Jenn Bouchard on Debuting in the Pandemic, Short Stories and How to use Little Free Libraries For Marketing

December 12, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

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Mindy: We are here with Jenn Bouchard, who is the author of First Course, which was published in 2021 by Touchpoint Press and has won 12 different awards. In addition, Jenn has published five short stories in literary journals, which I'm really looking forward to talking to her about because I personally find the short story market and literary journals to be one of the hardest things to crack. I actually spent quite a bit of time trying to do that in my mid-thirties and finally kind of gave up, but we can talk about that. Just to get started, why don't you tell us a little bit about your publishing journey?

Jenn: I did not seek this path at all. It sort of came out of nowhere when I was just finishing a major volunteer role. I had this big kind of gap in my life, this big hole. I was super busy. My kids were really young. I'm a full-time teacher, so I certainly had plenty to do, but I was looking for that thing for myself. And I think I want to try to write a novel. I really had no idea what I was doing. I started coming up with some ideas, but I started also going to a lot of author events. A lot of authors do come through the area. So First Course took me two and a half years to write a first draft. Gosh, I queried First Course for about ten months. I had a lot of really close calls with that. I had a number of agents who were like almost. It was so close I could kind of taste it. And so I noticed that there were a couple of small presses that were making a number of publishing deals with un-agented authors. And so I thought, "you know what? Maybe I'll just try and see if this is my path." So I noticed Touchpoint Press had been making a number of deals, and so I submitted to them in June of 2019. And within an hour, they asked for the full manuscript. And then four months later, I got a publishing offer from them. It's a journey I'm very grateful for.

Mindy: I love how you decided to go the route of going to author talks and author visits and author signings. I can say as someone that lives very rurally, I didn't have that option. I think that that is a really good way, especially if they're talking about their own journeys and how they got there. I think it can be very difficult to see someone that has quote unquote "made it" and realize that they used to be you, right? They used to be someone that didn't have an agent and didn't have a publishing deal or didn't even have a finished manuscript. I want everyone to realize that I don't forget that pain. No, I'm terrified every day. What if I can't write today? Or what if I don't have an idea? Or what if publishing tanks? What if AI starts writing all the books? There's always something to worry about. You had 14 awards. What are you winning out there? What are you out there doing?

Jenn: You know, there are a number of awards that are very much geared towards people like me. People who are with smaller presses.

Mindy: I'm going to share my experience. My book, A Madness So Discreet, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015. And that's a really big award. And that's a really big deal. And the people that love that book absolutely love that book. But the pie chart of people that love gothic historical fiction is small. That little wedge is very small. So people talk to me all the time about that book and they're like, "oh my God, I love that book." The people that love it, really love it. But it's like 15% of the reading population. So the sales aren't that great. People ask me all the time when there will be a sequel. They really want a sequel. It's set up for one. And I'm like, "you know, I would love to write one, but unfortunately I didn't sell well enough for my publisher to green light a sequel." And they're just like, "but it won the Edgar Allan Poe Award." And I'm like, "I know." And that was really cool. And it was super exciting for me, but awards don't necessarily drive sales. So did you find that there was any sort of like uptick in sales when you won these awards?

Jenn: I think it was more the feather in the cap. I think it helped me get a few book events, interviews, and things like that. I got accepted to a couple of book festivals. I would say I think it's helped with things like that. I think it also gave me the confidence to keep going. So you know, the book was published in June of 2021. I think the awards started coming in at a time when I needed a little bit of a push to show me that I was going down the right path. I think that helped a little bit with some of the imposter syndrome too.

Mindy: Those awards are really, really helpful to make you go, "oh yeah, I can do this." So tell me about being a teacher and a writer, because I know so many writers that are also teachers and teachers that are also writers.

Jenn: It is nice. I feel very fortunate to have something else. I don't talk about it much at school, but I did start the year just as, you know, telling them about myself. I did say, you know, I'm a published author. Every once in a while I'll have a student be like, "so you wrote a book, right?"

Mindy: I love working in schools, and I love working with kids. I like what you're saying too about having something else that you care about because writing is so solitary and it is so isolating and it is tough some days. So, talk to me a little bit about that balance. Not necessarily work and creative balance, but the balance of input versus output.

Jenn: If I've got a bunch of papers that I've got to get graded, the writing has to be put aside, you know, until I can get through that because I've got school deadlines. But I am getting a little bit better at looking at my time and being like, all right, I'm going to write for an hour and then I'm going to grade these papers for an hour. It used to be that the writing always got shoved to the side, and I'm really trying not to do that anymore. So I'm on a book a year plan. I know that for the next few weeks I have to work every day. You know, I have to really schedule the time. At least for me anyway, it's the first thing to get pushed to the side.

Mindy: I'm the same way, and it's my actual job. Just because it's hard. I end up in a "do as I say and not as I do" situation a lot because I will tell people, you know, you can't wait for inspiration. You can't wait to be in the mood to write. You can't wait for it to be the right time to write. You can't wait until you feel like writing. If you want to do this and you're serious about it, then you have to say, I am writing and I'm going to sit down. I'm going to put my butt in the chair, and I'm going to write. I say those things. Doing them is very different. I will do just about anything in order to avoid writing. I think too that other people give me a lot of energy. I am not currently working outside of the home. I haven't been for, I think, five or six years now. I don't get to pull energy from other people. You've got a family, and you're a mom. How do you balance any sense of guilt? As a female, we've got a lot of, if you're not putting your family first, what are you doing? How do you balance that?

Jenn: We bought the biggest calendar. It's this big glass calendar for the month, and everybody knows what everybody's up to. I think it helps that the kids are older now. They love the fact that mom's an author. That's super cool to them. So, they're old enough now that if I'm like I need to do this, they know that now. It was definitely a little bit tougher when they were younger, and I'd feel more guilt then. They've also seen mom get rejected. They've gotten to see that and they feel terrible for me, but they've also gotten to see me bounce back from it. So, I think it's been a really great way for them to grow up.

