand more deeply, my new masterclass Flat Character Arcs: From Transformation to Integration explores not just how Flat Character Arcs work, but why. The more deeply we understand the patterns underneath story (i.e., the reasons certain choices create meaning and resonance), the less we have to rely on memorized "rules." Instead, we can begin internalizing the principles themselves and using them instinctively in our own stories. You can also save 15% by purchasing the class as part of my Writing Steadfast and Tragic Character Arcs bundle, together with Negative Character Arcs: Hidden Patterns of Self-Deception.

This week I've got another compilation episode for you to enjoy while I take the rest of the summer off from producing new episodes.In today's episode, I'm sharing answers from six different writers to the question: What is your favorite part of the writing process? What really lights you up and keeps you going?The writers you'll hear from today are a mix of journalists, novelists, essayists, memoirists, and historians–and sometimes they tick multiple of these boxes. They include Christine Chitnis, Christopher Castellani, Elizabeth Gonzalez-James, Minda Honey, Kenneth C. Davis, and Lisa See, and I selected this group not just because I loved our conversations and know you will too, and not only because they're a diverse mix of genres, ages, genders, and races, but also because they were really eloquent about the parts of being a writer that really light them up.As important as I believe it is to talk about the hard things–like dealing with doubt, and finding a way to make money–it's equally important to focus on the parts you love so much it makes the hard parts easier to handle.Hope you're enjoying the last bits of summer--it lasts until September 21st, despite what the school calendar may say! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Game Deflators dive into new Mario LEGO reveals, MTG's Zeta booster packs, Gamescom 2026 highlights, Xbox Disc‑to‑Digital's huge launch, and revisit Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball on Xbox. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 03:13 Gaming Pickups and Personal Experiences 06:13 Exploring Lost Ember and Chrono Trigger 09:16 Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Preparations 12:19 Quick News: Lego Mario and Magic the Gathering Updates 25:47 Magic Card Art and Design 27:50 Gamescom 2026 Announcements 29:07 Excitement for Upcoming Games 32:37 Grand Theft Auto Trailer Discussion 34:16 Final Fantasy and The Witcher Updates 45:56 Xbox's Digital Transition 47:38 Game Preservation and Physical Media 50:43 Microsoft's Strategy and Brand Identity 52:46 Nostalgia and Iconic Franchises 55:54 The Magic of Gaming for Kids 01:01:12 Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball Review John and Ryan dive into a packed week of gaming news and nostalgia, starting with their recent pickups and reactions to the newly revealed Super Mario LEGO sets. They break down the designs, the fan response, and how Nintendo continues expanding Mario into physical collectibles. The conversation shifts into Magic: The Gathering as Wizards of the Coast surprises players with the cryptic announcement of the Zeta Set — the first Secret Lair release to feature actual booster packs. The guys explore what this means for collectors, gameplay, and MTG's increasingly experimental product strategy. Next, they recap every notable announcement from Gamescom Opening Night Live 2026, highlighting standout trailers, surprise reveals, and industry‑shaping updates from the show. The biggest news of the week comes from Microsoft, as the company officially announces Xbox Disc‑to‑Digital — a massive initiative supporting thousands of physical games at launch. John and Ryan dig into how the program works, why it matters, and what it means for collectors, preservationists, and the future of physical media. To wrap up the episode, the Inflation Deflation Game of the Week features a review of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball on the original Xbox. They revisit the game's mechanics, presentation, reputation, and current market value. Find us on TheGameDeflators.com Twitter - www.twitter.com/GameDeflators Facebook - www.facebook.com/TheGameDeflators Instagram - www.instagram.com/thegamedeflators The views and opinions expressed on this channel are solely those of the author. The content within these recordings are property of their respective Designers, Writers, Creators, Owners, Organizations, Companies and Producers. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted. Permission for intro and outro music provided by Matthew Huffaker http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe 2_25_18

CAA literary agent Rachel Mann on what makes her say yes to a manuscript, how to navigate the submissions process without losing control of your career, and why cutting is the work that makes prose land. You'll learn Why the recognition an agent needs is physical rather than analytical. What to do when you're not sure your manuscript is ready to send out. How to buy more time after a full manuscript request without killing the momentum. Why telling other agents about your requests works in your favour, even if it feels grubby. The realistic rhythm for chasing an agent who has gone quiet. Whether refusing to use social media can cost a writer representation. A question worth answering before you sign with anyone, and why the answer shapes the edit. The edit most manuscripts need before submission, and why it rarely means adding. How poetry's distillation applies to prose, whatever you write. What still gives an agent hope in a market where people are reading less. Resources & Links Rachel's Website Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr Waterstones Puffin Jo Unwin Literary Agency Karolina Sutton agent Harriet Poland agent Sarah Harvey agent John Ash agent Boy Parts by Eliza Clark Ottessa Moshfegh author Society of Authors The Arvon Foundation To Query Rachel: Email her at rachel.mann@caa.com. To submit, please send a cover email, one-page synopsis and the first three chapters of your work, or the rough equivalent. About Rachel Mann Rachel Mann is a Literary Agent at CAA and represents a broad range of work – largely fiction, with some non-fiction — from commercial to literary, in adult, young adult, and middle-grade markets. Her clients include Eliza Clark, Caleb Femi, Jade LB and Aisling Rawle, and have won and been listed for major prizes, including the Granta Best Young British Novelist, the Forward Prize for Poetry, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize, the YA Book Prize, The Bookseller Discover Prize, and the Carnegie Medal. She spent ten years editing and commissioning fiction for young people at houses including Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, and was global publishing director at the Roald Dahl Story Company. She became an agent in 2018 and joined CAA in 2023. For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

Send us Fan MailNobody likes a bully! One of the reasons myself and many others became cops was to protect those who couldn't protect themselves. That's what cops should do! But, what happens when your own sheriff's department turns on you and becomes the bully? What do you do when your bosses and teammates turn on you? Where do you turn?My returning guest today, former Sheriff's Deputy Bridget Truxillo, was a sheriff's deputy in Florida for years. She worked undercover in the narcotics unit and was also the department's first and only female SWAT operator. Unfortunately, she was the victim of workplace harassment, bullying, and discrimination. She just ‘took it' until her own department drove her to resign. Bridget Truxillo went on to the next chapter of her life and became an attorney. That firsthand experience is why she founded Lady Law Shield, a firm built specifically to give law enforcement officers and first responders legal guidance on the employment issues they run into at work — things like workplace disputes, retaliation, and the fallout that can follow difficult decisions made on the job. Bridget works at the point where the job and the law collide, helping officers protect their careers while making sense of a system most attorneys don't understand from the inside. This conversation takes lots of unexpected twists and turns that I think you will find useful if you are a cop or if you want an insider look into the confusing and sometimes cruel world of law enforcement. It was a treat talking to Bridget again and hearing her amazing story of resilience and how she is of service to the law enforcement community.In today's episode, we discuss:·      Bridget's beginnings in law enforcement.·      What her rookie year looked like. ·      Being brought into undercover work after only having one year on the job.·      How and why she tried out and earned a spot on the SWAT team.·      How was she treated being the only female on the SWAT team? ·      Being the victim of workplace harassment and discrimination and how she dealt with it.·      What led to her decision to resign from law enforcement? ·      How can we as cops transition from being a cop to civilian life seamlessly? Is it possible?·      What she sees as the biggest mistakes cops make transitioning into civilian life.·      Her work as an attorney, founding Lady Law Shield, helping first responders who are victims of workplace harassment and discrimination.All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Visit Bridget at her law firm, Lady Law Shield.Check out Bridget at the following conferences!Rise: Women in Policing | San Diego | September 2026 Tuesday, September 8, 2026 to Friday, September 11, 2026. I am speaking Thursday, Sept. 10,  10:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m., title: Navigating Workplace Challenges Without Derailing Your Career.2026 6th Annual National Law Enforcement Survival Summit, September 28-30, Las Vegas, NV. I am speaking September 30, title: Leadership Under Scrutiny: Reducing Liability and Workplace BreakdownCheck out our conversation from two years ago.Head on over to my website!What's the craziest thing you saw when you were a cop?My first week on the job, a guy running at me with a butcher knife. He'd just killed his brother over the last hot dog.That's chapter 1. There are 33 more.Police Stories: The Rookie Years just launched - available on Amazon. Search 'Police Stories Patrick O'Donnell' or click thSupport the show

Two tales of children whose adult life in baseball might have been influenced by childhood fears real and imagined (but mostly real). First, the speed-king of 1880s baseball (since dethroned or at least debunked) has to watch his parents await the arrival and Robert E. Lee and his hordes on their doorstep. Then we return to John McGraw, his dangerous youth, his possible encounters with Mark Twain, and an afterlife wish-list of writers, actors, and cartoonists posted by an obscure writer who soon thereafter journeyed to the next world to meet them himself. We then conclude by debating if young McGraw had better options for escaping his dilemma than we do today. The Infinite Inning is a journey to the past to understand the present using baseball as our time machine. America's brighter mirror, baseball reflects, anticipates, and even mocks the stories we tell ourselves about our world today. Baseball Prospectus's Steven Goldman shares his obsessions: history from inside and outside of the game, politics, stats, and Casey Stengel quotations. Along the way, we'll try to solve the puzzle that is the Infinite Inning: How do you find the joy in life when you can't get anybody out?

On today's program, Gateway Church wins its appeal to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by child sexual abuse survivor Cindy Clemishire. We'll have details. Plus, frontline missionaries with Free Burma Rangers are helping Burmese villagers clear landmines and reclaim their homes, one field at a time. We'll take a look. And, LIFE Outreach International unseats Liberty University as this months' top user of private aircraft. It's the latest in our latest Pastors & Planes series. But first, an anti-trafficking group is stepping into a very different line of work. Our Rescue, formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad, just landed a $158 million federal contract. The group will provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children. That’s a big shift for them. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. We get editorial, database, and other technical support from Christina Darnell, Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, Heidi Allums, and Casey Sudduth. Writers who contributed to today's program include Kim Roberts, Neva Piombino, Marci Seither, Michaela Gordoni, Christina Darnell, Makella Knowles, and Jessica Eturralde. Until next time, may God bless you.

