#amwriting With Jess & Kj

Hey #AmWriting Listeners. It’s April 13, 2020, and this episode, like the last, is a throwback to a simpler time, when we left our homes without masks and took baristas and lattes and a whole lot of other things for granted. So it may feel jarring that we’re not discussing the current situation, but at the time there was little to discuss—and we wouldn’t have, anyway, because our guests, Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen, had so much fantastic advice to share about co-writing, writing suspense and just writing in general. They were a blast to talk to, and we hope they’re hard at work on a new thriller via Google docs.  If you’re hard at work on a project—or would like to be—our sponsor, Author Accelerator, has some free resources for this tough time, including a free ebook—The brilliantly titled Writer’s Guide to Agony and Defeat, writing resources for families and an upcoming webinar with creativity coach Jennifer Louden that’s just what every writer needs: Why Bother? Why write this book, and why now? I

Hey campers, KJ here. In this week’s episode, we talk to the brilliant Jessica Abel, a creativity coach extraordinaire, about how to get past whatever’s stopping you and develop a sustainable creative life. In so many ways, it’s a timely episode, and it WILL inspire you to get in there and get some work done. But it may also inspire you to wonder what planet we are living on, as we lightly discuss such exotic activities as driving children to school and going to work. Sorry. That was Planet February, also known as the good old days. We were prerecording for some planned travel that—well, you know the drill. As we press go on this episode, life has changed for all of us—but in every other way, this call to creative action is completely timely. So take a break from the news and revel in it. It’s also a great time to check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator, where you’ll find a free seven-day writing challenge that can help you narrow in on the project you want to write—and let me just say I love that thing.

Hey writers—super-practical episode this week! Call it part two of the Sarina coaches KJ through her book launch series. This week, it’s the #MarketingMojo page—things you’ll need as you market your book no matter what the book is or when it launches. This is the road to creating things like back-of-the-book or flap copy, ad copy, social media post copy and more, for fiction and non-fiction both.  We go in deep in the podcast, but here’s a quick primer, starting with the easiest and building up to the biggest challenges. Sarina suggests creating a Google doc with the following:  Praise for the book/General praise for you and your work. Why? People buy things because of the emotions they’re expecting to feel. The praise you get from others—or the praise you’re hoping for, which is another way to approach this—is a shortcut to what emotions people have when reading your work. Short quotes from the actual book that say something in a few words that’s really indicative of the theme. Note—they can be

Feeling a wee bit stuck? Struggling to get anything on the page? Well, we all are—and not only does this week’s guest know from writer’s block (her last book came out in 2004), but she gave a raging case of it to her protagonist in her new novel, which allowed her—and us—to really dig in deep into what happens when the words don’t come. Join KJ and Sarina as we talk to Laura Zigman, author of Separation Anxiety (a perfect book for this moment, all about how we’re all, every single last one of us no matter how weird or obnoxious or even put-together-seeming, just doing the best we can with what we’ve got) about writing funny, the edge between humor and empathy, and how life can get in the way of publishing even when it seems like you’re on the right track. #AmReading Jess:  The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, Eric Larson Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, Jennifer Finney Boylan Podcast: The Long Form  Laura: Weather, Jenny Offill

Well, fellow writers, when we recorded this we were just at the beginning of it all. It’s safe to say things have already changed—all of us have families at home, we’re all shut down, with noisy houses full of people trying in various ways to work online. We went from “trying to work anyway” through “I give up for a few days” and now we’re back to “trying to work anyway.” So this advice still applies—we’re setting small goals, giving ourselves schedules as best we can, and trying to strike that balance between cutting ourselves necessary slack and still trying to be who we want to be as writers.  It’s true that this keeps happening:  And when it does, we’re trying to find things we CAN do with absolutely zero attention span. Like share our friends’ books on Instagram. Or record a podcast about how crazy we feel. Which we will keep doing. So, same time, next week? Now’s actually a good time to check out our sponsor, Author Accelerator—get matched with a book coach, or send some of your forced iso

Hey listeners! It’s been a mad mad mad week here (all of you in the future, check the date), and I bet there too. Result: there are no shownotes for this episode. We’re talking about  revamping my website to get it in gear for my forthcoming second book. Here’s the image we mention—the before—and for the after (which is still in progress), head over to my site and see what you think. Any questions, shoot me an email (kjdellantonia@gmail.com or reply to this.