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Mindy: So talking about the short story market, and talking about the perseverance required there. I went through a period of time where I was like, "I'm going to try to use short stories as a way to supplement my income." Boy, was that fucking stupid. So...

Jenn: I've never made a dime.

Mindy: Okay. So tell me a little bit about that. Tell me about wanting to get yourself out there in short stories...

Jenn: Yeah.

Mindy: What your goal was, and if you do not see a monetary benefit from it, which I did not either, then what is the benefit, and why would you encourage someone to try it?

Jenn: So these are all fantastic questions. When I was waiting to see if First Course was going to get picked up anywhere by a publisher, I decided I was going to try to build a platform for myself. I was a complete unknown - a teacher. I'm a mom. I'm not the most interesting person. So I was like, well, if I could write some short stories and get them published, that will at least give me something. Because I was writing query letters. I had nothing to even say in the bio piece. And so I wrote a couple of short stories, and started sending them out there. I knew I probably wasn't going to get picked up by anywhere that paid anything. It was definitely more about building the platform. It took a while to get things accepted. Brat was the first story I had published and that was by Bookends Review. That got picked up at the very beginning of the pandemic. So I had started submitting that probably November of 2019. Another one that got accepted very quickly, like within five weeks. But the very first one I wrote took 11 months. I wanted to go with quality publications. That was really important to me. The places that I was published in were really lovely to work with. And I felt very proud to be with them.

Mindy: Would you kind of classify that in the same arena as winning the awards? Like, there's no monetary benefit, but it just kind of feels like an acceptance and maybe even a nod. Yes, you are a writer and you can do this.

Jenn: It's more validation, more things that are on my website now. So if someone enjoyed First Course and they're waiting for Palms on the Cape to be published next summer and they want to read something else I've written, they can read one of these stories. You've got a tremendous body of literary work. I don't have that yet, and so this is nice to be able to offer something else.

Mindy: It's kind of a weird place to be. I remember when my first book came out and people would reach out and be like, "oh my gosh, I loved your book," but you don't have anywhere else to point them yet.

Jenn: Right.

Mindy: How your marketing and how your approach to things changes a little bit too. You were talking about doing a Goodreads giveaway. I should still be doing those things. I am not utilizing all the tools that I used to, but I have hit a point with social media. I'm not sure it really works. And I am not interested in making TikToks, and I'm a writer because I'm a writer. I am not an actress. I don't mind being on camera. I like talking to people, speaking is part of what I do, but what I do is interact with people. That's what I do well. If you put a person in front of me, I can go. You put 800 people in front of me, I can go. You put a phone in front of me and you're like, pretend like you're talking to 800 people. Like I'm not good at it. Tell me about how you as an indie and as a debut author are using or not using social media.

Jenn: I launched in 2021. So I mean, it was a strange time. Most bookstores were not really having events. My launch was with a bookstore, but it was virtual. So I had to get very used to talking to a screen very quickly. I agree. I do much better when I can connect with people in person, but I ended up doing a lot of virtual events. I did have some, there were some outdoor events I was able to do in 2021, but it's really been combination of different things. Trying to collaborate with different authors. Number of authors from my debut year connected really well and because of the circumstances of debuting during a pandemic, we've had to be more creative in a lot of different ways. And so we've done some Instagram lives together. We're trying to build on all of that. But one of the things that I found, I don't know if it really drove that many sales, but I think it definitely got my name out there more, was that I started connecting with friends around the country and I placed copies of my book in little free libraries in every state. My friends or their friends, whoever I was able to find in all these different places would take a picture for me and send it to me. And then I would post it on my social media, and I would include the location. I would tag a local indie bookstore. So I was trying to make connections in these different geographic places. It was a way for me to make some inroads in some other locations. And so I do think it helped. I think my name is out there much more than if I hadn't done that.

Mindy: I love the idea of using little free libraries. For anybody that doesn't know little free libraries, you've probably seen them. They look like bird houses or little barns and they're usually just on posts and usually they'll be in the town square or the middle of a town or in front of a library. I actually put one up in my hometown here in Ohio, and I put it next to a coffee shop. I use little free libraries too as a way of promoting myself. It's wonderful. Every now and then I'll slip some books in there. Somebody will reach out to me over Facebook or Twitter and be like, "oh my gosh, your book was in here and it was signed. That's so cool." And I'm like, yeah. So whenever I have an event, if I'm in a town and I'm driving through and I spot a little free library, I will put one of my books in there. And whoever finds it, finds it. And it's a really cool little way to try to get yourself out there. I also recommend just if you're a person, like me, that has 30 to 50 books just sitting on top of their dresser, if you are reading something and you're not into it, or if you finished something and you know you're never going to read it again, take it to a little free library. Because I think they're so important. Like I said, I put one up in my hometown. I put it up at the beginning of the pandemic. Our library closed, and it's a really small, really rural town. That thing gets traffic.

Jenn: Yeah, they're awesome. They're creative. The stewards, the owners of them, they really put so much of themselves into the design and the upkeep in certain circumstances. And I really enjoyed connecting with those people too, the people who kind of manage those libraries.

Mindy: If you're interested, just check out Little Free Library, I think dot net? You can find locations for every little free library across the United States. And if you're interested in putting one up, you can buy a little free library from them so you don't have to make one if you don't want to. Little free libraries are fantastic. It's wonderful as a reader, but it is also great as a writer. Like you're saying, you can use them to kind of passively market yourself.

Jenn: I put bookmarks in them too. You know, talking about my next book. They're always gone whenever I check to see if the bookmarks are there. They're always gone.

Mindy: Oh yeah. Well, what better market for bookmarks than a place where people are going to pick up books? Everybody needs bookmarks. Yeah, that's perfect. So tell me a little bit about your second book. You've mentioned it a couple of times already, and then you had just informed me over email about some recent successes.

