#amwriting With Jess & Kj

Two years ago, Jennie Nash and I (this is KJ) got into a debate about what was the best, most helpful book for a writer’s bookshelf. Almost instantly we realized that we couldn’t choose just one (although if we could, I suspect it’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel for me and Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit for Jennie, but even as I write that I’m having second thoughts in favor of Big Magic but I’m just SO ANNOYED with her right now because of the whole take-back-my-book thing) and, yeah.  Anyway. It’s summer reading time, and to my summer reading list I’ve added a few books about writing, starting with Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being and, yes. Twyla Tharp’s book (it’s taken me this long to get over my resistance but JENNIE IS ALWAYS RIGHT about these things) and adding, for a practical note, Save the Cat Strikes Back by Blake Snyder and The Trope Thesaurus from Jennifer Hilt. (Want my non-professional summer reading list? Subscribe to #AmReading.)  If you’re looking to add to your own profession

The book is The Society of Shameand one of the many, many ways you can tell it’s satire is that it keeps making people who don’t get it mad. Satire is fiction, hopped up on humor and then amped up by all the things that seem like they couldn't quite happen and yet you know they might. (Another commonality of good satire? The most outrageous bits are often the ones that come straight from the headlines.  The author is Jane Roper, who is also the author of a memoir, Double Time: How I Survived–and Mostly Thrived–Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins, another novel, Eden Lake, numerous personal essays and humor pieces, and a very eclectic Substack, Jane’s Calamity.  She MAY be the first graduate of the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop to appear on the pod, and we talk about that, as well as the parenting memoir ghetto. But mostly we’re focused on satire—what it is, how it’s really playing with fire, and why it still needs heart.  A few other satires mentioned: Dietland, Sarai Walker The Startup Wife

Howdy from KJ’s office, where I’m trapped because outside these doors, an angry child lies in wait, ready to tell me all I’ve done wrong as a parent over lo these many years. Good thing I had Jess and Sarina to keep me company while we talk about marketing, selling, navigating the socials, blurbing and asking for blurbs and reading blurbs and oh, still writing the whole time. Links from the pod: The Flying Pig The Chain, Adrian McKinty On Good Authority, Anna David The Eragon series, Christopher Paolini Good As Gold, Sarina Bowen Jess’s daily videos  I’m not linking the dumb lounge chair I’m sorry. #AmReading Jess: On Good Authority, Anna David KJ: Yellowface, R.F. Kuang (The Plot, Who Is Maud Dixon, The Writing Retreat) (note—I wrote more about this in the #AmReading Substack HERE —link also below.) Sarina: We All Want Impossible Things, Catherine Newman Ghosts of the Orphanage, Christine Keneally #AmReading If you love writers behaving badly Give me ALL the writers behaving badly. Stealing, p

SO. Virginia’s Substack—here it is right here—which also features a podcast, went from 700 people to 4500 people to 28K subscribers. BEFORE her new book, Fat Talk, hit the NYT best-seller list. Wouldn’t you like to hear how? We’ve got you covered. Replicating her success? Well, that’s never the way it works. But everything we learn helps.  Links from the pod: FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture @v_solesmith on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America #AmReading Virginia: Momfluenced, Sara Petersen More Than You’ll Ever Know, Katie Gutierrez How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water, Angie Cruz KJ: Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher If you love a good writing retreat—especially one that comes with good solid coaching and the chance to meet others who are working on similar projects—here’s one to check out. This fall, three Author Accelerator certified book coaches are offering Mainely Memoir, a retreat for women writers in historic

How do I find a writing group and what if they’re mean? That’s a question we get asked a lot, and we always encourage writers to reach out in our Facebook group or boldly throw it out there anywhere else online that you hang out and see what happens. You don’t even have to trade pages to be a writing group. You look for the kind of support and camaraderie you need. But if you’ve ever thought of hying yourself off to your local version of Grub Street or our local spot for in-person writer-ness, The Writer’s Center to find your people—or possibly starting an in-person writer-connection-thing of your own, then you’ll want to listen to my conversation with Joni Cole, founder of said Writer’s Center and the author of Toxic Feedback: Helping Writers Survive and Thrive—which is just freshly out in a revised version, which is why we’re bringing this convo back to you now! This new version has half a dozen new chapters, plus new interviews with famous authors who share their own feedback stories--from the inspiring