And you thought our shelves full of self help books were just to manage our own issues! Nope, there’s another use for them. Our guest this week, Kathleen Smith, is a therapist and writer and the author of Everything Isn't Terrible, a helpful and humorous guide to shedding our anxious habits and building a more solid sense of self in our increasingly anxiety-inducing world. It’s very useful, and we’re valiantly attempting to tame our own anxieties—but that’s not (much of) what we talk about. Instead, we’re focused on what’s really important—and within our control: Creating believable, dysfunctional characters and then helping them to grow and change. We talk about romance dynamics: the pursuer and the pursued, the over-functioner and the slacker—and how important it is that a couple be at a similar level of maturity (or, more likely, immaturity) to be believable. From there, it’s headlong into siblings, birth order and circumstance, family coping mechanisms and some of the ways to develop deeper conflict wi

It’s our 200th episode! In all that time, we’ve never missed a week and never regretted our choice to spend 40 minutes (ish) together—and with you. We love doing the podcast, so this week we thought we’d answer a few podcast-y questions we get a lot: should you start a podcast? Can a podcast help promote a book? Is there gold in them thare podcast hills?  We talk about all that and more—but here’s one thing you won’t find in the episode, in part because it seems so obvious now that we never think about it. The smartest thing we did, when we decided we were going for this podcast thing, was this: We made it about writing. That was not, back in 2016, an obvious choice. Jess had just written a best-selling book on parenting. I was the editor of the New York Times’ parenting section. Sarina wasn’t on board yet, and it was just the two of us. The obvious thing to create would have been a podcast about family life.  And we would be so, so sick of doing it by now. Or at least I would. (This is KJ writing

Our guest today, Dan Blank, sure seems like a man who loves his work. On his own podcast, the Creative Shift, he’s a warm and engaged interviewer. In his emails, he’s genuine and engaged. Is he selling his book and his services as an advisor to authors developing their platform and launching their work into the world? Sure, but it never feels like he’s selling. It feels like he’s sharing. Wouldn’t we all like to feel like that, and have our readers see us that way?  We were hoping Dan would share his magic sauce and we’d all go skipping off towards easy street down a rainbow path, but it turns out there’s some work involved here. So instead, we talked about process, from the way you manage your personal trolls to the way you manage your emails, and then we talked—buzzword alert—authenticity, and finding the things you genuinely want to share with the people who are a match for your work. (You can download Dan’s free guide, 5 Ways to Immediately Connect with Readers, here.) Episode links and a transcr

We’re interviewing Julie Lythcott-Haims this week and you won’t want to miss it, because 1) she wrote an amazing, best-selling book called How to Raise an Adult and then followed THAT up with a memoir, Real American, that the New York Times Book Review pretty much thought was amazing and is now drafting the sequel to Adult very much on her own terms; and 2) she could very easily have become Jess’s arch-nemesis, and vice versa. If they had been totally different people. If they had been less open, less willing to see possibility in a scary-sounding situation. If they’d let fear and jealousy win. But they didn’t. So two writers with authority, each releasing a book on raising children to be independent in nearly exactly the same moment turned out to be a recipe for collaboration, not catastrophe. The lesson? In books, it’s really almost never winner-takes-all. We talk about how they pulled it off, how Julie transcended expectations with her memoir and why it’s so important to resist the call to writ