Jenn: There is an audio book being made of First Course. Tantor Audio acquired the audio rights. So, that's really exciting. I always wanted it to be an audio book. So, hopefully early 2023 for that. And then Palms on the Cape will be published by Touchpoint Press, the same publisher that published First Course, in summer 2023. I don't have an exact date yet, but I'm really excited to work with them again. I got to work with my same editor again, which was fantastic. I'm super excited about it. It is about a owner of an upscale beach bar. She's on the verge of turning 40. She might be in love with her male best friend, but she won't admit that to herself yet. But everything's going fine, and then one day this group of people come into her beach bar and everything changes. It was an absolute blast to write. It was so much fun.

Mindy: I don't hear that often. So I'm really glad to hear that.

Jenn: I smiled the whole time I wrote the book.

Mindy: I was either tense or crying the whole time I was writing my 2024 release. But that's okay, because that's my brand. So tell me, is there anything that you are going to do differently this time around?

Jenn: You know, I'm really hoping that there will be more opportunities for events this time. And even if there aren't, I think I can make those opportunities because I know so many authors in so many places now, and we're just going to put together events ourselves. I think that that will be fun. So I feel more confident this time in my ability to make things happen. I'm excited that more book festivals will be in person and not virtual. And I've actually got a couple of things over the next few weeks. There are more opportunities now, which I'm excited about, but I think with the second book, there'll be more that I can do. I think that there are more possibilities.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your book First Course.

Jenn: I'm at JennBouchard.com. All my social links are easily available there. Instagram is where I spend most of my time, but I do have a presence on Facebook. First Course is available wherever books are sold, you can get it. It is available on all the major online retailers and then any bookstore. If it's not stocked there, they can order it for you.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Isabel Sterling on Changing Agents, Writer Burnout, and Avoiding Shame

November 28, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We are here with Isabel Sterling who is a queer YA author. Her debut was called These Witches Don't Burn. Isabel is also a life coach for writers and the host of the Author Burnout Coach podcast, where she talks weekly about different facets of writer burnout and what we can do about it. So, one of the things that I'm really interested in talking to you about is burnout for sure. Let's start on a positive note, and let's talk a little bit just about writing in general - what you write, why you write what you write, your experience in the industry and how you got into the industry, and the whole publishing journey for you.

Isabel: So, I started writing back in 2012 so I'm at my 10-year of writing anniversary, which is really fun. Writing actually is how I figured out that I was queer. One thing I always love to share is I'm on agent number three, and so many people think you get your agent and then you're done and everything's fine and dandy. And that's very rare these days that somebody stays with an agent forever. Yeah, so I wrote These Witches Don't Burn. I got my first deal in 2017. It took a year on submission. So I signed my first agent. We went out on sub, and then that agent left the industry. So I had to get a new agent, and we actually were able to resub that same book, which is something that can be kind of rare. So it sold almost exactly a year from when it first went out. And then I've been lucky enough to stay with the same publisher since. So I had a sequel come out, This Coven Won't Break. I love writing about magical girls and mystery, and there's always murder. There has to be murder. And then I moved on from witches. I had a vampire book come out in '21, The Coldest Touch. Right now, I'm working on a ghost murder mystery kind of YA.

Mindy: I want to talk a little bit about the number four, because you said it was your fourth book that got you an agent. So I want to talk to you about the first three - where they are and if you have any plans for them, or if they are just part of the journey and you already passed those milestones.

Isabel: The very first book I wrote... At the time, it was exactly what I needed. I loved writing, but I was like, being a writer felt like something that wasn't for me. Like I'm from a small town. I didn't know any writers. I never got to go to bookish things. Like I just, it wasn't part of my worldview. So I wrote my very first book during NaNoWriMo in 2012. I learned how to finish a book, and I learned how to revise a book through that process. I learned about querying, and I queried it. And I learned how to get rejections because I got all of those. I tried one time a couple years after I'd written it to go back and like, maybe there's something here. I can pull some threads and try to redo it. And it just wasn't working. And I think part of it is as you grow as a writer, not only do you grow in your storytelling skills, but you also grow in the types of stories that you want to tell. It's just going to stay in the drawer, and sort of be the thing that taught me that I could be a writer.

And I could sort of feel myself growing each time I wrote... Like my first dual point of view, and that one was also the first book I wrote with a lesbian main character. And this is before I knew I was queer. And I was like, "I don't know why I love this so much, but I love writing it." And I was like, "huh." It took two more books before I figured it out. But yeah, I was like, why do I love writing this? It's so weird. But I'm super straight. I don't know. And I think I've always had a really good mindset around like revision and critiques. So I actually went to music school. I was a composer, and so every week we would get critiqued on our work that we had written. Four years, every week I was getting feedback. So when I became a writer, I was like, oh, this is an old hat, like whatever. It's supposed to get critiqued. That's just the way it works. I realized I was trying to write a book that I thought would get an agent. Screw publishing. I'm just going to focus on what would be the most fun. And that's the book that ended up being These Witches Don't Burn.

Mindy: I also am from a small town. Knew no one. Had no idea how to go about the process of getting published. Had to learn everything. Had to learn the industry. All those things. Like you, you know, I had no one to go to. I had no one to say, "hey, you know, your best friend's uncle's wife is a writer. You can talk to her." No. My best friend uncle's wife is a farmer, and so is everybody else. So I did have four books that I wrote prior to my first one to get published. Interestingly enough, the very first book that I ever finished was The Female of The Species.

Isabel: Oh, wow.

Mindy: Don't be too impressed because that had nothing to do with the version that is published today. It was a completely different thing. Themes and ideas were the same, but absolutely none of the words have anything in common with the one that got published.

Isabel: I think that's common even just like from first draft to final draft. Maybe the first chapter stays the same, but that's about it.