Jess here. I know, I KNOW. I’ve been meaning to get to this for ages but who has time to just sit and watch videos about software? Not me. However, last week Sarina told me about some of her Scrivener tricks and I realized it’s time. I put my butt in the chair and scrolled through ALL of the Scrivener YouTube videos (for Mac) and searched on #scrivener #scrivenertips and a few other hashtags on TikTok, and I have to admit, I learned a lot. I’m no guru, but I’ve solved some problems I was having with the app. I hope my time spent learning this stuff can flatten your learning curve so you can get on with the words!  Links: Scrivener Scrivener on YouTube Are you itching for a career change but struggling to figure out that next chapter? By now, you’ve probably heard us talk about book coaching—how much we love being coached, and how much I loved my coach training.  Book coaches help writers bring their dreams to life through support, feedback, project management, and accountability at each step of the book w

Jess here. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I know how my brain works, which is to say it doesn’t, unless a hard and fast deadline looms large in my calendar. I’ve been known to tell my agent or editor to expect chapters on a given day, or I plan to have a completed book proposal to her by X date three weeks hence, but this spring, I’ve decided to call in my writer reinforcements.  I summoned KJ and Sarina to a study room in the Howe Library in Hanover, NH on a very rainy day in late April because I needed their help. I needed them to hold me to dates and words and pages, and without being prompted, they pulled out their planners and dutifully asked me what dates to circle in brightly colored ink. I now have deadlines, and actual human beings to bug me about them, for various stages of my novel-in-progress, and I will not - can not - let them down.  This, dear listeners, is what accountability buddies are for.  Come along for the ride and, as a bonus, learn about all kinds of Scrivener tools and tricks I pl

Dana Bowman is the author How to Be Perfect Like Me and Bottled Up: A Mom’s Guide to Early Recovery. She was the 2016 recipient of the Kansas Notable Book Award, making her the only podcast guest to share that distinction with me. What else do we share? The experience of feeling a level of exhaustion with the goals we’ve set for ourselves and the need to find our way back into the work.  Links from the Pod Clifton Strengths The highly competitive Kansas Notable Book Award! Jon Acuff Becky Blades episode #347, Start More than You Can Finish: Redefining failure #AmReading Dana: Vacationland, Meg Mitchell Moore Remarkably Bright Creatures, Shelby Van Pelt The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control, Katherine Morgan Schafler Four Tendencies, Gretchen Rubin KJ: The Society of Shame, Jane Roper Mentioned: Life in Five Senses, Gretchen Rubin Are you itching for a career change but struggling to figure out that next chapter? By now, you’ve probably heard us talk about book coaching—how much we love bein

Jess here! This week, I’m coming to you from somewhere in Indiana, tired but happy. Getting out on the road and speaking to students, teachers, and communities is both exhausting and incredibly invigorating, and this week I got to speak to a classroom of student writers, kids who are just learning about the basics of researching, writing, and even podcasting. There’s nothing I love more.  When I’m in these classrooms, and especially when I’m talking to kids looking to change the world by writing for their school papers as they dream about breaking big stories like the Harvey Weinstein saga, I always recommend Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey’s essential text, Chasing the Truth: A Young Journalist’s Guide to Investigative Reporting.  Enjoy!  New York Times investigative journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the story of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults in 2017 and harassment and won a Pulitzer Prize for their efforts. Their book about the Weinstein investigation, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harass

As a former member of the “write drunk, edit sober” club, I thought it might be interesting to look at the research on alcohol, weed, stimulants and their effect on creativity so we can figure out what’s working for us, what’s not, and weigh the pros and cons of intoxication for inspiration. I cite a few studies in this episode and, for the #AmReading segment, share a few of my favorite books on the topic of writing and intoxication.  A fun article about the Delphic Oracle in the New York Times Research Cited: “Alcohol Benefits the Creative Process: being moderately intoxicated gets people to think ‘outside the box.’” “Cannabis Use Does Not Increase Actual Creativity but Biases Evaluations of Creativity” Heng, Y. T., Barnes, C. M., & Yam, K. C. (2023). Journal of Applied Psychology, 108(4), 635–646.  "Neurocognitive, Autonomic, and Mood Effects of Adderall: A Pilot Study of Healthy College Students" Weyandt, Lisa L., Tara L. White, Bergljot Gyda Gudmundsdottir, Adam Z. Nitenson, Emma S. Rathkey, Kel