At the time of Washington Irving's death, he was the most famous and widely praised American writer of his or any other era. But his reputation soon dwindled, and today he's known primarily as the author of just two stories ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle"), while his groundbreaking works of history, biography, and essays are barely known. In this episode, Jacke talks to essayist Phillip Lopate about his book A Washington Irving Sketch Book: Reflections on an American Writer, in which Lopate pays tribute to the life and works of a nineteenth-century kindred spirit. Then Mike Palindrome turns the tables on Jacke, interviewing him about this summer's History of Literature Podcast Tour, in which Jacke, Emma, and a hearty band of guests journeyed together through literary England. On Sale Now! For more information and to order ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Great Detective! An Adventure for Two People [2-Book Boxed Set]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ by Jacke Wilson, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠press.historyofliterature.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. SPECIAL OFFER! For a limited time, enter promotion code LOVE26 to get 20% off! And if you help us get the word out by posting two people enjoying the book on social media (plus a link to our website), we will refund money to your account. Learn more at ⁠press.historyofliterature.com⁠! The music in this episode is by Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠gabrielruizbernal.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Help support the show at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠patreon.com/literature⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠historyofliterature.com/donate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can the Fast Drafting method help you finally finish your novel? And how do you make progress when you only have 30 minutes a day to write? Jessica Brody shares her tips for finishing first drafts after 20 years as an author. In the intro, Clive Barker's Kickstarter, The Amazon Tax [Seth Godin]; Trad publisher announces “human-originated, AI-facilitated” book, The Everything Code [PanMacmillan; AI policy; CHAPTR]; Holy relics, churches, and memento mori in Bruges and Brussels. This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. You can pre-order with bonus extras at JessicaBrody.com/preorder You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why a small advance can set you up for long-term success Why 97% of first drafts are never finished How to finish a novel writing 30 minutes a day Why drafting and revising are two different jobs How a pre-writing ritual primes your brain for flow Writing a meta murder mystery after 20 years of teaching plot You can find Jessica at JessicaBrody.com and WritingMastery.com. Transcript of the interview with Jessica Brody Jo: Jessica Brody is the best-selling author of over 20 novels across different genres and age groups, as well as writing for Disney Publishing. She's also the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and other books and courses for writers at the Writing Mastery Academy. Her latest book is Page One to Done: Finish Your Novel in 30 Days with the Fast Drafting Method. So welcome to the show, Jessica. Jessica: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm so honoured to be here. My writing community speaks so highly of this podcast, so I'm excited. Jo: Oh, well, thank you, and you were requested, so this is going to be a good one. First up— Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing and publishing. Jessica: Well, I started writing when I was seven. I like to put in air quotes, I wrote my first, quote, “novel” when I was seven. It was about three pages long. I got the bug very early. I didn't realise it was an actual career choice that you could take seriously until way later in life, after I'd already graduated college with a degree in economics and I was working as a financial analyst, and I was just writing on the side for fun. Then, as luck would have it, I got laid off from my job, and I ended up trying to take writing a little bit more seriously in that time. That's when I found the Save the Cat method, which absolutely changed everything for me. Before that, I had loads of rejection letters, and I eventually sold my first novel to St. Martin's Press, and I've been writing and publishing ever since. That was 20 years ago now. Jo: 20 years, wow. It's so interesting. So you were in economics, you were a financial analyst, and you got into writing. Did you have any pushback from either your own brain that was like, “I cannot make money this way,” or your family? Or how did you make that leap? Because we just hear that it's not a career, financially, really. Jessica: I know, and I think I went into it very blindly, using television as my resource of this is how much money I can make writing. Like Sex and the City, she was selling books for lots of money. So I was like, oh, I just have to sell one book, and then I'll be set. That was not the case. My first advance was so much lower than I expected, and what happened, though, was kind of interesting. I sold my first book, way lower advance than I was hoping for. I wasn't making any money anywhere else, so I was taking on all these odd jobs that I could do in my own time. I was doing transcription work, and I was working at a school half the time. I mean, I just had so many really weird jobs. I think what happened was, because I didn't have another financial net to help me, it just pushed me really hard. So once I sold one book, I was like, well, I need to sell another one and another one, and I ended up in this 20-year cycle, which I've slowed down thankfully, since, but of writing so obsessively, I should say. I just kept selling books and selling books. My advances got higher and higher, and eventually I was able to support myself with my writing, but it was not instant at all. Jo: Actually, that's a really good note there, because we often hear so much of these debuts that get paid a ton of money, and then they disappear, and they almost spiral down. Whereas what you've done is spiral up. Which is almost a better way to do it perhaps, with your reputation with traditional publishing. Jessica: It's funny, I tell this story a lot to writers who are looking to get published, that the big advance is not necessarily the end-all be-all. Because I have heard that story before, someone gets a very big advance, and then it doesn't earn out, and they can't sell another book because the publisher's lost money. I had the opposite experience. My advance was so low, and my publisher got worldwide rights. They bought worldwide rights. So they started selling foreign rights of my first book really early on, and I earned out before the book even came out, with just a few foreign sales. That ended up setting me up for success, because I was making money for the publisher from day one, and I was able to sell more books, and so I sort of worked my way up. I really do credit a lot of that to how long I've been able to stay in this game. Jo: No, it's a good way of thinking about it, because people forget the publisher isn't a charity. The publisher has to make money from your book. So it's nice that you make money, but they have to make money, or they're not going to bother, right? Jessica: Yes, exactly. Jo: So let's come back to Save the Cat, because you mentioned that the original method really changed how you write, and then of course you did Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. So I've got that. I imagine a lot of people listening have got that. Tell us a bit about why that methodology made such a difference to you, and why you think it's so useful. Jessica: Well, you'll sense a theme here. I went into this business, like I said, without knowing a lot, and I went into it the way I think a lot of writers do, which is, I had an idea, I sat down, and I tried to write it. I had no guidance, no map, no structure, and I just wrote. I actually finished something, which is surprising, but then I started to get all these rejection letters that basically said similar things, which was, “You're a good writer, you have a good voice, but there's no story here.” I just didn't understand that feedback, because I had finished something. I could print it out and stack it on my desk. Wasn't that a story? Apparently it was not. Then a screenwriter friend of mine that I was talking to about how I was getting all of these rejection letters with the same note said, “You should read this book that recently came out. It's called Save the Cat, and it's for screenwriters, but I think it could work for novels because it just seems to be all about structure and storytelling.” So I read the book cover to cover so quickly, because if anyone's read the original, it's just so readable, and everything started clicking in my mind. I realised, wow, I really don't know how to tell a story. I could plot out everything I had done wrong, and I went back to my book and I started rewriting it from page one with this new structure in mind. When I finished that, I ended up getting an agent for that book, and the agent sold that book. I've been using the method ever since. It just made so much sense to my brain. What I tell writers is, “Use the method that makes sense to your brain.” All storytelling structure methods are basically telling the same story, just with different words, sliced and diced a little bit differently, but structure is structure, and a story is a story. It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. It has to have conflict, it has to have a middle twist, and things like that. So this one worked for my brain, and I started to teach it to other novelists, because at the time there was still just the screenwriting guide. So I started to teach how I was using it to other novelists, and that turned into the book, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Then I wrote a young adult version of it as well. And I still use it to this day. It's just something that's always made sense to me. Jo: So were you hired by the estate? Blake Snyder died, right? So were you hired to write that, or is that something you arranged? Jessica: It was kind of something that was arranged. I think Blake Snyder Enterprises is the name of the company. Blake Snyder died in 2009, sadly. When I started using the method, I was blogging about it on my blog, and I would share some of my beat sheets of the novels I was writing. The people who had taken over his estate reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you blog for us? Because we don't have a lot of novel content on our blog. We just do screenplay stuff.” And I said, “Of course.” I had a fangirl moment. Oh my gosh, they've reached out to me and this is so exciting. So I started blogging for them, and then that turned into the workshops that I started doing with them. Then we partnered up on the book. I think it was one of those things that felt inevitable, like we were just working toward it. I was living in LA at the time. They're based in LA. And I remember having breakfast with them, and we all just looked at each other and said, “So we need to write a book, right? There has to be a book.” So we ended up sharing the copyright, and, as you see from the title, it says based on the books by Blake Snyder. It's very much his method. Then I brought some of my novel flair and some of my own little tips and tricks that I had picked up over the years and applied it to his method. Jo: I love that. We are going to come to your other book for writers in a minute, but just on that intellectual property sharing, writing in other markets, you also write for Disney Publishing. This is so fascinating to me. Now, there are lots of people who do write for other properties. So how did that come about writing for other properties, and how does that fit into your portfolio of the things that you do? Jessica: Yes, writing for other properties is really fun. It's probably not for everyone. You have to know what you're getting into before you pursue it, because it's very much not your IP. You're writing under someone else's brand, you're in their canon, and there are certain rules you have to follow. So you have guidelines. I found it to be really fun and kind of a break from some of my own stuff, because I didn't have to come up with everything. I didn't have to invent all the new worlds and all the new characters. A lot of them were just given to me, and I could play within the boundaries of that sandbox, and I really found that inspiring. So what happened actually is I was on a writing retreat with a bunch of other writers, and there was a writer at the retreat who already wrote for Disney Press and was supposed to write this new series for them, based on their Descendants series. She said to me, “I really can't do it, but I'd love to recommend someone else to them.” I think we had been talking about how big of a fan I was of Disney or something, and she said, “Do you want me to recommend you?” And I said, “Yes, absolutely.” Another big fangirl moment. So the editor of that series reached out to my agent. They talked to me. They got writing samples from me through my agent, and then before I knew it, I was hired to write, I think the first contract was maybe for two or three of the books, and then we renewed for a few more. It was just really fun. Then I formed a relationship with that editor. We ended up working on another series for younger kids, based on the Disney Princess LEGO series, which was much younger and new for me. It had illustrations. That was a whole new challenge, but I found it really fun. As I said, it was a nice break from writing my own things, because I could write them fairly quickly. They did have very fast turnarounds at the publisher too, but I could use my skills for structure and storytelling and apply it to a world that already existed, and it was a nice pairing. Jo: I love this. So much of what you've done seems to have come from relationships or just putting yourself out there in the world. Jessica: Yes, good observation. I hadn't thought of that. Jo: Whereas I think a lot of people think that it's all about cold pitching. It's not so much, from what you're saying. Jessica: Yes, and I did another IP project with Simon & Schuster called Boys of Summer, which was a young adult novel. That one specifically came from my agent. So a lot of times publishers will reach out to agents and say, “Here's what we're doing. Do you have authors who would fit?” And my agent will often reach out to me and say, “Here's the pitch I got from a publisher. Are you interested in submitting yourself for this?” That's what happened with Boys of Summer. They actually sent out an outline to a bunch of writers who were interested, and I had to write sample chapters to the outline, or I think it was the first couple of chapters or something. I was very gratefully selected to write it. That came about from having an agent, and a lot of times having an agent is a way into IP work. And then those connections can help too. Jo: Fascinating. Right. Well, let's get into your book Page One to Done, which as I said, one of my listeners actually requested to have you on the show to talk about this book, because she said it was absolutely fantastic and helped her finish her book. So why finishing? What is the problem? Why write a book on actually finishing? What are some of the common issues that people have? Jessica: Well, thank you to that listener. I really appreciate it, and here I am because of you. Connections once again. So Page One to Done came out of my own struggle with finishing, and not just finishing, but finishing efficiently and maintaining joy throughout the process of writing a novel. As I said, I was writing very fast and furiously, and my deadlines were piling up, and I started to feel like writing a novel stopped being fun. It started to become a very frustrating process, and I realised that was a lot about how I was approaching the first draft, which, as most writers know, the first draft is very hard. When I started to look further into it, I found this statistic online that's widely accepted in the writing community, which is that 97% of first drafts are not finished. Which is, wow, mind-blowing, but also not that hard to believe once you think about the challenges of writing a first draft. Taking an idea from a seed, developing it into a full plot with character development and arcs and subplots and side characters and themes and all the things that you think a story should have, getting that all onto the page and actually reaching the end. It's very, very difficult, and I never lie about how difficult it is. So I was struggling to finish things quickly, to enjoy the process, and I noticed that other writers were too. I felt like, well, I have this plotting guide that I love, this structure guide, Save the Cat! Shouldn't this be easier once I have an outline? And it wasn't. And that, I think, is because we forget that there's another part of the process. It's not just about developing a compelling character. It's not just about having a well-paced plot. You have to be able to get ideas out of your head and onto the page in a way that doesn't make you want to quit. I think one of the problems with the first draft is most of us write something down, it does not match what's in our head, and we start to get more and more frustrated. The process becomes overwhelming. We're holding too much of the story in our head. We're going back to page one to revise with every new idea we have, so it starts to slow down. The farther we get into the book, the longer that back to page one process takes, and things start to spiral out of control. I think that's essentially what happens to this 97% of first drafts. The writer quits because it's not good enough. It doesn't match what's in their mind, and there's too much to hold, and it starts to become overwhelming. So this is what was happening to me. Even though I was finishing things, the process was still very overwhelming, and I started to experiment with different things. Different mindset shifts that I could make, different ways I could change my writing routine to really enhance the process, to get into flow faster, to stay in flow for longer, things like that. It took me about five years, and I developed this collection of mindset shifts and strategies and routines that I could not only apply to myself, but I turned it into a system that was repeatable, and I started teaching it in my Writing Mastery Academy. I called it the Fast Drafting method, and it's all about letting go of this idea that our first draft has to be perfect or even that good, and just focusing on getting ideas down as quickly as possible, even if that creates a big mess. It's this freeing process of doing that in a way that we don't get in our own way. So I started teaching it to other writers. People were finishing things who had never finished things before. Writers who had taken two years to write a first draft were writing first drafts in weeks. The biggest comment I was getting was, “This is so freeing. This is so liberating. This is so fun.” And it gave people the motivation that they needed to actually sit down and revise the book. Before, either they never finished, so they never got to the revision process, or they were so overwhelmed and bogged down by the two years it took for them to write one draft, they didn't have the energy to revise and get it to the next level. So anyway, all of this is to say it was working for me, it was working for other writers. I turned it into a book called Page One to Done, and it's my three-phase process, mindset, preparation, and drafting, which I equate to running a marathon. You wouldn't run a marathon without proper training and proper nutrition and the right mindset, just like you wouldn't write a novel without the right mindset, the right preparation, and the right skills you need to get to the end. Jo: That's fantastic. You mentioned training there and some of the routine changes. So I hear new writers say, “Oh, I can't write unless I maybe have two hours or three hours to write down stuff, and I never have three hours at a time, so I never have time to write.” I hear that a lot. So what would you say to those people? What is a routine and a mindset shift that might help those people? Jessica: That's great, and I hear that all the time too. I interviewed a handful of authors for this book who had gone through the fast drafting method with me, and I would say the majority of them wrote for 30 minutes to one hour a day and were able to finish their books in a matter of weeks to maybe two months. That's because what I teach in the book is not about the amount of time you have. It's about how you use that time. When you really structure your day and your writing time with intentionality, you do whatever you can to block out distractions, get into flow, stay in flow. I'll give you one amazing tip that basically solves all of these things in a second. But when you really bring intentionality to those 30 minutes, you can write more in 30 minutes than you can in three hours without bringing these kinds of intentional choices. So that's one of the things I teach. You don't need more time. You actually just need to approach the time you have with the right mindsets and the right intentions. So one of the biggest shifts I tell people is just don't write and revise at the same time. For one, it pulls your brain in two different directions and creates the requirement of context switching, because essentially drafting and revising are two different jobs. Drafting is getting ideas out of your head and onto the page. Revising is polishing those ideas. They require very different headspaces and very different skills. So when we try to do both of them at once, we're pulled in two different directions. We're essentially trying to polish something we haven't even figured out yet, so we're polishing in the dark, if you will. It causes our brain to snap back and forth so many times. The term context switching is very big in the zeitgeist today, and that's because it's eating up our brain capacity. So if you spend 30 minutes just getting ideas down without judging them as they're coming out, without trying to revise them as they're coming out, you will get a lot of words down. A lot of that has to do with just what do you expect out of those 30 minutes? If you expect to write a chapter of absolutely brilliant polished prose, you're probably not going to do it, and you're going to feel like you wasted three hours. Then the next time you have three hours, you're like, “Well, no, I'm not going to do that. It's too frustrating, and I don't have three hours to begin with.” But if you sit down with the idea of, “I'm going to get all my ideas down. I'm going to just enjoy this process and live in my story for these 30 minutes,” you will be amazed at how much will come out onto the page. And you can absolutely finish a book that way. So intentionality is how you set up your workspace. Making sure that your phone is on do not disturb, making sure there are no pop-ups on your screen, making sure there are not even windows open behind your document. Every time your mind thinks about something else, you have to bring it back, and that eats brain power. So it's things like that. I have a whole chapter on how to set up a writing routine. One of the biggest tips I give people is to do what I call a pre-writing ritual. This is based in neuroscience, and there are all of these studies that back this up, that our brain does something where it associates an activity with another activity. So let's say right before we sit down to write, every time we do that, we do 10 jumping jacks, just as an example. But we only do 10 jumping jacks before we write. We don't do 10 jumping jacks before we sit down to do our taxes or answer emails. It's just before we write. Your brain starts to create this associative link with jumping jacks and writing. These are ways that we can prime our brain to get into the writing mode, and after doing that a handful of times, you do your jumping jacks, and your brain is literally already in your story before you sit down. It starts to soften that resistance that happens when we think, “Oh, I have to go write now,” or, “I've got to go write a certain amount of words,” or, “I have to work with my story.” It softens that, where it just becomes, “Oh, this is what I'm doing now.” Setting up these pre-writing rituals, which could include jumping jacks, could include something else, a lot of examples we can explore if you want, creates that associative link and allows us to get into the writing zone even faster. So by the time we sit down, we're already primed to go. We're not wasting a lot of that time going, “Oh, should I do it now? Should I do it later? I've got to open my document. Oh, my coffee's a little low.” All the things that we do to delay writing. They start to fall away. Jo: Yes, I mean, I always tell people, you and I turned up on time. We arranged this. We respect each other. We turn up, and we're doing this within a time slot. So I always say to people, “Look, make a calendar entry for your writing,” and do you respect your writing enough to turn up on time and do the work? We had a few minutes of saying hi or whatever, and then we got on with our work, which was this interview. So if you've arranged to start writing for that half an hour, then it is work still, right? You need to turn up and honour that. Jessica: Yes, and actually I have the same tip in the book. I say put it on your calendar, block it off. For the reasons you said, it creates in your brain the idea that this is a serious thing. It's not just a, “Oh, I'll get to it when I get to it,” like folding the laundry. It's like, no, this is what I've decided to do, I'm serious about it, I respect it. Just like any other appointment that you would respect, like lunch with a friend or an important business meeting, you show up for it. You don't go, “I think I'll show up to that business meeting in a few hours when I feel like it.” Also it keeps the routine consistent, because one of the tips I give is to always write at the same time every day if you can, because again, that associative link created in your brain, that habitual routine. So if you put it in your calendar for the days that you're going to write, you won't schedule over it by accident, which is just another logistical thing. I say something similar to what you just said, Joanna, in the book, which is basically, if you booked a massage for an hour, you would stay for the hour, right? Because you paid for this massage. Jo: Hell yes. Jessica: It's important to you. You're not going to get up in the middle and start texting your friends. You want your massage. If you treat your writing like any other thing that's important to you and show up for it consistently, it will show up for you, too. Jo: Yes, and I think the other misconception is that, okay, so that person has made it, and they're at the desk. I listen to rain and thunderstorms in my headphones. That's kind of, I guess, my routine. But that doesn't mean that I can just stream something wonderful. You talked about separating the writing and the editing, but sometimes it really is pretty basic, right? Morgan walked into the room. That will often be my thing, and then I'll be like, “Okay, well, why?” And what was the room like? Or was it even a room? So sometimes you just have to start writing something rather than wait for a perfect sentence. Jessica: Oh, yes, absolutely. Waiting for the perfect sentence, you'll be waiting for a long time. I say waiting for inspiration, you'll be waiting for a long time. My joke is, if I waited to write only when I felt inspired, I'd finish a book about every 20 years, if that. I think that's very important, and I teach a lot of tips and tricks in the book on how to get past that resistance, because of course, we don't want to just sit down and write something that we don't like. We don't want to just write down, “Oh, she stared at her computer for 10 minutes.” But sometimes we have to write that down to get to the next sentence or the next plot point or whatever barrier is in our mind. So one tip I'll tell people is put things you don't like in brackets, the square brackets. It's a really simple tip, and it's one of the tips I share in the book. Just put it in brackets and move on. What the brackets do, at least for people who use it, is it's like scaffolding. It's a reminder to your brain, this isn't permanent. This isn't going to stay. I'm going to come back to this later and fix it once I figure out what the story is and what she's actually doing in the room at this moment. For now, it's there. It's on the page. I can move past it. For me at least, the brackets are just this really nice reminder of the scaffolding. Nope, nope, nope, not perfect, not permanent, moving on. Then you can come back later and flesh it all out. I share a lot of anecdotes from my 20 years of writing novels, and one that I particularly like is I was working on a novel, and I had this scene that was just so awful, where all of my characters were sitting in a room. I had no idea what room it was or what it looked like, and they were talking about their feelings. It was just so awful and boring, but I had to get through this scene because I had to establish certain things that came later. I was complaining and complaining about this scene. I was on a writing retreat at the time, and my writer friends were like, “Let's just do a writing sprint, and we'll all write really fast, and we'll all get through our bad scenes, and we'll move on.” So I did that. I moved past the boring scene. It was still boring all the way to the end, but here's the thing, I couldn't figure out what happened in that scene until I'd figured out the whole story. So I wrote the bad version, and then in the next draft I came back and I was like, “Oh, this scene should take place on this bridge that I wrote in the finale that I didn't even know I needed, and it's this very symbolic bridge, and they can be standing on the bridge, and then they should be talking about this because that's going to pay off in the third act,” and I hadn't even thought of that yet. So all the things were coming together, but I could never have come up with that at the time. If I had just sat there and tried and tried, I probably would have gotten stuck at that scene and quit. So I had to just write the bad version, move past it, and come back later. Jo: Yes, and I think maybe because you're famous for structure, people think that maybe you wouldn't have to do that, because you already came up with that in the plotting. It sounds like you're also putting in those elements and foreshadowing and deepening things in the edit. So that's quite comforting for me as a discovery writer, because I end up doing so much more of that kind of thing in the edits. Jessica: Well, something I like to say is that we're all discovery writers, just different degrees. Because the writing process, no matter how much you plot in advance, is always going to be a discovery process. There are always going to be things you didn't think of. There's always going to be a way to tie things together that you never could have thought of before you started writing. So much of the story evolves and gets processed on the page and in your mind as it's coming out onto the page, and it's delusional to think you can think of all that before you start engaging with the characters. You can come close. I've known writers who have come very close, but almost all writers will discover something that they didn't know in the outline. I would argue that that's actually the fun part of writing. It's not the days when writing goes exactly to plan. They're nice, but they're not necessarily the fun parts. The fun parts are when you sit down to write the scene you thought was going to be the scene, and suddenly this new detail appears, and you go, “Oh my gosh, this totally unlocks everything, and I never even thought of it.” It could be in a text message. It could be on a billboard. It could be something the character just blurts out that you weren't expecting, and suddenly your whole story comes together in that moment, or maybe just the scene comes together. It's those moments, I think, that we write for. So even just expecting the book to come out exactly as you plotted is one of those mindset shifts. If you shift it and think, “This is really fun. I get to discover new things about my story that I wasn't expecting,” that, again, just makes the process a little more fun. So instead of, “Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be,” or, “This isn't what I outlined,” which is focusing on what's wrong with the book, it becomes, “Oh, wow, this is teaching me something I never expected about my story, and that's pretty cool.” Jo: Yes, I think that moment, Carl Jung called it, I guess, synchronicity, the moment when these things come together and it feels just incredible, that's the moment we all look for. It does seem to happen on every book. Everything clicks into place, and I look forward to that moment with every book. I did want to ask you about a novel that you have coming out soon as we record this, called How to Write a Murder. Now, this is a new genre for you, and it's quite meta because it's about writers as well. So talk about writing a brand new genre now at this point in your career. What are the challenges of trying to reach a new audience? Why do this book now? Jessica: Wow, great question. I love challenging myself to do something new. I wrote contemporary for many years and then thought, “I'm going to try a sci-fi.” Or, “I'm going to try middle grade now.” I think I go where the story wants, where I'm inspired to go when it comes to story ideas. However, with mystery, it's been one of those things that's always been on the back of my mind, like a wish list, a bucket list. I want to write a murder mystery. I just never had the right idea. Or I never had the time, or I never had the space. Then I finished my last novel contract, and I took a break, because I had been writing on deadlines for years. I took a very, very much needed break from deadlines. For the first time in I think 15 years, I did not have a book deadline. I just asked myself, “Jessica, what do you want to write?” As opposed to, what's the next book that's due? And the answer was very clear. I want to write that murder mystery. I toyed with a few ideas, and then I started to think about, okay, so I wrote this book on plot that a lot of people know and use. What if someone used that book to plot a literal murder? What would that look like? This meta explosion came to mind, which is that I wanted to write a murder mystery that's structured like a plotting guide for murder mysteries. The characters in the book are all writers who are familiar with this plotting guide, and the events of the story are unfolding like the plot of a murder mystery according to this book. You have no idea which one of them is actually using the book to plot the murder, because they all know the book. So one of the taglines is, “One dead body, seven mystery writers, and they all know how to get away with murder.” It was sort of my culmination of everything I'd done in my career. All the plotting workshops I'd taught, all the revision courses I'd taught, and of course this plotting structure method I'd been teaching for years, and I put it into this book. It's a fictional version of Save the Cat! It's called The Bestseller Formula. The premise of this book is that someone is using a murder mystery plotting guide to plot a literal murder. So the reader is learning how to write a murder as they're reading about the murder on the page. Jo: I love it. I know lots of people are going to want that. It does bring the business side of things into more difficulty, because of course you have readers, like you mentioned middle grade, you've got YA books, and obviously, I guess, the writers that you teach will be interested. How is this going to work for your book marketing and your business? Because it also sounds like this might be a standalone. Jessica: It is a standalone as of now. I have some sequel ideas, but we're not pursuing them yet. It is a different market for me, for sure, and that's become a challenge as I'm marketing, because I'm not in the thriller mystery space yet. I haven't written a novel for adults since the very, very beginning of my career. I've been mostly writing for teens and middle grade. The good news is most of my teen readers are now adults, because it's been so long since I wrote for teens. So there's that. I think the book will appeal to mystery readers just because it's a fun mystery, and there's a fun meta element to it. I think it's going to appeal to writers as well. So I'm very much leaning on that, at least for the launch. I hope my writer community will get behind this book, because it's very much an ode to storytelling. It's an ode to writers. I dedicated it to writers. As a writer, you will understand this book on a level that a reader never will. You will get so many of the little inside jokes that a reader might just skim past. So I did very much write it for writers, with the hope that readers will also enjoy it. I had the most fun writing it I've had, I think, of writing any book. Partly I think that was because I wasn't writing it under deadline. I was just writing it for me, but also just because it felt like the book I'd been destined to write for so long. Jo: Fantastic. So we're out of time. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jessica: How is that possible? I feel like we just started. JessicaBrody.com is the best place to find everything. If you're interested in my writing courses, you can check out WritingMastery.com as well. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jessica. That was brilliant. Jessica: Thank you, Joanna. I had so much fun.The post From Page One To Done: Fast Drafting Your Novel With Jessica Brody first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Anthony King (Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat; Rooster; The Afterparty) discusses worldbuilding in the real world, what's too funny for reality, lessons learned from Jury Duty that are applicable to traditional script writing, how the game was nearly blown up, and more.SUNDAY AUGUST 30, 8pm PT at the Lodge Room in LA and streaming live/on demand everywhere:WGF RetroReads presents: Star Trek 60th Starring Noah Wyle as Captain James T. KirkJoin Noah Wyle, along with Katherine LaNasa, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Shabana Azeez, and Ayesha Harris of The Pitt, and some surprise guests, for a celebration of 60 years of Star Trek. Hosted by the Writers Guild Foundation, which also celebrates its 60th anniversary, this special night will include remarks from people closely associated with the series, a performance of the first aired episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” with live score, and an appearance by a Salt Vampire replica from the episode, on loan from the Star Trek Archive, Paramount.This evening's show is in support of the Writers Guild Foundation's Library and Archive, Writers' Access Programs, and Veterans Writing Project. In-person tickets are sold out but you can catch the stream and watch on demand for two weeks!SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 4pm PT at the Elysian Theater in LA and streaming live/on demand everywhere:Dead Pilots SocietyIn Dead Pilots Society, scripts that were developed by studios and networks but were never produced are given the table reads they deserve.The September 13 show features Life of the Party by Alex Herschlag (Broke; Will & Grace) and Demi-God by Katie Greenway (Welcome to Flatch; Tooned Out).Starring: Al Madrigal (Lopez vs Lopez), Aaron Abrams (Clown in a Cornfield), Lucas Hazlett (Loot; American Princess), Bob Glouberman (The Shrink Next Door), Izzy Diaz (The Residence), and more to be announced!THE WRITERS PANEL IS A COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION.Follow and support the show by subscribing to Ben Blacker's newsletter, Re:Writing, where you'll also get weekly advice from the thousands of writers he's interviewed over the years, as well as access to exclusive live Q&As, meet-ups, and more: benblacker.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's get sneaky! Show Notes: Run Time: 1:56:47 We thought knew a lot about this story going into it, but clearly not as much as we thought! Listen as we discover what we don't know, fill in the gaps, and come up with a story that we're quite proud of by the end.  We've got a lot of cool episodes coming up, so be sure to get your questions in early and often! Send them here!  And, as always, keep on saving the Multiverse!