Marika Flatt is the founder of PR By the Book, an independent publicity firm dedicated to working with authors, publishers and books. Their tagline is “from author to influencer,” and we talk about that process—and how your goals as an author (sell books, get speaking gigs, sell earlier books, increase name recognition, even sell products or services) change how you might work with a publicist, and even whether you should work with a publicist at all.  And if your book is still very much a WIP, we’ve got you covered with what writers can do before our books are ready to start establishing the kind of backstory (I refuse to call it platform, because there’s so much more to it) that makes that writer-publicist teaming really work later in the game. Marika even has a DIY program for authors to help us figure these things out without a major investment.  We also got this great reminder: “If your book soars, all those people will be there to buy your next book.  If your first book crashes but people connect

It started with a question in the #AmWriting Facebook group: How do you get it all done? And the answer was, of course—we don’t, no one does, we push things off until tomorrow or we put out fires all day and then frantically write until late in the evening or we drive our children around for hours while chastising ourselves for not making better choices.  But really, you all said. Really truly when do you write? And how d you put it first? And what do you do when you don’t or can’t? This is us, three full time writers and also parents (all of teenagers), talking about the push and pull of looking like you’re at home and available when you’re not, and how the awful truth is that sometimes you are, and how we control what we can and scream hopelessly into the void at what we can’t. (That’s just who we are.)  We realized we’re each good at some parts of this and not others, which means we can take a little inspiration. We can protect our time, do the important stuff first and cut ourselves a little slac

How do you become a science writer? What if you didn’t even think you liked science as a kid? What if, instead of “serious journalism”, you spent the first half of your career covering celebrities and royals, even becoming the London Bureau Chief for People magazine? Then you’re in perfect shape, at least if you’re our guest, Lydia Denworth. She tells us how she made that transition, going from People through Redbook to Scientific American using the dual powers of curiosity and ignorance (and more relevantly, the willingness to admit it). We also discuss getting grants for non-fiction research, pitching scientific topics and the literary aspect of science writing—and Friendship, which just happens to be both the topic and the title of Denworth’s latest book.  Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, did you love last week’s #WritersTopFive: Top 5 Ways to Win at Newsletter Subject Lines? Because I did (and I’m winning.) This Monday: Top 5 Things to Do When Your WIP Feels Like It’s In Flames. Supp

Struggling to put a price on your time? Jess and Sarina (an economist and former trader on Wall Street) help your find that elusive number.  A listener asked Jess for advice on consulting fees, so in order to find an answer more satisfying than, “It depends,” Jess and Sarina get down to economic brass tacks. Sarina explains how publishers or anyone else who wants to hire you for your writing value your time, and how you can propose a figure that takes everything from opportunity costs to fungibles into account. In an attempt to make pricing your time less complicated and emotionally fraught, Jess offers a simple formula to nail down a number that represents your hourly worth.  Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, January 20, 2020 is ONE OF THE BEST YET: Top 5 Ways to Win at Newsletter Subject Lines. So sign up, support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use f

She writes Emmy-winning television comedy, bestselling children’s books, plays, and sentences for the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Is there nothing Jill Twiss can’t do? Musical theater actress and stand-up comic Jill Twiss dreamed of writing for television but did not know how to break in to the world of late-night comedy shows. The stars aligned when a few supportive women called some chits on her behalf, and lo, she landed a spot in the writing room of the Emmy-award winning show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Her work on Last Week Tonight has earned her multiple Emmys, WGA and Peabody Awards, and led to a series of bestselling children’s books as well as the opportunity to write humorous “Can I have that word in a sentence, please?” hints for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  This week, Jill and Jess talk about how Jill got her start in television, her love of Vice President Mike Pence’s pet rabbit Marlon Bundo, how her children’s books came to be, their shared need for pressing deadli