Mindy: I love what you're saying about going back to one of your old books and being like, it doesn't fit in trad. There's a lot of reasons why this doesn't work, and I'm going to do it myself. So I just did this too. I think it would have been the second book, it might have been the third one, that I wrote. It was the very first time I tried to write YA. I had a wonderful time doing it. That book is so important to me, and it's a huge part of my writer identity in a lot of ways. I always say it's like if John Hughes directed an episode of the X-Files. There's no way that I could ever publish this book under my real name. I do write under a pen name. I've talked about this on the podcast before. I don't share my pen name because it would screw my branding so hard. But I just published that book, that urban fantasy, two days ago. I have made at this point in time, $4.08. And you're right. It's so lovely when you're not focusing on "what will my editor buy? What will my agent like? What fits the market?" And I'm glad it's there, and I'm working on the sequel now. And hey, we'll just keep going.

Isabel: It's funny too, you bring up pen names. Isabel Sterling is not my real name. My real name is Sam Adams. It's a beer. I was never going to be able to have Sam Adams dot com. So for me, when I did a pen name for indie, it's still me.

Mindy: One other thing I wanted to touch on about that you mentioned earlier was that you've been through three agents. So...

Isabel: Yes.

Mindy: I'm a little bit of an anomaly in that I am still with my very first agent. It's extremely rare. Adriann Ranta Zurhellen, she is currently with Folio Literary, is my agent. But she's been my agent for 12 years now, almost 13 years. I had been querying for 10 years - five books, 10 years - trying to get published, and I was working in a high school library. I made about $14,000 a year. I was barely making it. I watched the documentary all about the fact we may run out of water someday. I wrote Not a Drop to Drink, and dystopians were right on the curve of going out. But they were still in, and I queried. And for the first time, I actually had a lot of interest, and I ended up with two phone calls with two agents. One of them was Adriann. She only had one sale at the time. And then the other agent that I had a conversation with was a big name agent. She had sold 30 books that month. But she moved in the romance world, and that was where she was situated. And she really wanted my book to have a happy ending. And then I talked to Adriann, and Adriann was like, "I love that you kill the love interest." And then we had a long conversation about Dostoevsky. And I was just like, okay, so Adriann is the one that fits me as a writer and fits me for a career. She only has one sale, and she's with a really tiny agency. Then I have this mover and shaker that really wants it, but wants to change my tone and how I write. And I went with Adriann. It was the right choice anyway, even if she had remained in a small agency. So I don't know. I think you just, you have to go with the fit.

Isabel: Part of it for me, having switched so many times, is one, my needs have changed. Like I have changed as a writer in a lot of ways. So my first agent, she switched to like book scouting or something. So she left, and so I queried this new project signing with Kathleen Rushall, who is at Andrea Brown. We were together for... It was a number of years. So she was like perfect for me as a debut. She's exactly who I needed. And now I needed somebody a little bit different for where I wanted to go next. I think there are so many people who like, "Oh, I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings." And we still have those four books together. She's still the agent for those. We still talk every few months when we're talking about royalties or foreign stuff. We still have a great relationship. It's just that period of our time together is just over.

Mindy: And it's a business, and you got to remember that. I mean, I love what I do. And like I said earlier, I published something underneath a pen name just because I love it and I want to see it out there. And it's probably not going to make any money so that one is more of a sentimental decision. But when it comes to the business side of writing underneath my real name and the stuff that actually drives a career and how I make a living - yeah, those are business decisions. There are a lot of books that I would like to write that are just sitting because it's not their time right now according to the market and things that are trending. It's like that one is not going to go right now. This is going to sit. This is going to wait. You got to balance your art and your, your, I guess, checkbook.

Isabel: Yeah, I think part of it too is like when you are in it for a career, you understand that it's a long game and that publishing has cycles. So when I was first writing, everybody was like, "Don't you dare write vampires. Vampires won't sell." Now they're huge again. And you're like, eventually what I wanted to do would come back.

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Mindy: So I want to talk about burnout. I had an intimate experience with burnout this summer. I had never experienced it before, and I ended up in a situation where I had to write the vast majority of a book, probably I'm going to say 65-70,000 words in about three weeks. And I did it to myself, and it was my own fault. And that's where I ended up, and I had to do it. And I did it, and I've done that before, and I don't recommend it for anyone. It is not healthy, spiritually, physically, emotionally, creatively, psychically, sexually, like this is not a good idea, right? But I did it. So a couple of things came from that. Number one. I know that I can, and that is bad. Because I'll probably do it again. Number two. I was kind of non-functioning after that. That book was due September 15th. It's currently November 17th, and I just now started giving a shit about anything in the writing world again. And by that, I mean actually trying as far as being present on social media, being a literary citizen, reading even. I was just... I would love for you to talk a little bit about burnout because that was a new experience for me, and I really hated it.

Isabel: The way we talk about how we're showing up to our writing is hugely impactful of whether or not we burn out. There's a difference between being exhausted and being burnt out. You talked a little bit about how it sorta - it was your own fault that you had to write it this fast. I'm sure that does not feel good.

Mindy: I do write quickly, and I do tend to perform well under stress and I do well under stress. And I know these things about myself. When I say I did this to myself, I totally did. I'm sure that there are different avenues that I could have taken. In order to stay alive, I have five or six irons in the fire at all times. Obviously, I write underneath my real name. I have a pen name that is pretty involved, and I co-write with other authors. I have projects that are passion projects that may never go anywhere, but that I co-author with a buddy of mine. And then I also have an editorial business that I run myself. I have the blog and the podcast, which take up quite a bit of time. I also am hired out with a non-fiction book coaching editorial business underneath a different name yet that I work with. I had taken on too much editorial work both underneath my own shingle and then being hired out as a contractor with another company and I was being paid well. The editorial business pays well, and I needed money, right? Writing can pay well, but it also pays sporadically. And it's something that you can kindof put back. I don't think of it as my nine to five. My nine to five is keeping my little irons hot and burning, and then my big iron is something I just have to return to every now and turn it over.