In this episode, an artist roommate gives Chelsea Barnwell reason to reassess her own frugality and practicality, and Isla Rickerton tells of her recovery—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—after an act of harrowing violence. "Leaving Home Stories,” is a special summer series in which writers from The Habit Membership read personal narratives on the theme of leaving home, literally or metaphorically, temporarily or permanently. Sponsored by The Habit Membership for Writers.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Phantom Blade Zero showcase, Amazon gaming speculation, Horizon spinoff reboot, GTA 6 leaks, pickups, and a Jurassic Park SNES review. Chapters:  00:00 Intro 03:13 Game Pickups and Miniatures 06:11 Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Planning 12:17 Chrono Trigger Gameplay Experience 18:16 Fast News: Gaming Industry Updates 34:23 Amazon's Gaming Aspirations 37:45 PlayStation's Horizon Multiplayer Reboot 41:58 Sony's Live Service Game Struggles 48:23 GTA VI Leaks and Speculations 56:19 Retro Game Review: Jurassic Park on SNES John and Ryan start the week with their recent gaming pickups, including John's discounted Critical Role miniatures for future sessions, Ryan's time with Granblue and Guilty Gear Strive, and John's ongoing playthrough of Chrono Trigger on PS1. The news kicks off with the Phantom Blade Zero showcase, where gamers are calling for a physical release — overshadowing the impressive gameplay reveal. The guys then react to speculation that Amazon may be stepping away from gaming, following recent studio closures and the hand‑off of online services to other developers. They analyze what this could mean for Amazon's broader entertainment strategy if the trend continues. Next, they dive into Sony's reported reboot of the Horizon multiplayer spinoff after negative feedback, noting how this continues a string of failed live‑service attempts. The conversation then shifts to Rockstar and Take‑Two as GTA 6 leaks reveal map and gameplay details ahead of the Netflix preview, sparking debate about marketing strategy and fan expectations. To wrap up the episode, the Inflation Deflation Game of the Week features a review of Jurassic Park on SNES, as John and Ryan revisit the 16‑bit adaptation of the blockbuster film and evaluate its current market value. Find us on TheGameDeflators.com Twitter - www.twitter.com/GameDeflators Facebook - www.facebook.com/TheGameDeflators Instagram - www.instagram.com/thegamedeflators The views and opinions expressed on this channel are solely those of the author. The content within these recordings are property of their respective Designers, Writers, Creators, Owners, Organizations, Companies and Producers. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted. Permission for intro and outro music provided by Matthew Huffaker http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe 2_25_18

Daniel Mason is the author of six books of fiction, including The Piano Tuner, the story collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth — which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — and North Woods, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dublin Literary Award. He's also a physician and a professor in Stanford's Psychiatry Department. His latest is Country People, published by Random House and out last month. It's a Good Morning America summer book club pick and a NYT bestseller. It's contemporary, it's hilarious and, for us procrastinators who would rather fall down research rabbit holes than write, it's very relatable. It also gives writers a bunch of craft lessons to sink our teeth into. How to use your text to teach readers how to read your novel. Embedding content into form (this novel is a master class in that). Using different textures and kinds of writing to enhance your storyline, and more. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It's stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you'll find an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It's perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded on August 13, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Andrew Callahan, Mike Giardi, Alex Barth, Mike Kadlick, Taylor Kyles, Brian Hines, and Evan Lazar react to Mike Vrabel's blunt admission after the Patriots' preseason win over the Eagles: "I don't think we have a very deep team." The panel breaks down what's fueling the concern — injuries along the offensive line, Harold Landry still out, and a shorthanded edge rush — and what it means for New England as roster cuts and the trade deadline approach. HELP US GET 1k on our 2nd channel! Subscribe to Patriots Newsfeed for bonus content, clips, behind the scenes and more: https://www.youtube.com/@PatriotsNewsFeed Patriots on CLNS Media is Powered by:

In this special episode we go behind the scenes with memoirist Deepa Paul, essayist, cookbook author Gina Beach, and novelist Daisy Buchanan and talk about the two things that keep them going: the passion behind the work, and the practice that makes the work possible. From an essay that no editor wanted to a Women's Prize-longlisted memoir, a personal research rabbit hole that became a four-year book project, and the journey from idea to novel, this is a personal conversation with three writers about about why they write the things they write — and what kept them going. You'll learn Why an essay no editor wanted a decade ago turned out not to be an essay at all. How to break a book into tasks small enough to finish inside a single hour. The case for treating your own interior life as seriously as any grand subject. How a rabbit hole of personal research turned into a four-year book project. Why the hardest part of self-publishing has nothing to do with production. When procrastination is doing useful work, and when it's just filling the gaps. What changes in your writing once you stop trying to get it right. A reason to stop measuring a writing session by its word count. How sitting alongside other writers quietly rearranges your sense of your own work. The tidal metaphor that makes a bad writing day easier to let go of. Resources & Links Writers' Hour Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently by Deepa Paul Deepa Paul 'The power of an hour' — Deepa Paul interviewed by the Women's Prize Nurture: Oil-Free, Plant-Based Cooking for Health by Regina Beach Regina Beach All Grown Up: A hilarious and heartwarming new novel inspired by Little Women by Daisy Buchanan Daisy Buchanan — Creative Confidence Clinic About the Guests Deepa Paul is a Filipina-Indian author living in Amsterdam. Her writing explores the balance between being a mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter, adventurer, and herself – all at the same time. Her debut, Ask Me: A Memoir of Daring to Love Differently, was longlisted for the Women's Prize. Regina Beach is a disabled poet and essayist. Originally from the American midwest, she now calls the Welsh Valleys home. Her writing has appeared in Global Poemic, Boldly Mental, The Rail, Haiku by You, Five Minutes, Visual Verse, The Horror Tree, and Disoriented among others. She is the founder of the literary magazine Lesions | Art + Words, which features the work of people living with chronic health conditions. Her book is Nurture: Oil-Free, Plant-Based Cooking for Health. Daisy Buchanan is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author of Insatiable (longlisted for the CWIP prize), Careering (as heard on BBC Sounds), Limelight and Pity Party, and the non-fiction titles How to Be A Grown Up, The Sisterhood and Read Yourself Happy. She writes for major newspapers and magazines from the Guardian to Grazia, and is host of the chart-topping podcast You're Booked. Her latest book is All Grown Up: A hilarious and heartwarming new novel inspired by Little Women. For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

Send us Fan MailMy guest on the show today, Mary Howe, is an Air Force veteran and daughter of a military legacy family.  Mary's mom is a retired Army Major; her father, Master Sgt. Paul Howe was in Delta and was in the Battle of Mogadishu, which later became the source of the movie Blackhawk Down. Her grandfather was Lt. Col. Charles Beckwith, the founder of Delta Force. To say that her family has a history of service at the highest levels would be an understatement.A bit about Mary. Mary Howe is a former Air Force Special Operations AC-130U aerial gunner turned Family Nurse Practitioner, now working in veteran disability medicine. Her work sits at the intersection of service, identity, and personal responsibility—shaped by a life spent in high-performance environments and a refusal to let performance define her worth.She is the writer behind Unfinished Business, a body of work that documents growth in real time, without the polish or the illusion of having it all figured out. Her perspective challenges the habit of outsourcing direction, calling people back to internal leadership, self-trust, and the work that happens long before anything looks successful from the outside.Her background spans military service, medicine, and a lineage rooted in Special Operations, but her focus now is simple: helping people think better, take ownership, and build something internally that doesn't collapse when circumstances change.It was an honor and joy chatting with Mary. Please enjoy my conversation with someone who is truly inspirational.In today's episode, we discuss:·      Her mom, Connie, was a Major in the Army. Her dad, Master Sgt. Paul Howe was Delta and was in the Battle of Mogadishu, and Grandpa was Lt. Col. Charles Beckwith, the founder of Delta Force.·      The differences in Delta, SF, Ranger Regiment, Ranger Tab, SEALS, PJ's: Delta is now called Combat Applications Group (CAG).·      A group of PJs was on the coast of Florida that saved 11 people who had to ditch their plane in the ocean. They had about 5 minutes of fuel before they had to go back to base.·      Growing up in a military legacy family, what was the talk like around the dinner table?·      Her rebellious stage growing up. What did that look like and how did her parents deal with that? ·      Growing up in a strict home. Were her parents bouncing quarters off her bed?·      Not realizing the gravity of her father's service until she read the book Blackhawk Down. ·      Her father's thoughts regarding the book and movie Blackhawk Down after he lived it.·      SERE training.·      Being a gunner on an AC-130U and her being deployed in four separate combat missions.·      Post-military life. Becoming a Nurse Practitioner and continuing to be of service.All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Check out Mary's website!Head on over to my website!What's the craziest thing you saw when you were a cop?My first week on the job, a guy running at me with a butcher knife. He'd just killed his brother over the last hot dog.That's chapter 1. There are 33 more.Police Stories: The Rookie Years just launched - available on Amazon. Search 'Police Stories Patrick O'Donnell' or click thSupport the show

On today's program, a federal judge has dismissed the last remaining claim in Johnny Hunt’s defamation lawsuit, marking the end of a contentious legal battle. He had sued the Southern Baptist Convention and others back in 2023. And, a Texas church is sued by the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church over its bylaw changes. Plus, water filters open doors to share the gospel with vulnerable people around the world. But first, a story out of Tucson, Arizona. Warren, tell us what’s going on at GracePointe Church. Arizona authorities have arrested a former finance manager at GracePointe Church on felony charges. Her name is Tracey Jorgensen. She’s 61 years old. Court documents say Jorgensen stole church funds for five years — from 2020 to 2025. The total is more than $356,000. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. We get editorial, database, and other technical support from Christina Darnell, Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, Heidi Allums, and Casey Sudduth. Writers who contributed to today's program include Jessica Eturralde, Bob Smietana, Michaela Gordoni, Kim Roberts, Kadence McKinnon, Kathryn Post, and Makella Knowles. Until next time, may God bless you.

Where writers mislead or sell false hope to Dolfans. 8-19-2026

Welcome back to the Cookbook Love Podcast! Before I launched my recent masterclass about how to grow your audience for a cookbook, I sent my email list two questions: what's holding you back from growing your audience, and what do you want answered in the class? In this solo episode, I'm sharing the answers my readers sent in, along with a mindset shift for each one, so you can see whether you're standing in the same gap they are. In this episode, I discuss: Why writing a blog isn't a barrier to your email list, it's one step away from it Why consistency isn't a personality trait, it's a weekly decision you keep making The difference between engagement and attention, and how to invite more of the first Why internet politics doesn't have to touch your dream of writing a cookbook What to do when you haven't identified your cookbook topic yet I close the episode with a reminder that waiting to grow your audience or build your platform isn't neutral. A small shift in how you think about these five "excuses" can be the difference between staying stuck and finally starting to build an audience and get a book deal you dream about. Mentioned in This Episode: Cookbook Concept Map (free download)

Sara Stein is a seasoned brand builder and product developer with a career spanning Hollywood, fashion, and consumer products.Starting at Writers & Artists Agency and Simpson-Bruckheimer Films, she transitioned to fashion PR, founding S Public Relations in 2001. Best known for launching Los Angeles Fashion Week, she represented over 60 brands, including Universal Consumer Products, Superga, and Erica Courtney Jewelry. She produced live events featuring The Beach Boys and Runway Shows.In 2012, Sara launched Sisters of Los Angeles, a vibrant gift brand sold in upscale outlets across the U.S., Canada, and Japan, including Nordstrom, The Fontainebleau Hotel, LAX, The Broad Museum, Hallmark, and Ritz-Carlton. Her brand was featured on THE TODAY SHOW, Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Cosmopolitan Magazine, The LA Times, Sunset Mag and more. She managed operations, product design, and strategic partnerships before selling the company in 2018.In this episode, Sara shares her journey from Hollywood and fashion PR to building her own consumer brand. We talk about her experience launching Los Angeles Fashion Week, developing Sisters of Los Angeles, growing the brand into major retailers and destinations, and what she learned along the way as a brand builder and entrepreneur.What's Inside: Sara's journey from Hollywood and fashion PR to entrepreneurship  Building and growing Sisters of Los Angeles into a widely distributed gift brand  Product development, partnerships, and the experience of eventually selling her companyInstagramFacebookSwags to Riches WebsiteSupport the show

⭐⭐⭐ PODCAST OFFER! Get 50% off workshops and courses at UX Content Collective until Monday, August 24. Just use PODCAST50 at checkout. ⭐⭐⭐ Dave Connis is back on Writers of Silicon Valley after a very different eighteen months. Since his last appearance, Dave has been laid off, thrown himself into experimenting with AI, built new product workflows, and started creating System Design Lab: an education platform focused on systems thinking for product and content designers. In this episode, we talk about the emotional fallout of layoffs, the strange new roles appearing in content design, what AI actually looks like when you use it every day, and how to actually prove you're a systems thinker - both in an interview, and on the job.  What we talked about: ✅ What getting laid off did to Dave's confidence, identity, and relationship with work ✅ Why trying to constantly "prove your value" can lead straight to burnout ✅ The new roles emerging around AI, including design technologists, system architects, and content architects ✅ Why today's job descriptions increasingly seem to be looking for impossible "unicorn" candidates ✅ What Dave learned from months of actually building with Claude, Figma MCP, and other AI tools ✅ Why AI workflows are much harder to make reliable than LinkedIn posts would have you believe ✅ How systems thinking helps designers define concepts, objects, attributes, and relationships before AI starts building ✅ How to demonstrate systems thinking in an interview ✅ Why Dave is building System Design Lab  Where to find Dave: System Design Lab LinkedIn ⭐⭐⭐ PODCAST OFFER! Get 50% off workshops and courses at UX Content Collective until Monday, August 24. Just use PODCAST50 at checkout. ⭐⭐⭐

How well can we ever really know our parents?For Nancy Head Thode, that question became the beginning of an extraordinary journey into the life of her mother, Ann Head, a once widely read mid-century writer whose fiction explored women, marriage, pregnancy, class and independence at a time when many of those subjects were still spoken about carefully, if at all.Ann Head was more than a novelist. She was part of the literary life of Beaufort, South Carolina, and an influential teacher and mentor whose students included a young Pat Conroy, years before he would become the celebrated author of The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides.But to Nancy, she was Mom.In this encore presentation of HarmonyTALK, host Lisa Champeau talks with Nancy about the woman behind the books and Nancy's own journey to understand her. That journey eventually led to Ahead of Her Time: The Trailblazing Life and Literary Legacy of Ann Head, Nancy's biography of her mother.Drawing from journals, family memories, archival material and correspondence, Nancy began piecing together a fuller portrait of a woman who was ambitious, unconventional, creative and complicated.The project also forced Nancy to look again at her own childhood and at the difference between what children see and what adults later come to understand.Nancy brings an unusual perspective to that process. A longtime family psychotherapist and early advocate for family mediation, she has spent much of her professional life helping people understand relationships, conflict and the stories families carry.Now she has turned that careful attention toward her own family.It is a conversation about mothers and daughters, memory, writing, the lives women were expected to lead and what can happen when a daughter decides her mother's story deserves to be told again.

If you're using the Save the Cat! beat sheet to outline your novel but your story still feels flat, disconnected, or hard to draft, one of these five common mistakes may be the reason why.The Save the Cat! beat sheet is a popular story structure framework because it gives fiction writers fifteen clear landmarks to plot toward. But filling in all fifteen beats doesn't automatically give you a story that works.In this episode, I'm breaking down five mistakes writers make when using the Save the Cat! beat sheet—and what to think about instead so you can build a stronger, more connected novel outline.You'll hear me talk about things like:[03:10] Why jumping straight into the Save the Cat! beat sheet can leave you with plot points that technically fit the framework but don't feel rooted in your story.[05:35] Why having the “right” story beats in the “right” places isn't enough—and what keeps a novel from feeling like a series of disconnected events.[10:00] Why fifteen beats do not equal fifteen scenes, and how misunderstanding the difference between a beat sheet and a scene-by-scene outline can distort your story.[12:50] The Fun and Games mistake that can leave you stuck in the middle, scrambling to figure out what should happen next.[16:30] The often-missed internal side of Bad Guys Close In (and how it can give your All Is Lost moment much more emotional weight).If you use Save the Cat! Writes a Novel for plotting or outlining, this episode will help you understand what the framework is actually designed to do—so you can use it to support your story instead of forcing your story into fifteen boxes.

Plus: BHP annual profit rises on record copper prices. And a tech selloff that began on Wall Street Monday, gathers steam. Luke Vargas hosts. Sign up for WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The overly-ambitious attempt at a Tango-sode! Show Notes: Run Time: 2:09:03 So, Tango began a relisten a couple years ago, and wrote in some great letters along the way, and we attempt to get through all of them this Editor's Note. But first, an upcoming schedule! Tuesday, September 1st: Episode #327 - Creative Process: Recently Made Heroes from the Interim Tuesday, September 8th: Episode #328 - Writers' Room: A Silver Age story where a hero goes back in time and teams up with their younger self Tuesday, September 15th: Episode #329 - Writers' Room: The Sobek event Tuesday, September 22nd: Editor's Note #93 (the promised Science-sode) Tuesday, September 29th: Episode #330 - Writers' Room: Prime Wardens power-switching story Exciting stuff to look forward to! OK, back to the Tango-sode, in which you get to hear by the end of it how everything falls apart. But then! It gives us an angle for some future content and a way to make everything work out for the best! All's well that ends well, or so some say! Join us next week for an episode about Stealth Suit Bunker! Until then, keep on saving the Multiverse!