Actually, there is no action without anxiety. We all feel it, and we’re all driven by it—and almost no one is completely at peace with it. Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home), has been working for years to normalize those feelings and the spectrum on which they appear to bring mental health struggles out into the open and encourage people to rethink the relationship between their mental health and their success. We talk about harnessing every degree of anxiety and finding ways to keep going—and even go better—when things get hard. LINKS FROM THE POD The Anxious Achiever Hiding in the Bathroom: How to Get Out There (When You’d Rather Stay Home) The Anxious Achiever Podcast Morra Aarons-Mele Using tropes and genres like a pro: Ep 334 with Alexis Hall #AmReading Morra: Robertson Davies The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy Which sent us onto a tangent that included: Peter Orner, author of Still No Word From

We’ll admit it. We like our writerly gear. We get a little rush from visiting our favorite Vermont stationery store together. (In fact, we just did this last week.) But in all seriousness, we spend a lot of time on this job, so it’s good to figure out what works for us. Today Sarina takes us through her novel-writing tech stack. She covers hardware, software and the “why” behind the tools she chooses.  Links for some of Sarina’s tech:  Scrivener Keychron K series Keyboard Inexpensive ergonomic mouse Campus binders with removable pages and extra paper Remarkable 2 Otter.ai app What’s in your tech stack? Let us know in the Facebook group! If you love a good writing retreat—especially one that comes with good solid coaching and the chance to meet others who are working on similar projects—here’s one to check out. This fall, three Author Accelerator certified book coaches are offering Mainely Memoir, a retreat for women writers in historic Biddeford, Maine, held over three days in the gorgeous Maine wo

Becoming an expert takes years of work and many of you have asked how you can take that expertise out for a spin in the media. I don’t blame you. From the moment the my first Atlantic article, “Why Parents Need to Let Their Children Fail” went viral in 2013, I was eager to get on television and radio so I could talk about my work, stir up interest in my topics, and hopefully maximize my chances of selling a book on the topic. One decade and two books later, I still pitch producers all the time about a range of topics, and I’ve learned some things.  Sit back, relax, and let’s talk pitching, prepping your topic, and securing media spots on television and radio so you can become one of those go-to experts producers seek out over and over again.  If you love a good writing retreat—especially one that comes with good solid coaching and the chance to meet others who are working on similar projects—here’s one to check out. This fall, three Author Accelerator certified book coaches are offering Mainely Memoir, a re

Jess here, because I hate outlining. Hate it. It sounds boring and feels like an assignment, writing stripped of all flow and joy. I asked KJ and Sarina to help me with this problematic mindset, because my novel in progress clearly needs a solid outline and yet every time I go back to work on it, I feel irritated, frustrated and blocked.  Thank goodness for my accountability buddies, because they came through for me in this episode. In fact, the moment we logged off the Zoom call, I got back to work, refreshed, refocused, and engaged in the process of storytelling.  Resources Jennie Nash and Author Accelerator Save the Cat Writes a Novel #AmReading Jess: I’ve been watching Daisy Jones and the Six on Amazon Prime and re-listening to the audiobook, which features Jennifer Beals as Daisy. I needed more Taylor Jenkins Reid, so I finally downloaded the audio of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which I’m really enjoying. (Also mentioned: Carrie Soto Is Back, Malibu Rising) KJ: Amy Poppel’s The Sweet Spot

Recently, someone on Twitter asked if sensitivity readers are still a resource writers utilize and where to find them. Yes indeed, sensitivity readers are still a great resource, and since we interviewed Jordan Shapiro and a sensitivity reader he worked with on his book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad. I hope you enjoy this re-airing of episode 266 the #AmWriting podcast.  Hey all, Jess here. When I agreed to read and blurb Jordan Shapiro’s new book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad, I was struck by the attention he paid to inclusivity and the language he used to describe it. When I mentioned it to him, he told me he’d used a sensitivity reader named Jazz to ensure he got the language right. Sensitivity readers are becoming more of a norm in publishing. Jodi Picoult has tweeted about how much she depends on hers to get her descriptions, language, and representation right in her books articles like this one in the Guardian and this one in Vulture are great primers on the topic. We asked Jord