And so, I left that big iron alone for too long while I was monitoring all my little ones and trying to keep them right where they needed to be. Just putting my efforts, not necessarily in the wrong places - just not distributing them evenly. The other thing is I had 25,000 words on this book already done. I don't know how long the book's going to be. I don't know what's going to happen in the book. And when I started actually getting into it, it was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be. It's really dark. I mean, I write dark, and this one is dark. It's a tough one. I don't want to return to this today. I don't want to go back into this world because my main character is depressed, and I'm in her head, right? And it's not a good place to be. I didn't really want to go back in there that often. And then I ended up having to completely like full immersion dive in for three weeks, and it was not healthy. I have edits due on that book January 9th, and I haven't even fully read my edit letter yet. I don't know if I want to go back in there right now.

Isabel: This is why I have a whole podcast on author burnout because it's so many facets. But I see a lot of what's kind of in play here, with what happened this summer, is when you try to write a book or do really do anything when you're fueling yourself with shame and pressure and I shouldn't have done this to myself, that is purely a recipe for burnout. Shame is always going to sap your energy. So like writing a book takes a lot of energy. And if you're shaming yourself to the page, it's like 10 X is hard. Say, you decide like, "hey, book's due in three weeks, and I really do want to get it done" and it's not a "I fucked up. I should have done this sooner. I didn't manage my irons properly." This is where we are, and I'm committed to getting it done because it's important to me to hit this deadline. You will still be exhausted when you're done, but you're not going to have like the two months like I can't function after. And so I'm in a similar place with my '24 release. So I am going to be getting edits on... I think December 8th or something, and then I have four weeks to edit because we have to get to copy edits by middle of March to keep that season. And so I could be like, "I fucked up. This is my own fault." That narrative is very normal in publishing. Am I willing to do it from a place of I want to and not I have to or else I am a loser and my book is going to get pushed.

Mindy: I wish that I was able to make healthier decisions for myself. I am a person that does not have a spouse. I don't have a significant other. So if I get pushed back a year, I won't make it. I will add to that that I could have asked for an extension. I chose not to. This is where Gaelic pride comes in. This is where I'm Irish, and I'm like, "I got a deadline and I'm going to hit it and no one's going to stop me. And I've never missed a deadline before." And it's a point of pride. So I very well could have said, "Hey, guys, I need another month." And they would have given it to me.

Isabel: So I'm in that boat now where my spouse developed epilepsy as a 30 year old. I am the only income earner, and I don't have a day job. We have to pay out of pocket for insurance. So I totally get like, oh, fuck, what do we do? At the same time, you can say, I'm not missing this fucking deadline because I need to eat. But you can do that without shame. You can do that without being like, I've screwed up. I messed up. And it's not easy. I'm not saying like you... Those thoughts are still going to come. Your brain is still going to go like, here's all the reasons why I screwed up because that's how we're socialized. We're socialized. We always look for all of the reasons that we are wrong. There's so much perfectionism, in books in particular, because we have so much revision that we do, yet we still put so much pressure on early drafts to be perfect. As if that's possible. And for me, like when I did bump the book, we were early in having our foster kid. And also, the biggest thing was I needed to scrap the entire idea and figure it out because it wasn't working. And then my editor left, and then it took like six months to get a new editor. So nobody was waiting for this book. I didn't have a deadline. But now I'm like, I'm going to be doing these revisions over the course of like three-ish months, and it's going to be hard because we don't have daycare. We have a two and a half year old, but I'm willing to do it because I'm like, "we need to pay for this roof because all our shit's leaking." But I'm not going to be like, "well, I should have done this and I should have done that." Like, no, this is where we are. I can have so much love and compassion, which took a long time to get to, for the version of me who was trying to figure out how to be a mom with like two hours notice as a foster parent and you're just like, figure it out. Of course, I struggled. And now it's still going to be hard, but I'm willing to do it. And I know that I'm choosing it because I want to pay for the roof, not because if I don't, I'm an asshole.

Mindy: Definitely what I turned in for my first draft was nowhere near to perfect. Ben was like, "I know you had concerns about this one. I know that you were worried about it." I had also just weaned entirely off of my own depression medication at the time. And so like everything was a little fuzzy in my head, and he was like, "You did way better than you think you did." And so, I think that that is something that we should carry within ourselves too, is that we are our own worst critics all the time. You have to give yourself a little bit more grace. And I'm really good at telling other people you're doing fine. You're doing great. It's going to be okay. You can't be the best at everything. In fact, you don't even have to be the best at any one thing. Just show up, and do the best you can at everything you try. And hopefully you'll be able to, at the end of the day, always go to bed tired.

Isabel: One of the things I teach clients is setting a minimum enoughness measure. The minimum amount of something you can do and be like, I at least showed up for that. So like on a day when you have a bunch of shit lined up, you don't even plan to write 2K. Like maybe you plan to write 500. And if you write more, hell yes. But at least you're not setting yourself up for something that's going to be so hard. Because if your brain thinks it's hard, your brain doesn't want to do it. Your brain is designed to not do hard things.

Mindy: So why don't you tell listeners specifically what the name of your podcast is so that people can find you and find your podcast. And also just talking about being a life coach for writers, because obviously... Obviously, you know what you're talking about. What are the kinds of services you offer for that?