Dr. Kara Zivin joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about maternal mental health and her own her mental health crisis during pregnancy and postpartum, how she became a patient and professor in the same health system, navigating shame and guilt around sharing a personal story, taking risks with our professional life, incorporating medical records and journal entries into a memoir narrative, grounding memoir in our own story, supporting women and families, the relief that comes from sharing the hard thing, increasing awareness and helping women to feel less alone, and her new memoir Persevered: A Maternal Mental Health Memoir.   Email Ronit after graphics and episode is scheduled:  https://www.loom.com/share/7be1c961b881401a9939edc25e34a08e   Also in this episode: - claiming our stories - letting go of an initial structure - maternal mental health and mortality   Books mentioned in this episode: - The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso - Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee - The Suicide Index by Joan Wickersham  - You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith - The Braille Encyclopedia by Naomi Cohn - Hell Gate Bridge by Barrie Miskin   Kara Zivin, PhD, MS, MA, MFA, is a professor of psychiatry, obstetrics and gynecology, and health management and policy. She aims to increase public awareness about mental health conditions and to influence policy addressing them by combining research expertise (data) and personal narrative (story).    Longer: https://karazivin.com/about/   Connect with Dr. Kara Zivin Website: www.karazivin.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kzivin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kara-zivin-ann-arbor/ Blue Sky: https://bsky.app/profile/kzivin.bsky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karazivin/   Purchase book: https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780804012645/persevered/ https://www.amazon.com/Persevered-Maternal-Mental-Health-Memoir/dp/0804012644/ https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/persevered-kara-zivin/1148516116 https://bookshop.org/p/books/persevered-a-maternal-mental-health-memoir-kara-zivin/0f1698b9c560969c https://www.booksamillion.com/p/Persevered/Kara-Zivin/9780804012645   – Ronit's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Rumpus, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, Hippocampus, The Washington Post, Writer's Digest, American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir WHEN SHE COMES BACK about the loss of her mother to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and their eventual reconciliation was named Finalist in the 2021 Housatonic Awards Awards, the 2021 Indie Excellence Awards, and was a 2021 Book Riot Best True Crime Book. Her short story collection HOME IS A MADE-UP PLACE won Hidden River Arts' 2020 Eludia Award and the 2023 Page Turner Awards for Short Stories.  She earned an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Pacific University, is Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, and teaches memoir through the University of Washington's Online Continuum Program and also independently. She launched Let's Talk Memoir in 2022, lives in Seattle with her family of people and dogs, and is at work on her next book.   More about Ronit: https://ronitplank.com Subscribe to Ronit's Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank   Follow Ronit: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ https://www.facebook.com/RonitPlank https://bsky.app/profile/ronitplank.bsky.social

This week’s episode features Jennifer Degani, Tania Gutting, and Pam Kiper. They’ll read two stories about frequent home-leavings, and one story about one big move after a long time in the same place. "Leaving Home Stories,” is a special summer series in which writers from The Habit Membership read personal narratives on the theme of leaving home, literally or metaphorically, temporarily or permanently. Sponsored by The Habit Membership for Writers.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Deific Duo's Journey into Mystery concludes with the Road to 800, featuring special guest Ryan Does. The conversation covers the end of the Road to 800, the Donny Cates Thor run, and the transition to the current Al Ewing Thor run.We explore the consistency and legacy of Thor comics, the impact of different writers and artists, and the meta-narrative of Thor's journey. Our discussion emphasizes the differences between the runs of Donny Cates and Al Ewing, comparing them to a blockbuster film and prestige TV, respectively. We conclude with a preview of the upcoming Thor issue 800 and plans for a future podcast episode.Part 8 of The Deific Duo's Journey into Mystery: Road to 800Check out PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/u65477484?utm_campaign=creatorshare_creatorCheck out INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/marvelthorpodcast?igsh=Nm15MjQ2dW10cXZ3&utm_source=qrCheck out DISCORD:https://discord.gg/DsKTVAmwuYTakeawaysThe Consistency in Thor's LegacyImpact of Writers and Artists Narrative Perspective and MythologySatisfaction of ContinuityComparison of Cates and Ewing RunsPreview of Thor Issue 800 and Future Podcast EpisodeChapters00:00 The End of the Road to 80003:00 The Donny Cates Run21:01 Transition to the Al Ewing Run27:29 Storytelling and Modern Myth28:45 Satisfaction of Continuity30:31 Comparison of Cates and Ewing Runs47:39 Preview of Thor Issue 800 and Future Podcast Episode

Wolverine PS5 bundle, Hobbit MTG set, Sony disc secrecy, GTA 6 Netflix exclusive, D&D prep, and a Reel Fishing PS1 review. Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Game Deflators Podcast 00:21 Recent Game Pickups and 3D Printing Adventures 03:04 Dungeons and Dragons Campaigns and Character Development 09:06 Comic Book Discussions: Saga and Fables 14:15 TV Shows and Their Adaptations 15:58 Exploring Finny the Fish: Gameplay and Mechanics 18:49 Mad Maestro: Controller Challenges and Gameplay Experience 19:46 Lost Ember: A Journey Through Reincarnation and Exploration 23:07 Book Finds: R.A. Salvatore's Works and Collecting 24:51 Ryan's Gaming Updates: Fighting Games and Progression 30:12 Quick News: PlayStation 5 Wolverine Edition and Magic the Gathering 38:38 The Future of Physical Gaming: Sony's Wall of Silence 45:03 The Gatekeeping of Game Development Knowledge 46:08 Take Two's Marketing Strategy with Netflix 50:04 The Future of Marketing in Gaming 57:17 Real Fishing: A Nostalgic Dive into Gaming John and Ryan kick off the episode with their recent gaming pickups, including John's new D&D miniature materials and 3D‑printing prep for an upcoming campaign, while Ryan shares what's been grabbing his attention this week. They move into news with Sony's newly revealed Marvel's Wolverine PS5 bundle, breaking down the Battle Yellow and Adamantium designs, and limited‑edition appeal. The conversation then shifts to Magic: The Gathering as The Hobbit crossover set becomes one of the most unique releases of the year, prompting discussion about cross‑media collaborations and collector hype. Next, they explore Kotaku's report on Sony's secrecy around disc manufacturing, reacting to the “wall of silence” that makes homebrew disc creation nearly impossible — especially as PlayStation moves away from physical media entirely. The guys also break down Take‑Two CEO Strauss Zelnick's defense of Rockstar's decision to debut the GTA 6 extended look as a timed Netflix exclusive, discussing whether this strategy helps or hurts fans and how it fits into Rockstar's broader marketing push. To wrap up the episode, the Inflation Deflation Game of the Week features a review of Reel Fishing on PS1, as John and Ryan revisit the relaxing classic and evaluate its current market value. Find us on TheGameDeflators.com Twitter - www.twitter.com/GameDeflators Facebook - www.facebook.com/TheGameDeflators Instagram - www.instagram.com/thegamedeflators The views and opinions expressed on this channel are solely those of the author. The content within these recordings are property of their respective Designers, Writers, Creators, Owners, Organizations, Companies and Producers. Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted. Permission for intro and outro music provided by Matthew Huffaker http://www.youtube.com/user/teknoaxe 2_25_18

Maria Whelan is an agent at Mushens Entertainment, in London. Prior to that, for more than 8 years she worked as an assistant and agent at InkWell Management in New York. She began her career in publishing as a Foreign Rights Assistant at Janklow & Nesbit in New York. Maria graduated from University College Dublin with a BA in English and Drama, then obtained her Master's in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh. Maria represents both fiction and nonfiction writers, including USA TODAY bestsellers, a Lammy Finalist, a Discoveries Women's Prize shortlist winner, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Finalist, a Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel winner, NPR's Best Books of The Year authors, a James Beard Award winner, Barnes & Noble picks authors, and MacDowell Fellows.  Maria joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about how she finds her clients, query letters, hands on agenting, comparison titles, submitting to editors, ageism in publishing, the difference in agents in NY vs the UK, selling memoirs, and more. For more information on Writers on Writing and to become a supporter, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. You can help out the show and indie bookstores by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. It's stocked with titles by our guest authors, as well as our personal favorites. And on Spotify, you'll find an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. It's perfect for writing. Look for the artist, Just My Type. You can find hundreds of past interviews on our website. (Recorded on 7, 2026) Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett Host: Marrie Stone Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)  

Children's fiction studio founder Jasmine Richards (Storymix), publisher Natalie Doherty (Puffin and HarperCollins Children's Books), and bestselling author Soman Chainani (The School for Good and Evil) on shaping an idea commercial enough to sell, what makes a children's book impossible to put down, and trusting the unconscious to write it.   You'll learn Why the most commercial idea is the one that centres its reader from the very first thought. How a single pithy log line can carry a book all the way from the slush pile to the playground. The counterintuitive trick of starting your story at chapter three. How to read what children are reading now so your pacing keeps up with theirs. What a publisher is really looking for when a manuscript lands on the desk — and why voice comes before plot. How the categories from early readers to YA actually break down on the bookshop shelf. The difference between weaving in a message and writing a book that feels worthy. The case for never self-censoring in a first draft, and saving the negotiation for later. How tiring out your conscious mind can unlock a freer, more instinctive way to draft. Why the goal of writing should be the writing itself, not the bestseller list.   Episode Links #050: Jasmine Richards — How to Pitch Commercial Children's Fiction & The Business of Children's Publishing #081: Natalie Doherty — The Magic of Writing for Children, Market Trends & Behind the Scenes of Publishing Children's Books #035: Soman Chainani — Writing Dark Tales for Children & Balancing Creative Work with Discipline   About the Guests Jasmine Richards is the author of over a dozen children's books, ranging from picture books to teen fiction. Her most recent novel, Keeper of Myths, was published by HarperCollins. She has over 15 years of experience as an editor, including roles at Hamish Hamilton, Puffin, and Dutton Books in New York. Jasmine is the founder of Storymix, a children's fiction studio, where she uses her unique experiences to develop new voices and inclusive stories. Natalie Doherty is a Publisher at Puffin, although during this interview she was at HarperCollins Children's Books. She's worked with award-winning and bestselling authors, including Tom Fletcher, Robin Stevens, R. J. Palacio, Tamzin Merchant, and Nazneen Ahmed Pathak. Before moving into editorial in 2010, she worked in Contracts and Rights at Hachette and holds a BA in Modern European Languages and an MA in Translation. Her recent middle-grade acquisitions include Simon Stephenson's The Snowman Code and Philippa Leathley's Inkbound. Soman Chainani's debut series, The School for Good and Evil, has sold more than 3 million copies, been translated into 30 languages across 6 continents, and became a major motion picture from Netflix starring Charlize Theron, Laurence Fishburne, Kerry Washington, and Michelle Yeoh, with Chainani as an executive producer. Each of the six books in the series — The School for Good and Evil, A World Without Princes, The Last Ever After, Quests for Glory, A Crystal of Time, and One True King — debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list. A graduate of Harvard University, Soman created his own fairy-tale major before going on to an MFA in film at Columbia University. He has made films that have played all over the world, and his writing awards include honors from Big Bear Lake, the CAPE Foundation, and the Sun Valley Writers' Fellowship. In Beasts & Beauty: Dangerous Tales, Soman reimagines old stories into fresh fairy tales for a new era. For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/​​WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!

Send us Fan MailWelcome back for part two of my conversation with Author and Detective Superintendent Bob Lessemun as we travel across the pond to England and to Turks and Caicos.A little about my guest. Robert C. ‘Bob' Lessemun, a man who left school at sixteen and walked straight into a police career that would span more than half a century. From uniform sergeant and ultimately Detective Superintendent. He built a reputation for tackling some of Britain's toughest cases-murders, international fraud, major drug operations-while pioneering interview and interrogation training that would influence detectives across the UK. This is the story of how a grammar-school boy from England became one of the country's most experienced investigators leading him to Turks and Caicos investigating international drug and money laundering cases.  It was a treat chatting with Bob! I hope you enjoy part two of my interview with Bob as much as I did.  In today's episode we discuss:·      Some cases that has stuck with Bob thorough the years.·      His thoughts on the police in Brittan today.·      How he wound up working in Turks and Caicos Islands? ·      Money laundering, human trafficking, and burial at sea.·      His advice for police officers in the USA and or other parts of the world. ·      His advice for being an affective police leader. ·      What he misses the most or least about being in law enforcement. ·      The Plod books and his writing career.·      Why he wrote The Young Plod: Tales from the Black Country, Plod Goes Private: Tales of a Private Investigator, and Plod Policing Paradise: Tales from the Caribbean? All of this and more on today's episode of the Cops and Writers podcast.Visit Bob's Amazon Author Page. Head on over to my website!What's the craziest thing you saw when you were a cop?My first week on the job, a guy running at me with a butcher knife. He'd just killed his brother over the last hot dog.That's chapter 1. There are 33 more.Police Stories: The Rookie Years just launched - available on Amazon. Search 'Police Stories Patrick O'Donnell' or click thSupport the show

Liars, Lisa Ridzen, and Debbi Voisey – welcome to episdoe 153! In the first half, we talk about our expectations of truth in the non-fiction we read, inspired by the hoo-ha over The Salt Path. In the second half, we compare When

This week, Kelly is...gone, so Byron and a very special guest chat about the horrors of 2026 so far, before talking modern Creepy Kid™ flicks...and unfortunately AI, reviewing Eli Roth's "Ice Cream Man". Stream on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/14ioP0zfFczK8hKPsDUmko?si=cff351ada3944a9a 0:00 Cold open 0:47 Cookie the Boston terrier and favorite ice cream truck treats 6:00 The year in horror so far: Stubs A-List, theater-only viewing 14:23 Speed round: Obsession, Backrooms, Hokum, Primate, We Bury the Dead, Undertone, and more 29:00 Staff Picks: The Stuff and Cooties 38:02 ICE CREAM MAN review begins 38:20 The Eli Roth question 46:50 The Horror Section and the Republic fan-investment angle 57:00 The look, the coloring, and the AI problem 1:12:00 Spoilers begin 1:29:00 Final ratings 1:33:00 Is there an organized hate campaign ABOUT THE FILM ICE CREAM MAN (2026) is a creepy-kid horror film co-written, produced, and directed by Eli Roth. A silent ice cream vendor arrives in a suburban town and hands out treats that turn the local children into homicidal maniacs. It is the first theatrical release from The Horror Section, Roth's new studio co-founded with Bloody Good Horror's Jon Schnaars. Made for roughly 5.5 million dollars, with about 10 percent of the company sold to around 2,500 fans through the investment platform Republic. TALKING POINTS Where Eli Roth sits now after Borderlands, the low-budget theatrical horror model and why five million is the sweet spot, the practical-versus-CGI blend, the teen paralysis lore hole, and the AI question: Roth's initial denial, the later walk-back to a sketches-handed-to-an-AI-company framing, and what that does to how genre fans watch low-budget movies going forward. STAFF PICKS Byron: The Stuff (1985, Larry Cohen) Jacob: Cooties (2015, Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion) CONNECT Discord: discord.frightday.com The Frightday Society: frightdaysociety.org Email: contact@frightday.com Bluesky / Twitter / Instagram: @frightday Phone line: 1-833-FRIGHT-9 MORE FRIGHTDAY 700+ episodes covering horror, paranormal, cryptids, true crime, and conspiracies since 2014. An Audio Wool original produced by Byron McKoy. #IceCreamMan #EliRoth #HorrorReview #Frightday #TheHorrorSection #HorrorPodcast Want more? Join the Frightday Society, at http://thefrightdaysociety.org As a Society Member, you'll have access to all Screamium content (Behind the Screams, It's Been a Weird Week, A Conversation With..., Toast to Toast PM with Wine Kelly, Cinema Autopsy, the Writers' Room, bonus episodes of Captain Kelly's Cryptids & Conspiracies, Byron's Serial Corner, and so much more! You'll also be part of our interactive community dedicated to the advancement of horror, hauntings, cryptids, conspiracies, aliens, and true crime. All things frightening. Keep our mini-fridges full of blood...I mean...not blood...normal things that people drink...by going to http://shop.frightday.com  Theme music by Yawns Produced by Byron McKoy Follow us in the shadows at the following places: @byronmckoy @kellyfrightday @frightday  This is an Audio Wool Original.

