Writer's Fun Zone

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
EDITORIAL by Iman Llompart

c. 2026 BETH BARANY

https://writersfunzone.com/blog/2007/02/01/the-writers-gmc-know-what-you-want/

_________

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

Like the work we do? Tip us! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

The post Make Your Environment Writer-Friendly | How To Write the Future, Ep 215 appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Rituals and Writing: How Magic Can Support Your Creative Practice by Bailey Lang

Guest Contributor — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:00:04 +0000

Let’s welcome back Bailey Lang as she shares with us “Rituals and Writing: How Magic Can Support Your Creative Practice.” Enjoy!

***

I consider myself a Literary Witch — that’s my title, and writing and witchcraft are major parts of my life.

Magic and writing both involve craft, after all, and in my experience, combining the two activities amplifies their benefits.

I also believe that writing is a uniquely human form of magic, and one we all have access to.

When I sit down for my writing practice, ritual is always involved.

Depending on how much time I have, that ritual might be more or less complex.

Sometimes it’s as simple as pulling an oracle card and reflecting on it.

For example, the card I pulled as I started working on this post was all about endings, and specifically patterns of death and rebirth.

As a book coach, I regularly talk to writers about how cycles of creation and composting are essential for creative work — we need periods of productivity and times when we rest.

Getting that card during my own creative ritual was a good reminder that self-care is part of writing, and that fallow periods are normal and beneficial.

So, for the rest of this post, let’s talk about the relationship between rituals and writing.

First of all, what is a ritual?

And, most importantly, why should you incorporate one into your writing practice?

What is a Ritual?

Rituals are everywhere, although we don’t always notice them.

When we think of ritual, we often assume we’re dealing with something mystical or religious — dancing around a bonfire under the full moon, or following along with a church service.

Those are obvious forms of rituals, but they’re far from the only ones!

A ritual is any type of repeated, symbolic actions that distinguish a space, event, or interaction and set it apart from normal, everyday activities.

More simply, a ritual is something you do to mark something as important and shift your energy to focus on it.

Some other common examples of rituals include:

Shaking hands with someone when you meet them for the first time
Singing happy birthday before the candles get blown out
Attending a commencement or graduation ceremony

When it comes to your creative practice, a ritual could be anything that helps you create the right internal and external conditions for your writing.

Creative rituals can be highly personalized to your tastes and interests.

Although I enjoy a witchy flair in my practice, that doesn’t mean you have to rush out and buy a tarot deck!

Remember that a ritual is, at its core, a repeated action that helps shift your energy — in this case, we’re trying to shift our energy to our writing.

Elements of a creative ritual might include:

An environmental element (lighting a candle, starting a specific playlist)
A clear set of actions (pulling an oracle card, freewriting for 10 minutes, choosing a writing prompt or exercise)
A mind-body shift (a brief meditation, some breathwork, a yoga sequence)

You could have different rituals for different aspects of writing, too — your ritual for a new writing session might be different from an editing day.

Your writing rituals get to be unique to you, so don’t be afraid to experiment until you figure out what feels right!

Why Should You Incorporate Ritual Into Your Writing Practice?

By now, you might be wondering why you should add a ritual to your writing practice at all — isn’t it just one more thing to check off the to-do list?

It sounds fun, but isn’t it just a bit…silly?

To that I would say, silly things that add some fun to our lives are worth doing for their own sake.

We all need a bit of whimsy now and then!

But starting your writing practice with a ritual is way more than just silly fun, and it’s definitely not just another task to complete.

Rituals are powerful.

Every human society across time has used rituals because they are powerful.

When we perform rituals with intention (even fun, silly ones), we get to access that power and harness it for our own creative ends.

A ritual activity at the start of your writing practice signals to your brain that you have started an important activity.

Rituals are performed to separate an activity from the mundane and signal that it’s valuable, or even sacred.

Treating your writing as meaningful by connecting it to a ritual is one way to ensure you show up for your practice.

Performing a ritual across time can also help you get into a flow state more quickly.

Going through the ritual actions — lighting the candle, pulling the oracle card — tells your subconscious that it’s time to get into the creative zone.

Aligning your actions and expectations creates better conditions for reaching a flow state and getting more writing done.

Treat Your Writing Like It Matters

Creating your own personal writing ritual is a way to treat your writing practice like it matters.

It allows you to bring a bit of magic and a bit of joy into the routine, and to harness the power of ritual.

We live in an era that is geared toward optimization and constant productivity, and most of us are more miserable and burned out than ever before.

Pairing our creative practices with ritual offers us an alternative approach — one that is more attuned to our true creative cycles and our individual needs.

You might feel a bit self-conscious the first few times you try your ritual, and that’s okay.

New things always feel a bit strange at first.

Stick with it, let it be fun, and watch how ritual deepens your writing practice.

Reading Recommendations

Magic Maker, Pam Grossman (affiliate link)

Word Witch, Kate Belew (affiliate link)

***

About the Author

Dr. Bailey Lang is the Literary Witch, a book coach who helps visionary authors reclaim their creative magic and finish their books.