Isabel: So I run the Author Burnout Coach podcast. It drops every Tuesday. I just released recently - how do you answer all those awkward questions at family dinners about like, how's your book going and can I have a free copy? Also by the time this comes out, I think I'll also have my episode out about setting boundaries with the toxic people who ask those kinds of questions. And how do you keep proper boundaries so that you're not just feeling miserable. But yeah, so I work with both new writers, and with new writers I do a lot of some of the basic storytelling skills because I am also a book coach. And then we do a lot of just how do you get to the page, overcoming the perfectionism, like that kind of stuff. And then with the published authors, it's all really like, you don't need my help in your book. You know what the hell you're doing. It's the perfectionism. It's the burnout. It's the, you know, I'm afraid to say no to shit because I think that I'm going to lose opportunities, and then I'll never get them again. And then you take on too much stuff, and then you're burnt out. How do you make decisions about your career that you feel really good about? You're not just trying to constantly please everybody else to your own detriment. So sort of more of that kind of like being both a storyteller and an entrepreneur as a writer. But all that stuff's at my website, Isabel Sterling dot com, so they can see all of the different services I offer. And then yeah, the podcasts, they're typically pretty short. They're like 15 to 30 minutes typically. And each one is a very targeted, like here's a cause of burnout, and here's how you can work on dealing with it in your own life.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find your books and you online as an author.

Isabel: Yeah. So I am online. I actually recently deleted my Twitter because I haven't been on it really since 2020 and I'm just like, I'm done. So find me on Instagram, isa underscore sterling. And then my books are wherever books are sold. They're available in English and Spanish and Russian and Polish. If you're going to pick up any of my books, I would recommend starting with The Coldest Touch if you love vampires. It is about a girl named Elise who whenever she touches someone, she sees how they're going to die. And she meets a vampire who is there to recruit her to join a mysterious organization. But then a teacher is on the block to get murdered, and they have to try to stop it.

Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson on Co-Authoring, Writing Mysteries, and Plotting vs. Pantsing

November 14, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com . And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

Mindy: We're here with Liz Lawson and Kathleen Glasgow, and we're going to talk about their new series, The Agathas, as well as co-authoring and writing mysteries. So let's start with each of you just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you write outside of this series that you have worked on together.

Kathleen: I write mainly contemporary, realistic teen novels when I'm not writing mysteries with Liz Lawson, and I tend to focus on somewhat sad books. And it was a joy to write The Agathas with Liz because we were determined to make it fun. What about you Liz?

Liz: Other than The Agathas, I have published one other book called The Lucky Ones. It is also like a sad emotional contemporary, and it came out April 7, 2020, which was the worst time ever. Kathleen and I have written two books and I'm working on a solo second book.

Mindy: I also write sad books. We're in good company. Yes, I also had a release right before the pandemic. That was a horrible experience. I do wanna talk a little bit about co-authoring. You each have written on your own, of course, and have careers outside of co-authoring. I also write underneath a pen name, and I do co-author with friends. And whenever people talk to me about that process, they're just endlessly fascinated by how it works, if it works, and also why you would decide to try it in the first place. So if you guys could talk to me a little bit about how you decided to come to a place where you wanted to work with a co-author and how you found each other.

Kathleen: Liz and I have the same editor, and we met online because I really loved T he Lucky Ones. We were messaging for a while, and then we met in person. And we have the sort of same dark anxiety written sense of humor. So we got along really well. And when Liz's first book, The Lucky Ones, came out, as she said, during the pandemic, plans were scuttled. Things shut down. All the great things that she had hoped for for her book didn't happen, and we were messaging back and forth. I think that we were both feeling very isolated because of lockdown. What if they wrote something just for us that no one knew about to keep ourselves active and busy during lockdown? And to just write something for the pure joy of writing it, and Liz is a big Agatha Christie fan. And I like true crime. And we just started noodling back and forth over messages and text. What would we like to write that would be surprising and engaging for us to write? That would be different from our sad solo books? And we sorta settled on writing a fun mystery. It wasn't even like a question, like how we would co-write it. I think that we just naturally sort of slid into making a dual POV. Do you think that's right, Liz?

Liz: Yeah, we had a very, very, very brief conversation of like, "Should we do this from one point of view or two?" Writing from one POV sounded really daunting. So it just naturally ended up, very quickly, we agreed to write from two.

Kathleen: And then it would be easier to trade chapters that way. And also we agreed that we would write quickly. I feel like if you're not gonna do dual POV and you're both writing the main text, things can move slower, and I think that we agreed that we wanted to write very quickly to keep the pace fast and to challenge ourselves. It was sort of obvious from the get go that Liz would be Alice Ogilvie and I would be Iris Adams. It's not that we set down ground rules, 'cause we've never done this before, but we had an element of flexibility built in. Liz said, 'cause she's really great at plotting, "You know, we're gonna need a spreadsheet in the beginning 'cause this is a mystery and we have to hit certain beats and we have to drop red herrings," and that really helped us keep writing at a quick pace. If you're gonna co-write with someone, I think that you have to have similar personalities and that you do need to set your boundaries. And you have to agree in the beginning about how you're gonna write the book... Like how quickly. Are you gonna have a spreadsheet? And also you have to be flexible so that Liz could come into Iris' chapters and change Alice's dialogue, not the context of it, but how Alice would say it because she knows Alice better than me.

Liz: And I think this is something you learn, you start to learn, with having an editor, and probably even before that, just having like other people look at your writing. You have to learn how to sort of let go of what you've done, particularly when you're co-writing. You have to allow the other person into your work. I think some writers are very precious with their writing, and I can be that way too, but when you're co-writing, it's really important to be able to say, Okay, this other person is also involved in this. They have opinions, and they have a point of view. And it is important that both of our voices are heard.

Kathleen: 'Cause you're sharing a story. It's not just like the story I'm writing. Liz and I came up with it together. So you're sharing a story. You have to get along well enough that you're like, "You're right, I need to change that whole chapter or that whole paragraph. You're absolutely correct." What matters is the story - not my ego or Liz's ego.

Mindy: I think it's a real place of vulnerability too, because like Liz said, you have to be open to... Not just as a solo writer - criticism. Because you always have to be open to that 'cause you're going to get it no matter what. Like you were saying, whether you have an editor, beta readers, or whatever it is, criticism is always gonna be there. But when it comes to someone literally going in and changing some of your words, or smoothing some of your words, or changing some dialogue that you wrote of the character that isn't necessarily your prime POV, there's a real level of trust there, I think.