If you sell digital quilt patterns, you've probably wondered whether a marketplace is worth it, and what actually goes on behind the scenes to make one work. Ruth Erdei joins the podcast to talk about Quilting Books Patterns & Notions (QBPN), the family business she co-owns, and why she believes so strongly in transparency as a business model. Ruth is a serial entrepreneur, designer, and creative business strategist with more than 20 years of experience building businesses across the craft, creative, and e-commerce industries. Her background spans custom cosplay, crochet, digital products, fashion, quilting, and cross-stitch, which gives her a wide view of both the creative and business sides of the industry. She's the co-owner of QBPN and co-founder of Craft Hatchery, two marketplaces supporting hundreds of independent designers and connecting makers with customers around the world. In this episode, Ruth shares: How she got started with QBPN and how the company has grown How the QBPN business model works and what makes it different from other marketplaces Why pattern writers might consider selling their patterns through QBPN The different revenue streams the company offers designers We also talk about something that doesn't always get discussed: what it actually costs to distribute digital patterns. It's easy to assume digital products have no overhead since there's no shipping or warehousing involved. But platform fees, protecting designers' intellectual property, keeping listings current, customer support, marketing, and ongoing file management all take real time and resources. Ruth talks through what that investment looks like at QBPN and why supporting and protecting designers is central to how the company operates. If you're a pattern designer weighing where to sell, or just curious how a marketplace like this runs behind the scenes, this episode is worth a listen.

On today's program, the State Department funnels $2 billion to Christian ministries to provide health and humanitarian aid in more than a dozen countries. We'll have details. And, new regulations make it harder for Christian ministries to operate in India — but one ministry we talked with remains committed to preaching the gospel there. Plus, a cybersecurity breach exposes donor date.  But first, the Southern Baptist Convention is facing a new federal lawsuit. Parents in South Carolina have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against the SBC and its Executive Committee. They’re also suing Pawleys Island Community Church, its academy, and several former leaders.  The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. We get editorial, database, and other technical support from Christina Darnell, Stephen DuBarry, Rod Pitzer, Heidi Allums, and Casey Sudduth. Writers who contributed to today's program include Henry Durand, Adelle Banks, Yonat Shimron, Bob Smietana, Kim Roberts, Neva Piombino, Aaron Earls, Michaela Gordoni, Makella Knowles, and Jessica Eturralde. A special thanks to the Christian Index and Lifeway Research for contributing material for this week's podcast. Until next time, may God bless you.

In this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by author, podcaster and anthropologist Michael Kilman.Michael shares fantastic insights on what anthropology is and how it can be applied to writing fantasy books.We delve into cause-and-effect, the anthropological roots of monsters, taboos, and cross-cultural myth structures, and discuss why these are goldmines for fantasy writers.We also look at how worldbuilding through anthropology explores real-world, cross-cultural issues, and we look at a wide range of examples of approaches that humans take to structure their societies.In short, using anthropology in your world creation process can help to create more nuanced and complex characters and cultures, making tension and conflict feel more impactful, and stories more immersive.I hope you enjoy it!More About Michael KilmanMichael co-wrote Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers with forensic anthropologist Kyra Wellstrom.He recently published an academic book chapter titled Worldbuilding as Pedagogy: Teaching Anthropology and Diversity in Contentious Times.He's spent 11 years teaching anthropology at university level, including a course called Anthropology Through Science Fiction, has hosted a TED Talk, and also hosts a live Ask an Anthropologist about Worldbuilding series on YouTube, which you can check out for even more on the topic.https://loridianslaboratory.com/https://www.youtube.com/c/MichaelKilmanAuthorhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBC4FaVnOAs - Michael's TED Talkhttps://www.instagram.com/loridianslab/https://loridianslab.medium.com/https://substack.com/@loridianslaboratoryMore From The Toolshed Get my handbook on writing fantasy > https://richiebilling.com/store/books/a-fantasy-writers-handbook-ebook Get courses and classes on creating fantasy stories, plus early access to episodes > https://www.patreon.com/TheFantasyWritersToolshed/ More resources and contact > https://richiebilling.com/