This week, Jess and KJ talk to journalist, author, and lifelong knitter Peggy Orenstein about research, nonfiction writing, expertise, and examining the unexamined in ordinary life. Peggy’s newest book is , Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater. Peggy’s TED Talk: What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller Etymology of the term “woolgathering” Etymology of the term “spinster”  The Revolutionary Power of a Skein of Yarn, Unraveling excerpt in the New York Times.  Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and Omnivore’s Dilemma #AmReading Peggy: KJ’s Playing the Witch Card, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver Jess: Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz and The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo KJ: Geneology of a Murder: Four Generations, Three Families, One Fateful Night by Lisa Belkin Also mentioned: The Puzzler by A.J. Jacobs If you

Hey all! Today Sarina brings you a fun but tricky topic: how to write a novel in three months.  Should you do it? Maybe. It depends on the book. Not every book can or should be written in 90 days.  But if you’re game to try, Sarina gives you:  4 things you need to know about the book before you start 5 tips for writing scenes more quickly 3 things to try when you’re stuck Links from the Pod The Astronaut and The Star, Jen Comfort 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, Rachel Aaron Otter.ai Becca Syme’s Quitcast and her book Dear Writer, You Need to Quit.  If you love a good writing retreat—especially one that comes with good solid coaching and the chance to meet others who are working on similar projects—here’s one to check out. This fall, three Author Accelerator certified book coaches are offering Mainely Memoir, a retreat for women writers in historic Biddeford, Maine, held over three days in the gorgeous Maine woods in September, with one-on-one coaching b

True confession time: Sarina and I have always wanted to make something like this. I’m talking about The Storyteller’s Workbook, which is a gorgeous combination of structural writing guide and writing bullet journal created by Isabel Ibañez, the author of Woven in Moonlight and Written in Starlight, a fantasy YA series that’s a hit with TikTok and Time Magazine both as well as a designer whose work you’ve seen while drooling in the paper sections of stores like Anthropologie and Adrienne Young, the New York Times and international bestselling author of the Sky and Sea duology and the Fable series whose first “adult book”, Spells for Forgetting, came out last fall. (That’s in quotes because who are we kidding, adults read the heck out of her earlier work.) The episode is fun, all about making something like this—and Adrienne and Isabel’s writing processes, the examples they share and the ways the book reflects how they really work. But what you’re really here for is to see what it looks like—which is, in a wo

As Leslie Hooton told me, “Some writers have a stroke of luck, I had a stroke at birth,” which left her paralyzed on one side of her body. Thanks to Dragon dictation (not sponsored, we’re just fans!), she’s learned to train her Dragon and “penned” three novels including her most recent release, After Everyone Else. As Jess hosts this episode, we delve into plenty of tangents on dictation, deleted text fragments, inspiration, and the wisdom of Wendell Berry. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. - Excerpt from “The Real Work” by Wendell Berry #AmReading Leslie: Olympus, Texas by Stacey Swan and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt Jess: Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wood, and Making the Ugliest Sweater in the World by Peggy Orenstein Leslie’s links: Her website Her Facebook Her Instagram If you’ve been intrigued by all the talk you

STOP. Do not think to yourself, well, I don’t want to write Erotica—why is this podcast/book for me? This conversation, and the book, How to Write Erotica, that inspires it, goes far beyond any pre-imagined specifics you have about writing scenes, stories and books focused on which bit of bodily anatomy goes where—because to write good erotica, you have to come back to the heart of writing any story (fiction, memoir, what-have-you: why this story, why this character, why now? Guest Rachel Kramer Bussel knows what makes good story, and this conversation is applicable to any writing that appeals to our senses (as all writing should) and challenges our ability to tell our truths (ditto). Links from the Pod Starr**cker Magazine on Twitter Take Me There anthology Fetlife.com Addition, Toni Jordan A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo Cheesy Boots in Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women #AmReading City of Likes, Jenny Mollen Spoiler Alert & Ship Wrecked, Olivia Dade Rachelkramerbuss