Kathleen: If you don't trust the person that you're writing with implicitly, and you really need to think about that before you start writing with them, you should not write with them at all. It's a collaboration. You need to have that implicit trust in another person that they can share this story with you and the writing of the story.

Mindy: I think that's very true. My experience with being a co-author also comes in with knowing what my strengths and weaknesses are. I have a hard time writing warm, positive, fuzzy emotions. I struggle writing it. I can write sadness. I can write anger. I could write frustration. I can write any of those darker spectrum emotions. Writing romantic feelings or thoughts that - even just friendship. I struggle writing those warmer, kinder, lighter, lovelier moments. And so in the books that I co-write under a pen name with my friends, we have another writer in the trio of us that we really rely on to write those things. So do you find yourself dividing the strengths and weaknesses as well?

Kathleen: We were committed to making this a fun book - a friendship wrapped in a mystery. Every time I would start drifting into much darker territory for Iris, even though her story line is a little bit dark, Liz would say, "Kathleen, this isn't your solo book. You got to pull way back. Come back from the darkness." And I was like, "Oh right, you're right. I can't go there because this isn't that type of book." I can't write romance to save my life. I cannot write a good romantic relationship, and so I was really relieved with this book that we were not going to have a central romance and that we were just gonna concentrate on these girls and their friendship.

Liz: I enjoy the romance, so I think I keep trying to veer us in that direction and our editor's kind of like, "That's not what the book is." And I'm like, "Well, but it could be... " The biggest thing is, because we do have these solo books, Kathleen and I have worked on other books during The Agathas process. And so, because Kathleen writes such sad stuff, like she said, I could always tell when she was working on her solo book. Because it would be like all of a sudden, Iris is being real sad and I'm like, "Umm, maybe we need to lighten her up just a smidge."

Kathleen: You write your first book in a bubble 'cause no one knows what you're doing. It's just you and the book. Can you write a book? Things change because there are contracts and deadlines and marketing, and it's hard to get out of that space then when you're writing every book after your first book and to get as close to your writing as you were when you were in a bubble. One thing that was really great about writing The Agathas with Liz was that no one knew. We didn't tell our agents or our editor. We just wrote it by ourselves, and it was back to being quite joyful and a really lovely writing experience where it was just me, Liz, Alice, and Iris.

Mindy: Yeah, there is something really, really nice about that. I don't share my pen name for a few different reasons. It would skew my brand terribly, 'cause my pen name is very silly and funny, and we have a wonderful time writing very, very, very silly things. And there is a freedom to that. I don't have to stick to any one thing. I don't have to worry about a brand in terms of my name - my real name on my other books. Now, because the pen name has started to take off a little bit I do have to worry about that brand now, but that's a lovely problem to have. So I wanna go back to something that Kathleen touched on a little bit. You're saying that you're both also writing your solo projects at the same time that you're co-authoring The Agathas together. Liz was saying that she could see when you had been working on your own project, that voice kind of slipping then into The Agathas and affecting those characters a little bit. So how do you as individuals keep those things separated in your minds?

Kathleen: Well, for me, it was realizing really quickly that I cannot write two books at once. Especially two books that were so different. I put a hold on that other book and concentrated on The Agathas, and that was a good learning lesson for me. I know that some people can work on several different things at once, but I learned that I cannot. So that was a good thing to learn.

Liz: For me, honestly, I've had a journey with my second book. It's changed and it's morphed many, many times. And I do think there was a brief moment back at the end of last year... We were writing the first draft of The Agathas and I was writing a draft of that book, and it just did not work very well. The voices were too similar. There was just a lot of crossover. I kept trying to put The Agathas into that book almost, and so I would say it's really hard to write two books at the same time. I know people do it. Clearly people write Adult and YA - like, different categories, and publish two books a year. But that is a skill, and I'm not sure I have it.

Kathleen: I don't know how people do it who have kids, either. 'Cause Liz and I both have kids. I can't write when my kids are in the house with me. It doesn't work, and I wanna pay attention to them. It's hard. Some writers are so prolific. It's almost disheartening when you see it on social media and you're like, "How did you write four books in two years? What is going on?"

Mindy: Well, it is difficult. People ask me all the time, "How you do everything that you do?" And I always say that it's at the expense of my mental health and personal relationships. And that's a joke, but it's also not. Like, that's not a joke. Making a living as a writer is almost impossible.

Kathleen: It is almost impossible. I've always still had a day job, and I remember when my kids were smaller. They were sharing the bed with me 'cause they were little and sitting up between them with my laptop on my knees, writing in the dark to meet a deadline, because sometimes you just do what you have to do. If you're writing and you have that deep desire to write, sometimes it happens when you least expect it. You'll do anything to make it happen.

Mindy: I wanna talk specifically about writing mystery. Co-authoring a mystery. So specifically with The Agathas, did you plot and plan ahead of time, or did you guys kind of write and discover what was going to happen?

Liz: We definitely did our best to plot it out because I think we both knew that writing a mystery is a whole different ball game than writing the emotional contemporary books. It's hard in a different way, right? With the books that we had written before, at least for me, I know it was so hard because of the subject matter. Putting yourself in that emotional space while you're writing can get really challenging after a while. For a mystery, it's almost the opposite. The emotion is still there and the characters still hopefully drive the plot, because I think those are the more interesting books, personally. There are certain things that you have to happen in your plot. You have to hit certain beats, and so plotting was very important to us. We had a whole spreadsheet on Google Docs where we tried to kind of plot out each chapter. I would say for the first book, we stuck to our outline pretty closely. Don't you think, Kathleen?