How can you tell where the real innovation in publishing is happening right now, and why is it emerging from the indie side first? How do you market your own book when you've spent 35 years marketing everyone else's? John Bond talks about Going Indie and what he's learned about authors who last. In the intro, my thoughts on writing with AI, Charles Dickens and encouragement for the 3-year-old dancing to K-Pop at the wedding, UK copyright law, The end of an era — Hugh Howey; Notre Dame, Paris; Today's show is sponsored by Bookfunnel, the essential tool for your author business. Whether it's delivering your reader magnet, sending out advanced copies of your book, handing out ebooks at a conference, or fulfilling your digital sales to readers, BookFunnel does it all. Check it out at bookfunnel.com/thecreativepenn This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why 2012 was a watershed moment for publishing in the UK Whether the snobbery around self-publishing has finally gone How to co-write a book with someone, and why there's no formula The pride swallowing involved in getting endorsement quotes for your own book The shadow economy of indie sales that no industry chart measures The hallmarks of writers who build a long-term career You can find John at wearewhitefox.com. Transcript of the interview with John Bond Jo: John Bond is the co-founder of Whitefox, a premium publishing services agency, and has over 35 years in traditional publishing, from bookselling to marketing and management. He's also the co-author of Going Indie: Publishing Your Book Your Way, with James Silver. So welcome back to the show, John. John: Thank you, Jo. Thanks so much for having me. Jo: You were last on the show in 2022. You've been on a couple of times, but just set the scene. Tell people a bit more about you and your long background in publishing. John: I suppose I could say I started as a marketing manager at Penguin back in the early 1990s in London, and that role eventually evolved into running sales and marketing, as it often does. I did that at Penguin and at HarperCollins. Then I ran one of the publishing divisions at HarperCollins, including 4th Estate, and published Hilary Mantel and Jonathan Franzen and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. I left that in 2011 and set up Whitefox in 2012, and it's a classic startup story. It was somebody I worked with at HarperCollins. We sat around a kitchen table, came up with an idea for a business, which was Whitefox, and that's grown into the creative agency that it is today. Jo: So back then, did you think, “I can do this better”? Was that the impetus, “I can do publishing better than Penguin and HarperCollins”? John: No, I thought we would solve a problem. There's something very attractive about that whole startup mentality and beginning something from scratch. I mean, I was in my early 50s. I'd had a long career in traditional publishing. On the plus side, I knew a lot of people, and I thought I could get meetings, people would reply to my phone calls or my emails. On the downside, I didn't necessarily have the energy of a 20 to 25-year-old. I knew a lot of people and I knew quite a lot of things, and I also knew what problems something like Whitefox could solve. We set up with this idea that if we could galvanise and organise the diaspora of freelancers in the publishing space and make them available to anybody that wanted to make a book, that that would be quite a powerful thing. These incredibly creative, wonderful people who were below the radar and were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. I thought if we could access that and make that available not just to traditional publishing people who know about these people, but to individual authors, businesses, brands, people that wanted to make a book, and if you added a layer of our expertise from traditional publishing, that could be quite powerful, I suppose. That's what I was thinking back then. Jo: It's funny, though. You said these wonderful freelancers who were not particularly valued or managed or utilised properly. That could also apply to a lot of authors in traditional publishing. John: Totally. Totally. But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about that. What's really evolved since we started, even in that 2011, 2012 period, is so much has happened to independent writers, indie authors. The whole ecosystem has become much more vibrant, and what is accessible to those writers is much greater. I'd like to think we've played a part in that. What that's done is put power back into writers' hands, and that quickly became apparent in the business as a byproduct of what we'd set up. Jo: Yes, and 2012 I do think in the UK was a pivot point, because I got into self-publishing in 2006/2007 when the Americans did with the beginning of the Kindle and the iPhone. Really the American ecosystem grew first. I happened to be in Australia, and so I think I was able to escape the negativity of the vortex in the UK, which took a number more years to embrace self-publishing as a force to be reckoned with as opposed to an embarrassing thing in the corner for vanity press. Do you see 2012 as a changing point in UK publishing? John: I think we'd just come out of the Kindle moment, hadn't we? There were all sorts of conversations going on about how that was going to change things forever. I think no one quite knew what the upshot of that was going to be, but we knew that it was incredibly disruptive. In 2012, Penguin, as it was then, before Penguin Random House, had offered to buy Author Solutions for $115 million, presumably seen as some kind of defensive measure as to what the market was going to evolve into. I think it felt like a real period of change. In the UK, James Daunt took over running Waterstones, and he was then ultimately going to run Barnes & Noble. It felt like a bit of a watershed. I think we were lucky in that sense, that maybe in the UK and in London, what we were creating coincided with an opening up of opportunity and creativity, and people wanting access to more tools to be able to do things themselves. Getting this idea that you invest in your own talent and what that could mean for your ability to do things quicker, better. Some of it was happenstance, but lucky for us. As you say, we then became aware that in a sense a lot of these things had come to fruition earlier on the US side. In London, that whole idea of setting up something that wasn't a traditional rights-owning model, but where you wanted to be working with people creatively, felt actually really exciting and timely. Jo: And when you started to work with independent authors, probably a couple of years after that, you started to work with a lot more indie authors and things really started to change in terms of the business side. Did you feel any of the snobbery from the traditional industry? Like you mentioned, you have a lot of contacts, a lot of connections. I came to your wonderful launch party and there were just people from all over the industry. I wondered if you got any kickback, or if anyone raised their eyebrows a little bit at who you were choosing to work with? John: Oh, definitely. And I would say I really think that's gone. You may think differently, Jo, but from my perspective, I think there has been such an evolution in the nearly 15 years that we've been going. So any of that residual snobbery, looking down your nose at people that were going DIY, producing multiple books, learning from every single publication. We've spoken about this before. I remember you sat on the panel of a FutureBook conference in the UK, which was run by a trade magazine, with this idea of looking at the, in quotes, “digital future of the business.” It felt like there were a lot of things being talked about, but not a lot of action on the traditional side. I suppose some sort of awe that there was some magic going on with people who were making a success of self-publishing. But then quite a lot of people looking down their noses at things that shouldn't get through the gatekeepers. I do think that's gone. Or if it's not completely gone, I can see it on the way out of the door, because there's no room for that when agents are struggling to sell books to publishers because publishers are looking at the next indie author, the next Freida McFadden, the next Sarah J. Maas, the next Rebecca Yarros. So whoever it may be, or wherever they're publishing, whatever they're doing now, wherever they may be, knowing that a lot of those people will already be publishing and be on not their first, second, third or fourth, but potentially their 10th or 11th book. It's a race to see who can help those authors, as a traditional publisher would see it, amplify what they're doing. I think the idea that there's an us and them, if it did exist then, which it certainly did in certain publishing quarters, is gone. I used to go to those conferences, like the FutureBook Conference, and certain publishers would talk about publishing, and when they meant publishing, they meant a really tiny area of quite literary, traditional imprints. That's what publishing meant. They didn't even mean publishing to mean educational publishing, or children's publishing, or academic publishing, and certainly not Kindle or POD or whatever. So I think that's had to change for very good, sound, commercial, economic reasons. Jo: Yes, you're right. I definitely have heard, as we go to similar events sometimes, and you do hear agents used to talk a lot more about finding books very occasionally in a slush pile, or doing courses so you could meet people and do pitch events and all this. Now it's often build an audience on BookTok or whatever, and sell lots of books, and traditional publishing as an amplifier, as you said. That's how I always hear them pitch it now, the question of— What can traditional publishing still do when indie authors can do so much? It does seem to be, well, we can amplify you, we can get you into traditional press, we can get you in traditional bookstores, we can help you with film and movie deals, that kind of thing. So that's really interesting, because that's actually changed quite a lot. They don't now seem to say, “Oh, well, we can make sure we pay you,” or, “We are editorial success as such.” John: I think they don't say editorial success or quality or indeed marketing, because that was what used to be said. I think there's an understanding that a lot of indie writers are better marketeers of their own books than traditional publishers, and if you go into the publishing machine, then you'll get your slot. It lasts for a certain period of time and then that moves on to another book. Whereas obviously if you're writing your own book and you're marketing your own book, you're able to do that yourself 24/7 wherever you are in the world, and you will know more about your readers and your audience and how that evolves than a traditional publisher would. What they probably mean now is, as you said, as much as anything, distribution, or even physical distribution. Because to be part of that process, I think that is still where a large conglomerate is able to wield some muscle, with this idea that if you physically want to see your book in bricks and mortar retailers in X outlets around the world, that's potentially easier to do if that is your aim, via a traditional publisher. So it is constantly evolving, because it used to be that marketing was the silver bullet, and I don't think that's the case anymore. Jo: No. We'll come back to marketing, shall we? Struggling with marketing. So let's get into your book. You recently co-wrote Going Indie with James Silver, Publishing Your Book Your Way. Obviously you already knew a lot about indie authors, so I wonder, what did you discover in the process of researching the book and the interviews you did? And I was one of your interviews. Did anything come up that surprised you, since you're already pretty embedded in the world? John: I would say some of it was reinforcing what I knew. So how everything is so intertwined, how in some ways unlinear everything is. People are doing lots of things in a different order to the way that traditionally writers would perceive this relay race of a manuscript gets passed to an editor, an editor passes on. That's just not how it is or needs to be anymore. I still think there is—not even a misconception—but I think there's a received wisdom that when you're talking about self-publishing, you're talking about fiction. The majority of books that Whitefox produces are not fiction, they're non-fiction. Some of them are quite mainstream, some of them are quite niche. That idea of connecting to your audience and your followers, and being slightly more scientific about how you find readers in your non-fiction niche, I think is still unspoken about in a way, in that genre fiction tends to be what people automatically assume the conversation is about. This probably doesn't surprise you, but I was pleasantly surprised to have it confirmed to me quite how much swapping and sharing there is of skills and knowledge in that space. I'm not saying indie writing is egoless at all, but there's quite a lot of sharing of knowledge and what works, and collaboration, which I think is great to see. Again, if you've, as I did many years ago, come out of corporate conglomerate publishing, traditional publishing, there's less of that by the very nature of the kind of organisation. And look, we just talked about marketing a little while ago. I do think this whole idea that the cutting edge of experimentation, it's not traditional publishing, it's indie writers. They are looking at not just how to find readers, but how to fulfil orders, how to make commercial sense of what they're doing from the absolute outset and get-go of what they're doing. And just how now the lines are blurring between what would be classified as traditional digital publishers and the writers who are doing their own thing, or doing their own thing on behalf of a few other writers. Those lines have completely blurred. There used to be this traditional hardback, paperback, X number of books a year, a year after hardback there's a paperback. This is the model we have been doing for centuries, and people doing things on their own. I think that's blurring massively, and the Venn diagrams of people's areas of expertise are just overlapping massively. Jo: Well, I think you're right there, and certainly the hardback special editions with sprayed edges and foil. A lot of us now are doing that first and not putting out the other, or putting out the rest of it at the same time. I dare say probably there are more indie authors with sprayed edge hardbacks than there are traditionally published authors. John: I'm sure that's right. And what's interesting is if you go to a traditional book printer, they are loving the direct communication with writers, that's not coming through traditional channels and traditional relationships. It's great business, it's interesting. I think that's something that's even developed in the last couple of years, that cutting out of some of the middle men required. Jo: Yes, and in terms of supporting freelancers and small publishing houses and printers and stuff, the other thing I've heard is that indie authors pay upfront, or they pay quickly, compared to some of these big publishers who are asking for long lead times and steep discounting. So actually a lot of these independent businesses are doing better under indie author work than they were under traditional. John: I think that's right, and that's what I mean also about the sharing of information and this collaborative idea of sharing creative knowledge. I mean, I'm making it sound like a kind of 19th century cooperative, which it isn't. I'm not suggesting that for a second. It's this idea that there's a lot of people learning a lot of things and there's a keenness to share some of that information, because if you've developed your own readership for your unique creative product, some of those learnings are very exciting. The printers I've spoken to love working on those kinds of things, because they are also being challenged to come up with new ways of developing ever more innovative physical product. Jo: Yes, I think it's a fun, creative time for sure. Things like Kickstarter, which you came on and talked about crowdfunding years ago, and I've obviously done. I think, what am I on now? Seven? I've just done my seventh. John: Wow. Jo: It's so much fun. But now what's happening is traditional publishers are arriving on Kickstarter and all that kind of thing. So we really see a blurring. Let's come back to your book, so Going Indie. You co-wrote it. Now obviously there are lots of positive sides of collaboration, but in terms of any challenges with collaboration and co-writing and the writing process of doing this? Because I've done this several times and I've found it very challenging. So tell us about the collaborative writing process. John: We thought a lot about it before we took it on. What I would say, having done it, is I am assuming there is no formula for how you do this. At Penguin I worked with a married couple who were crime writers, and they wrote books together. They merged their names so it appeared to be one name. I could not tell you, and they didn't share what that process was, whether they were writing different chapters or … I don't know. So I can only speak from my own experience. James is an established journalist. He's great with deadlines. He was very good at chivvying me along when I needed to be persuaded to hit the deadlines that I'd promised. I write blogs, I write newsletters, I write content for our website, but this is my first book. I've never written anything of this length. So in a way it started with the structure. It started with this idea that we would play to what we perceived as our respective strengths in terms of writing. We absolutely were not each writing every third word or anything like that. It was a process of trust in different parts. I thought, James had done some research and will be better at writing that. He deferred to me on areas that he took to be my areas of expertise. We did every interview for the book together. We went over the notes from those before they became part of the interviews for the book. And some of the book's elements are diagrammatic, so those are very easy to collaborate on. I think we tried to be professionally, creatively constructive with each other. So it was raising an eyebrow rather than shouting at each other if we didn't agree about something. A lot of it was down to the editing, and I don't know what your experience was like with a co-writer, but a lot of it came down to: here is something which is quite baggy. How do we, between us, make this as tight as we possibly can? I don't mean copy editing or proofreading. I mean the actual sort of, how do we get this into a pithy, usable, practical but discursive book? We didn't ever set out for this to be a pure reference book at all. We wanted to take a snapshot of what was going on. So a lot of it was genuinely trying to do some research and get people to feed into what was going on from lots of different perspectives, which is why we wanted to get mainstream traditional publishers, we wanted to get agents, we wanted to get indie writers, we wanted to get people who have all sorts of experiences and perspectives. That's what makes it what it is, which is, here's what we think are some of the interesting discussion points of what's going on now. Jo: It is a fantastic snapshot. I think it's really interesting—and obviously you also have seen my book, Successful Self-Publishing, which is on its fourth edition—this is one of the difficult things with snapshot type books. So have you already thought about that? I know this one has just come out, but have you thought, “Oh no, in five years we have to do it again”? John: Well, I think we thought we're going to have to address AI, which we do in the book, and we really tried to caveat that with saying, look, so much may change so quickly, and here we are talking about what we know now. We obviously tried to set the context for where we are now, and we tried as much as possible to make something which would last as long as we can. I think what we did think was, we have tried to make it as international a perspective as possible. But at the same time, we are a London-based agency, and a lot of the views will be from people based in the UK. So I think what I would like to explore is something that looks at potentially somewhere like the US, where I think there'll be different people that would perhaps have different perspectives on different things. So I think we thought about potentially there being future iterations of the book, but not yet. Jo: Not yet. This is the challenge with non-fiction, of course. On that, I would say what you just said around the US and stuff, the successful UK authors all use the same systems as the US. So I wouldn't say that the US … I mean, we all have the US companies we all use. I say Kobo is obviously Canadian, but I would say that we use the same ways of doing things. Obviously you might interview a different author, but … John: That was all I meant. I meant interviewing. Because we've interviewed agents and authors and publishers and they are largely UK based. So it was the idea that maybe there are some perspectives on things rather than systemic. Jo: Differences. John: Yes. Just that. Jo: So then I guess another challenge, we've kind of nodded to it so far, is marketing. So let's talk about the challenges of getting this book out in terms of publishing and marketing. Because you've been on the inner circle side, trying to do that for other people's books, but your own book, this is a whole nother thing. So tell us about that. John: Well, how do you do it, Jo? I mean, honestly, I've loved some of it. I get how you become completely obsessed with your book and trying to make sure that you can get it into the hands of the people that you want to get it into the hands of. We've got some great endorsement quotes, which was a task that, how can I say this? I would call it pride swallowing. The idea that you really try and get people to say nice things about your book and, if they don't reply, you think, “How much do I pester them? How much do I annoy them by asking them again nicely?” And the absolute sheer unadulterated joy when they come back with something positive that you can use and utilise in some way. So that whole process of waiting for feedback, I suppose, and hoping that people are going to like what you've done and help you spread the word for it. We had a launch event, we've given books away. We've published the book as ebook and POD. I think one of the great things about that is it's enabled us to be completely adaptable and make changes right up until the last minute. That drove everybody in my team completely crazy because we were making changes up until the last minute. So, is the book definitely going to be available on publication date? What's it going to do? You know, all of that kind of stuff. Also, just getting this idea that I suppose you can never stop. Is that a very obvious thing to say to a writer? It probably is. You just can't stop, because if you go, “Right, well, I've done it,” complacency is the enemy. Just as soon as you've got that quote, or someone said that they're going to give you an opportunity to talk about it on a platform, it's just another day and you've got to keep thinking about how you can spread the word and tell people that it exists. Jo: Yes, well, I think that's right, and particularly non-fiction, which unless it's very timely and you must get it out right now. But other than that— Most books you just have to keep marketing for years. Then just as you say, when do you stop? Well, you kind of never stop unless you want to, unless you want to retire and just give up, basically. Dean Wesley Smith, who's a big writer in the US and a kind of a mentor of mine in past years, he talks about it as this massive sea of books. And when a book arrives, he pictures it coming down and landing on the water. So the day you launch, it's landed on the water, and then it begins to sink. Then there are all these other books coming down. It's like this rain of books, and your book is sinking as soon as it lands. And your job is to keep it afloat somehow. John: Keep it afloat. Jo: Yes. John: I think you're right, and it's such an interesting perspective for us, who work with a lot of people who have one book. You know, they've spent 10 years writing it. It's their life story. It's their memoir. It's their self-help book. It's their book that accompanies them on their speaking journey, or whatever. Then there are the people who are writing constantly and can't stop writing because they're exercising that creative muscle all the time and wanting to get better, and wanting to improve and learn and understand why this works and why that hasn't worked. Just getting a glimpse into what it must be like for that person for whom writing is not a hobby. I kept saying to myself, “This is not something you're doing as a hobby.” I want this book to be of value to people, and if I'm investing that time and effort into something that I want to get out there, you've got to commit to whatever it is you need to do to make sure you're not sinking. Jo: Yes. John: I will now not be able to get that image out of my head. Jo: Yes. I know there's people listening who don't have a mind's eye, which I always find fascinating, but for those of us with a mind's eye, you can now picture that and you will never forget it. The other thing, I guess, is that, having done a lot, over 40 books now, the inevitable thing is you cannot keep pushing all of those books back up to the surface. So when you do get the bug as such of writing, the most interesting thing for all of us is always the next book. It's always like, ooh, the next thing I'm doing, I'm very excited about. So you do have to pick your battles on marketing. So have you got the bug, do you think? Are you thinking of other books in general? Because as you said, you must be, I guess, in your 60s. John: I am. Jo: You could retire. John: I am. You were talking about that long career. I could. I mean, I really love doing it, and I would love to do more. I think one of the things that surprised me was just how many ideas came up while we were doing the book about tangents that one could take it. I have no desire to write a novel. I don't want to do that. I wouldn't be very good at that. I do think there are some interesting spaces around where there's a kind of intersection of creativity and learning, and how you can develop books that would help people who are trying to achieve different things in different sectors of publishing. So without getting too granular about it, this book doesn't really address brands who want to become publishers, and I think that is something that our business has developed into working with, not just individuals, but businesses and brands. I think there's definitely spin-offs of this book which are not about repeating what we've done so far. And this whole idea of what you've been doing for a long time, what we've been doing since 2011, 2012, it's evolving now at such a speed. I mean, who would have known what was going to come out of TikTok? As you talk about TikTok to Shopify, that whole kind of new ways of finding readers, of taking books to market. As you said, Kickstarter, crowdfunding. There's all sorts of things that I think will emerge, because in a funny sort of way traditional publishing at the moment feels quite conservative with a small c. I mean, the bestsellers. Dan Brown is number one in the bestseller list this week in the UK as I speak, who has been a bestseller forever. And obviously new writers come along the whole time, but the market feels a little bit as if it's waiting now for innovation. I think if that innovation's going to happen, it's probably going to happen in the indie space before it happens in mainstream publishing. So people are coming to us and thinking, does that represent a trend? Does that represent something which could be a way of looking at something a little bit deeper, doing some research around and creating something which is not a long book, not a massive thesis, but something which is indicative of something which could be useful for people. Jo: Just coming back on the Dan Brown is in the bestseller list. I think this is completely to do with the way that traditional publishing measures things. For many years, more than a decade, probably since the beginning of Kindle, certainly the beginning of Kindle Unlimited, there is a shadow economy, I call it, or a parallel economy. I would say that almost zero of my own personal sales are measured by any industry standards. Anyone who makes any money from Kindle Unlimited or Kickstarter or Shopify, or selling direct in any form, or selling books at conventions, none of this is measured by any traditional things. As you know, the New York Times list, for example, does not include Amazon sales in their bestseller list. So you've got indie authors in the UK who are incredibly successful who have to decide, say, someone like LJ Ross, for example, decides, “Okay, I'm going to set up a proper imprint with Gardners or whatever so that I can get in bookstores so that I can hit a Sunday Times list or something.” So I would say that seeing things like Dan Brown on a bestseller list has almost no meaning in the shadow indie economy. John: No, you're absolutely right. We're not even able to see audiobook sales. Jo: Yes, audio. Any kind of borrows, like Spotify. John: No, you're completely right. I suppose I was making a broader cultural point, that it doesn't feel like there's an enormous amount of innovation going on or risk taking within what I would call mainstream trade publishing. And there doesn't seem to be the need to be, because there will be more consolidation. Small companies will be bought by big companies, so there's growth through acquisition. There's still a hope that something will take off that is a surprise, and there's still an enormous reliance on established brands who, even through the traditional metrics of how you measure them, are probably selling less, but still at the top of the pile. I suppose that's what I was meaning. Jo: Yes, and I agree with what the industry looks at as signals. It's just, as we said, a lot of these signals are invisible. So coming onto innovation, at London Book Fair this year there were a lot of sessions on AI, and you mentioned AI briefly, and there is a chapter in Going Indie on generative AI. And of course there's a lot of negativity and drama and lawsuits and this, that and the other. But at the same time, at London Book Fair, a lot of traditional publishers talking about using it, and of course they always say, “Oh, we use AI only in marketing and business, not with the creative or editorial.” Everyone makes this distinction. What are your thoughts on what's happening and where's it going with AI? Is a lot of this stuff not happening in public and just going on behind closed doors? John: I think so. We do have a chapter in the book on AI. We've generated summaries of every chapter using AI, which we explicitly said in the book as well. We've got our Ten Commandments of what we think are useful guidelines. I think that there has to be an enormous amount being done, whether it's experimentation or speeding up for efficiency's sake, or things that slow you down, within mainstream publishing. There has to be more than just the guardrails around the creative process. And clearly when we're talking about metadata, book description, cover copy, presumably royalty calculations, presumably if you're trying to grow your newsletters. There has to be an enormous amount of activity going on. We're driven by the market, so we do not commission. Writers come to us and they either want to work with us and we want to work with them, or that doesn't happen. So we're in a sense seeing what the market is seeing, and that is a whole range of things. As I've said before, there's a lot of sweeping generalisations out there, which if you look back to that Kindle moment, we were talking a little while ago about what was going on in 2010/2011, about the enormous broad brush strokes that were being perceived as a result of Kindle. Kindle has affected some areas of publishing, it's affected some not at all. I think it will be absolutely fascinating when the sweeping generalisations stop and there becomes, I suppose, even more transparency. The thing that people are looking for, isn't it? A little bit less opaqueness as to what is really being done. Because everybody's being so careful about what they say they're doing and what they're not doing. I suppose ElevenLabs is the one where people are openly engaging on the audio side. I mean, everyone is being so careful and cautious. Jo: Me too. John: What do you think? We spoke a bit about AI within the book, and I'm interested to know what you think. Jo: Well, I've obviously been openly talking about it since 2016. I openly talk about using it, and I've got my Patreon community where we talk about how we're using it, and tips on how to use it. But then, because I have been writing and publishing since 2007, 2008, I'm very strong in my creative voice. I'm very strong in my understanding of what I consider to be my level of output, and what I publish under my own name is what I publish under my own name. John: Totally. Jo: So the problem is for people who are less confident, I think, in what they're doing creatively perhaps. I know some people feel like they're scared it will take over or something. When you're as strong-minded as me, it's not taking over anything. John: It's not going to take over anything. And the other side of the coin is how many people are finding Whitefox using ChatGPT. Jo: Mm. John: I'm thrilled that we are emerging, through very detailed briefing of AI, as something that is worth engaging with. Jo: Positive marketing. John: Yes, exactly. As you say, I think there's a lot of negativity, and I think it will settle down eventually. I think less hysteria. Jo: Yes, hopefully sooner rather than later. So as we come to an end, you've been in the publishing industry a long time and seen a lot of people who have disappeared, but also those who've lasted. I wondered if maybe you could comment on those who last, because I definitely feel like I'm in my 50s now, and I want to keep doing this. I'm pretty obsessed with— What are the hallmarks of people who have a long-term career? So reflections on that. John: Oh, that's such a good question. I think there's some common characteristics and themes. So I think authenticity, I think this idea of being continually curious. I think there are people who can't help but create, and this idea that once you've sort of expelled once, that's enough. I think there's people that just can't stop creating, whatever you do with it. But this idea that the more you do, the better you get, the more you evolve and keep an open mind. I think there's definitely entrepreneurial writers who love this idea of keeping their readers engaged, and how that conversation is something that evolves and that collaboration evolves, is fascinating. I think if you love that, and you listen, there's always an opportunity to keep building on what you do. I love the writers who we work with. I can think of a writer who we're working on his fourth novel at the moment, and he is a bundle of positivity. No matter the trials and tribulations, the things that have gone wrong, his expectations definitely not being met with his first book. He definitely has this idea that he wants to keep writing, he wants to get better, and he is getting better. It isn't a journey that has a beginning and an end. It's something that will continue for as long as he wants to write. Every single book that he has published, he has learned and gained confidence, gained a network of connections that he's utilised himself now to not make the first half a dozen mistakes he made on the first book. Who knows where it will end up? But certainly the satisfaction he's getting, and the sales he's getting, are growing as he becomes savvier and quicker to make the right choices and decisions. So I think that's my honest answer to that. I think there are definitely people who think, “Phew, I have really wanted to do this book. Now I can rest easy. I've done my book.” Then there are people who really, whatever their objective, whatever the definition of success is from the get-go, just can't help creating. I do love that and respect that. I don't think our book falls quite into that category, because I think it's a slightly different thing. I think there are people who are still making a success of what they do and redefining that as they go on, and who are really open to ideas and input from different people and are not closed off. I love working with those people. Jo: So where can people find Going Indie and everything you do online? John: Well, Going Indie is available online at all good bookshops. It's available at Amazon and anywhere you buy books online as ebook and POD. Our website is wearewhitefox.com, and you'll find information about not just our book there, but a lot of other things that we're doing on that site. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, John. That was great. John: Thank you so much, Jo. It's been a pleasure. The post Going Indie, Publishing Innovation, And The Challenges Of Book Marketing With John Bond first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Opening Weekend: Selling Hollywood with Jim Fredrick continues on the TG&TG feed. A soap marketer who'd never set foot in Los Angeles became the most successful studio head in movie history. Alan Horn ran Warner Brothers and then Disney, greenlighting Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, and the modern Marvel and Star Wars era. He sits down with Jim Fredrick to trace a 60-year career built on serendipity, and to talk honestly about what selling a movie takes now. Takeaways: Hired because he was perfect. A Procter & Gamble marketer working on Ivory soap, Alan got recruited by Jerry Perenchio precisely because he'd never watched much TV and never been to LA. "You're perfect. You're hired." Norman Lear backed him against a mutiny. Writers walked out of his first All in the Family table read. A month later Lear stood up in front of 40 people and told them to accept it or get out. The Blackwing 602 pencil made it official: "You are now qualified to give notes." Green light or nothing. Alan took the Warner Brothers presidency only with final say on what got made, then built the run that led Bob Iger to call him for Disney. You can't buy an opening weekend anymore. Social media broke the old playbook. Audiences text each other 20 minutes into a Friday screening, and marketing keeps getting treated as low-hanging fruit when studios need to cut. Pull quotes (social-ready): "Every problem that I've ever had in business is a people problem." — Alan Horn "Throw a hundred lines in the water, because all you need to do is catch one fish." — Alan Horn "It's not so easy to buy an opening weekend, because people start texting each other 20 minutes into a movie on a Friday." — Alan Horn "It isn't really pre-COVID anymore to me. It's pre-streaming dominance." — Alan Horn Sponsors: Golden Trailer Awards (goldentrailer.com) West One Music and Q Factory by Robert Etoll (westonemusic.com)