“Every writer,” book coach Jennie Nash tells us, “ thinks at some point that they just cannot do this. That’s just part of the process.” It’s not our favorite part—but it’s true, and getting past that stage and on with the job of finishing a book in any genre is the part of the process that many writers just can’t seem to conquer. But for some of us—like Jennie—helping other people get past that road block is a superpower. If that’s you (and you know if it is)—then we might just have a side hustle for you. In this episode, we talk to Author Accelerator’s Jennie Nash about the five things that make a good book coach, how she trains book coaches and her process for guiding a writer’s process—and why a good book coach must be paid.  Transcripts are having a holiday break—but the next #WritersTopFive is already scheduled for Monday, January 6, 2020: Top Five Ways to Find the Right Agent to Pitch. Those Top Fives are how we thank our supporters, who tell us how much they appreciate the podcast by funding i

Whoa. Fellow writers, 2020 is upon us. And here at #AmWriting HQ, we love setting annual goals. We really do. We adore everything about it, from the anticipation and planning to the writing them in our handy dandy notebooks (although this year KJ got paralyzed by the need to make them pretty and ended up with temporary under a to-do list scribbles).  One reason we love it so much is that we feel good about our goals. Typically, we tend to reach them—and that isn’t because we’re super-people. It’s because we set the right kinds of goals. Things we can control, that are within our reach, that can me measured and revisited and that hold us up and support us in our work. And we also love words—which means we love choosing our word of the year. This year we’ve got three good ones. Listen in, and then share yours in our Facebook group.  If you’re working on goal setting and want to read more about how we make goals work for us, we’ve got something for you! Sign up for our weekly shownotes emails and get a goa

Whoa. Fellow writers, 2020 is upon us. And here at #AmWriting HQ, we love setting annual goals. We really do. We adore everything about it, from the anticipation and planning to the writing them in our handy dandy notebooks (although this year KJ got paralyzed by the need to make them pretty and ended up with temporary under a to-do list scribbles).  One reason we love it so much is that we feel good about our goals. Typically, we tend to reach them—and that isn’t because we’re super-people. It’s because we set the right kinds of goals. Things we can control, that are within our reach, that can me measured and revisited and that hold us up and support us in our work. And we also love words—which means we love choosing our word of the year. This year we’ve got three good ones. Listen in, and then share yours in our Facebook group.  If you’re working on goal setting and want to read more about how we make goals work for us, we’ve got something for you, our loyal email subscribers: a goal-setting mini-eboo

We’re reviewing our 2019 goals. Did we gloriously achieve? Live up to our words of the year by focusing on the worthy? Check every box and climb ever mountain?  We did okay.  In some cases, we killed. In others, there were extenuating circumstances. Goals were revised, cast aside, postponed. All part of the process. To hear how we did, listen in—and be sure to share your bests and worsts from 2019 in the #AmWriting Facebook Group. Then, get ready for some #2020GoalSetting next week. Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a request. Can you work supporting the #AmWriting podcast into your end-of-year budget? The next Monday’s #WritersTopFive: Top Five Ways to Find the Right Agent to Pitch, will drop into inboxes Monday, January 6, 2020—just in time for a new year of pitching goals. Every weekly #WritersTopFive email features fast, fun, actionable advice from KJ, Jess, Sarina and our guests. Supporters also get subscriber-only bonus PODCAST SHORTS. A little randomly timed inspiration from on

We all know you can’t really buy the things we writers want: inspiration, the power to spend as much time writing our books as we do thinking about them—not to mention sales, agents and editors. But you CAN grab a few things that make the writerly journey more fun. In this episode, we talk about the joys of journals and the perfect markers, tech tools that qualify as investments and those that are a little less spendy and suggest a few gifts for your writer groups stockings—including custom socks.  Episode links follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, December 16, 2019: Top 5 Things to Do to at the Start of a New Nonfiction Project. Remember, you can GIFT a supporter subscription! Or sign up to support us yourself. Give a gift subscription On that note, there are affiliate links in this post. Most will go to support the podcast, but the things KJ “borrowed” from Catherine Newman’s gift guide are her affiliate links (and