Kathleen: Yeah, we did, and it was very helpful for me 'cause I'm mostly a pantser. It was very helpful to have everything laid out in front of me so that we would know the direction we were going in and what had to happen in the next chapter. We left a little room for... Well, maybe that's not gonna work. Or little things that could happen in individual chapters, and then I would get to text Liz something like, "Oh, by the way, Iris is jumping out this window. Or this has to happen to Alice in the next chapter, because I did this." And Liz would be like, "Oh, that's fine." We had to plot it out beforehand because it is a mystery, and we had to know what things were gonna happen when and how we were going to insert them into the plot. And then we had to make sure that we had enough twists and where they would appear. It was good to plot it out, and I'm interested to see at the end of writing the solo book that I'm writing, having actually plotted a book now rather than being a pantser has affected my process of writing by myself.

Liz: Did you plot your solo book?

Kathleen: No, 'cause I had written a draft of it before we started The Agathas. As I'm revising, I did make a spreadsheet of things that I needed to...

Liz: Wow! Look at you.

Kathleen: I know. I feel terrible 'cause you know, I come from a poetry background. So I'm used to just going off and so this is a whole different world for me.

Mindy: Yeah, I also am a complete and total pantser. That can be difficult when you're co-authoring and one of my other co-authors claims to not be a pantser, but she will occasionally just very, very randomly have a character jump out a window or... She has even killed characters that we were not anticipating them dying. And then you open up the shared document and it's like, "Okay, so you killed the character we were going to use for something else."

Kathleen: Those things would happen to Liz and I too. I'm the worst at it 'cause I would insert something and say, "You know, you don't like this one character, but make them integral to the last twist of the books."

Mindy: I think there's a lot of strength to be found in plotting and then leaving room for discoverability.

Liz: Yes, I very much agree.

Kathleen: I think that's where the flexibility in co-authoring comes in again. You just really have to let what's gonna happen, happen if you think it's gonna make the book better.

Mindy: Once you had finished writing your draft, how did you then just approach your editor and say, "Hey, the two of us wrote a book together."

Liz: Well, I'll let Kathleen tell this 'cause she loves this story.

Kathleen: This is where I found out exactly how devious Liz is and how like her character, Alice, she is. I didn't tell my agent. We didn't tell our editor. I was just happy as a little bumble bee writing this book with Liz. And we got to a certain point, and I was like, "Well, this was really fun, but I gotta go back to my solo book now. Because I gotta revise this." And Liz was like, "I already told my agent. I showed it to her and she loves it, and she thinks that we should show it to our editor. She thinks it's gonna be really great." And I was like, "What?" I had to write a very sad email to my agent, 'cause I didn't tell my agent, and I didn't know how my agent would react that I had written something quite different than I usually write. The subject line was, I'm sorry. I didn't know what to say.

Liz: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wrote a book.

Kathleen: And my agent just called me and she's like, "Are you leaving me? What's going on? I don't even wanna read this." And I was like, "No, I just... You should read the whole thing 'cause I just wanna let you know I was writing this book with Liz and you don't know anything about it. And also it's like a mystery and it's kind of fun and it's completely different. And I know we hadn't talked about it, and so... I'm super sorry. And please don't be mad at me." Our editor also was like, "You did what? What now? The both of you? Hey wait." She read it, and she was like, "I love this, and I think it's a great move for the both of you." I think that Liz and I are really lucky in that respect that our agents and our editor were on board with us making the writing change. Because sometimes agents and editors are like, "No, you have to stick with what we represent you for. We're not into that other totally different thing that you're writing." We were really lucky that everyone on our team was on board and really liked it.

Liz: I assumed everyone would 'cause I liked it. So.

Kathleen: It can be a little bit difficult once you've written a few books that are one type of book to suddenly make a switch. And sometimes your agents are like, "I can't represent that," and sometimes your editor's like, "Oh God, no. I don't want that at all." We were quite lucky.

Mindy: Yeah, well, that's why I write under a pen name because I can be very silly and have a fun time and be a little bit ridiculous, and that is not what I write underneath my real name. And so when people meet me in real life and they've read my books, and they expect me to be a certain way. And then they meet me and I'm actually pretty funny and light-hearted, and I have a good time. And I'm quite silly. And they're just like, "Oh, this was not what I was expecting." So...

Kathleen: Are they... Mindy, are they like, "Wait, why are you smiling? You wrote The Female of the Species. What? This isn't you."

Mindy: They expect me to show up wearing all black and carrying around like a bag of detached testicles or something.

Kathleen: Right?

Mindy: I think the biggest reality check - it actually works the opposite direction - it's people that have known me my whole life. And I still live where I grew up, and it's a really small town. And I've got a super happy, normal, very Midwestern farming family that I'm from. Everybody knows everybody, and then I got published and people read my books and they're like, "Oh my god. Are you okay?" I very often, I can't tell you how many emails I have received where the subject line is literally like, "Are you okay?"

Kathleen: That's my favorite thing to do a response video of on TikTok. Anything I post inevitably three people are like, "Hey, are you okay?"

Mindy: Last thing. Why don't each of you share where listeners can find you online and where they can find The Agathas and then your individual books - the titles of your solo books as well, and also the sequel to The Agathas, which is coming up.

Liz: You can find The Agathas pretty much anywhere books are sold - bookshop, Barnes & Noble. There's a Barnes & Noble special edition, which was really exciting, and it has a very beautiful pink cover. The next Agathas is coming out May 31st of 2023. You can find me online on Twitter at LzLwsn. I'm also on Instagram at the same handle. I'm on TikTok on the same handle, except I'm currently locked out of my account. So I'm trying to deal with that.

Kathleen: The Agathas sequel, which is called The Night in Question, does come out in May 2023. So we're very excited about that. And you can get my books, Girl in Pieces, How to Make Friends With the Dark, and You'd Be Home Now, anywhere. If you wanna support my local indie store, it's called M ostly Books Arizona. So order there, and if you'd like it signed, put a note in the comment box. And I'm on social media at kathglasgow on Twitter, Miss Kathleen Glasgow on Instagram, and then Kathleen Glasgow on TikTok. You can always go to my website, Kathleen Glasgow books dot com and send me an email if you wanna ask me if I'm okay.

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