Send us Fan MailHannah and Laura are covering the final third of Jim Butcher's Turn Coat and are trying to decide if certain events needed to have taken place. They also discuss Hannah's hatred for Christopher Nolan movies, some recent non-fiction reads they loved, and a documentary that goes off the rails.**This episode contains SPOILERS for Turn Coat by Jim Butcher. Spoiler section begins at: 36 min 15 secs. ***CW for the episode: discussions of death, memory loss, sexism, racism, poverty, violence, sex, blood, vampires, magic, drugsMedia Mentions:Turn Coat by Jim Butcher I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney Strong Female Character by Fern Brady Following---Kanopy Memento---PeacockA Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib  The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren A Toxic Love Story---Netflix Support the showBe sure to follow OWWR Pod!www.owwrpod.com YouTube: @owwrpodBlueSky: @OwwrPodTikTok: @OwwrPodInstagram: @owwrpodThreads: @OwwrPodSend us an email at: owwrpod@gmail.comCheck out OWWR Patreon: patreon.com/owwrpodOr join OWWR Discord! We'd love to chat with you!You can follow Hannah at:Instagram: @brews.and.booksThreads: @brews.and.booksTikTok: @brews.and.booksYou can follow Laura at:Instagram: @goodbooksgreatgoatsBlueSky: @myyypod

Nicole Walker joins Let's Talk Memoir for a conversation about how we talk about current traumas and past traumas in ways that don't retraumatize us, making our work matter to others, giving ourselves agency over the hard stuff we're writing about, conveying interiority and emotion, making our experience fundamental to our writing process, exploring our stories through research, asking readers not to look away, disassociation vs distance, metaphors as entry points for readers, experimenting with the speculative, becoming more expansive, and her new book Writing the Hard Stuff.   Ronit's upcoming workshop: Writing Dynamic Memoir: From Lived Experience to Gripping Story https://www.lmcmurtrylitcenter.org/workshops/writing-dynamic-memoir-from-lived-experience-to-gripping-story    Also in this episode: - revising life paths - encapsulating our experience - the narrator voice and perspective in our work   Books mentioned in this episode: Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens by Laraine Herring Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story by Erica Stern A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form by Brenda Miller How to Plant a Billion Trees by Nicole Walker   NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books including How to Plant a Billion Trees and Writing the Hard Stuff. She has written pieces for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits Crux, the literary nonfiction series at University of Georgia Press and teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University where she serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society.    Connect with Nicole: Website: nikwalk.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nicole.walker.18041 @nikwalk.bsky.social Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nikwalker28/ ‭https://nikwalk.substack.com/    Purchase Book:  https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/writing-the-hard-stuff-9781350518650/ https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-plant-a-billion-trees-9798216278894/   - Ronit Plank bio and links:  Ronit Plank is a writer, teacher, and editor whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poets & Writers, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, The Rumpus, Salon, Hippocampus, The New York Times, and elsewhere, earning Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her memoir When She Comes Back was a Book Riot Best True Crime Book and Kirkus Reviews calls it, “An intimate, intuitive, emotionally vivid family account that finds hope in reconciliation". Ronit is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Home is a Made-Up Place, and her work has been anthologized in Selected Memories, Vol. 2: 15 Years of Hippocampus Magazine and Manna Songs: Stories of Jewish Culture and Heritage. Ronit is the Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Citron Review, teaches memoir at a host of venues including the University of Washington's Continuum Program, Antioch University, and 92NY's Roundtable, and is host of the podcast Let's Talk Memoir and the Substack Let's Talk Memoir. Find her on social media @ronitplank   Website: www.ronitplank.com Substack: https://substack.com/@ronitplank Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ronitplank/ When She Comes Back: https://ronitplank.com/when-she-comes-back/  

What did you think of this episode?Social media collaboration opportunities for writers. Samantha Evans Tschritter shares strategies to help you get seen.  Welcome to Your Best Writing Life, an extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference held in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of NC. I'm your host, Linda Goldfarb. Each week, I bring tips and strategies from writing and publishing industry experts to help you excel in your craft. I'm so glad you're listening in. During this episode, you'll learn about … Social Media Collaboration for Today's WritersWith 20 years of leadership experience and contributions to forty books, today's industry expert… multi-award-winning author S. E. Tschritter (Shridder) leads readers toward hope with content that resonates beyond the final chapter. Tschritter lives in South Carolina with her husband, three daughters, and their Siberian Husky, who's earned the hashtag #HuskySmartPuppyDumb. Talking Points: 1.) What does it mean to collaborate? What can that look like?2.) What are the benefits of collaboration?3.) No collaboration too small. How does that work?Substack – YouTube - InstagramSOCIAL LINKS: Love United  Linktr.ee  Listener giveaway…example of Instagram collaboration…. https://www.instagram.com/p/DbuReLJgAtH/?img_index=1Visit Your Best Writing Life website.Join our Facebook group, Your Best Writing LifeYour host - Linda Goldfarb#4 Podcast 2026 "Million Podcasts Top 30 Christian Writers Podcasts"#1 Podcast 2024 "Top 50+ Must-Have Tools and Resources for Christian Writers.Awarded the Spark Media 2023 Fan Favorites Best Solo PodcastAwarded the Spark Media 2022 Most Binge-Worthy Podcast

Send us Fan MailJacqui Lents shares her August 2026 audio newsletter, including a Scotland travel story where her phone's audio-to-text gets a foul mouth. Writers are encouraged to take part in the short story submissions for her podcast's Story Share series, and listen to episode 102. The month's Ridiculous Reads pick is Everything's Coming Up Rosie by Courtney Walsh, plus a September Bookish Flights book club featuring Walsh. A special thanks is extended to the attendees of the Crooked Nook event at Sherwood Brewery. Also new dresses for upcoming author events are incoming. Here are events: August 15, 2026 1:00 - 4:00 pmCalliope Bookshelf66870 Van Dyke Rd Washington, MI 48095 Holland Literary Festival, 70+ authors will be there.September 12, 2026 11:00 am - 5:00 pmHolland Town Center 12330 James St Holland, MI 49424 Apple Festival October 10, 2026 1:00 - 3:00 pm The Moorings222 Bridge St. Charlevoix, MI, 49720To learn more or sign up for the newsletter, go to www.jacquilents.com

This week’s episode, featuring Mariam Matossian, George Price, and Frank McCormack, will swing from the hilarious to the poignant. Expect door-to-door sales, a road trip in a hearse, and a hallucinated raptor. "Leaving Home Stories,” is a special summer series in which writers from The Habit Membership read personal narratives on the theme of leaving home, literally or metaphorically, temporarily or permanently. Sponsored by The Habit Membership for Writers.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week, we're talking Brittney and Cherelle Griner's divorce after eight years of marriage, plus the latest WNBA drama around trans inclusion and anti-trans activism. We also get into LGBTQ+ representation in this summer's biggest movies, answer your questions in Am I A Bad Queer?, and share our latest Bad Queer Opinions.Shoutouts:Kris: Women's Professional Baseball League (WPBL) - Had their first game on 8/1 marking the return of women's pro baseball to the US featuring its four founding franchises: the NY Heights, LA Queens, Boston Hunters, and SF Firebells. The six-week long regular season will stretch until 9/6, playoffs start 9/9. Follow @wpbl_official on IG for more infoShana: Sula's Kitchen - A Home for Trans, Nonbinary, & Queer Black Storytellers. Writers will have the chance to engage in prompts and break bread together in honor of literary lineages. Happens every second Sunday. Follow @weekend.wordsEpisode notes:1:07 - Queer Urban Dictionary4:16 - Category is: BG and the Breakup Heard in Russia 13:05 - Category is: Trans Community & Sports34:23 - Category is: LGBTQ rep in summer box office smashes38:06 - Am I A Bad Queer?56:34 - Bad Queer Opinions1:03:58 - ShoutoutsShare your Am I A Bad Queer? hereSupport the showPATREON: patreon.com/BadQueersPodcastSubscribe to our Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/@BadQueersPodcast The opinions expressed during this podcast are conversational in nature and expressed only for comedic purposes. Not all of the facts will be correct but we attempt to be as accurate as possible. BQ Media LLC, the hosts, nor any guest host(s) hold no liability over the conversations on this podcast and by using this podcast you understand that it is solely for entertainment purposes. Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, parody, scholarship and research.