Bailey has a PhD in rhetoric and writing studies and they love geeking out about writing, language, and magic.

You can sign up for Bailey’s free newsletter, Ink + Alchemy, for monthly missives that will help you build a writing practice you love.

Website

Newsletter

The post Rituals and Writing: How Magic Can Support Your Creative Practice by Bailey Lang appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

How to Self-Coach Toward Your Writing North Star

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:41:41 +0000

How to Self-Coach Toward Your Writing North Star – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 214

***

“What you want is to be able to look at your goal, what you’ve written down, and have a really clear picture for what that looks like.” – Beth Barany

If you self coached, could you be more efficient with your writing time?

That’s exactly what How To Write the Future podcast host, Beth Barany is sharing today in the episode titled “How to Self-Coach Toward Your Writing North Star.” Beth shares what the writing GMC stands for and breaks down each area explaining how you can create your best in your storytelling,

From defining your big goal, how to find your motivation, to even handling conflicts, Beth also shares an example of a quick-timed exercise at the end of the episode, which is great for when you’re feeling stuck in your writing.

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

RESOURCES

The Writer’s GMC: Know What You Want

This episode is adapted from The Writer’s Adventure Guide by Beth Barany

https://books2read.com/writersadventureguide

About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for How to Self-Coach Toward Your Writing North Star

What Is Writers GMC

BETH BARANY: Hey everyone, Beth Barany here. I am the host of How to Write the Future podcast, and I’m sharing with you an episode from my premium channel because I think it is so relevant to everyone. So let’s dive in. Enjoy.

Today I’m gonna talk about the writer’s GMC. What does GMC stand for? That stands for goal, motivation, conflict. And I pulled that right from a book called GMC: Goal, Motivation, Conflict by Deb Dixon.

Why is this important? As a writer, you are designing characters. You need to know your character’s goal, your character’s motivation, and your character’s conflict or conflicts for storytelling.

Now years ago, I took that idea and I was like ah hah! This is great if we apply it to ourselves, to the creative process. So I wrote a book actually using that tool and many other tools, specifically the hero’s journey, and I wrote The Writer’s Adventure Guide: 12 Stages to Writing Your Book. This is a self-coaching guide for the creative process.

So this book is still available. You can check it out. It’s got a lot of great exercises in there. I today wanna explain to you what is the writer’s GMC and how you can apply it to your writing as well as any creative project that you’re doing.

So let’s go through it step at a time, and I even have an article that is a companion to this if you wanna check that out, in the show notes.

I’m gonna go a little bit more in depth than what this article does because, hey, I wrote this article, gosh, nearly 20 years ago, and I’ve updated it.

Okay, so in your writer’s GMC, you can use this as a rubric, a template, a checklist for any creative project.

[02:02] Define Your Big Goal

We’re gonna focus here today on your creative writing, but if you have a creative business, I work with also with creative entrepreneurs, you could use it for that, and you could use it for small projects, big projects, medium-sized projects .

So the first thing: goal. And when I speak of goal, I mean the hard goal, the goal that is a little bit of like, ah, difficult. Not the one that’s easy. Write the big goal that you’re working on that feels meaty, that feels challenging, that feels, like you’re up against a big, tall mountain, and you’re like, “Ah, I’m not really sure going straight up, that seems awfully hard, but I need to do it,” that kind of goal.

So be specific. What are you working on right now? What is the shape of it? But also, what is the end goal? There you are, you’re at the end of this project, where would you like to be? Or if you wanna cut it down to size, it doesn’t have to be the whole project.

Like a book, you don’t have to put, “I wanna be publishing my book.”

That’s great, but let’s bring it down to: what is it that you’re trying to accomplish today, tomorrow, this week, next week, next month? The next big chunk. Okay?

So write that down. What is your goal? And what you want is to be able to look at your goal, what you’ve written down, and have a really clear picture for what that looks like.

Like, uh, I might say I wanna finish my copy edits by, gosh, at this rate, I think I could, I could finish my copy edits in two weeks.

So if I’m diligent at it, to give myself some room, I’m gonna say my goal is to get it done by the end of the month. Or I could say, if I’m writing on a first draft, which I am, also, I’ll say, “Okay, my, my goal is to have a first draft ready to show my critique partners by the end of the year,” for example.

That project personally, I don’t have a deadline on, but I do know what I’m working on.

[03:58] Find Your Motivation

All right, next, next, motivation.

M for motivation. You want to understand what is driving you. Just like we wanna know why our characters do what they do, and we need to hint at that in our stories so that our readers can relate to our characters, you need to know what is fueling you, what is driving you to work on and accomplish this goal.

And then what are your secondary motivations? And maybe there’s even a deeper reason and another deeper reason below that. When we want to accomplish something, it’s not just for the externals of it. There’s a deeper reason.

I’ve talked to a lot of writers, and they talk about satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, leaving a legacy.

All of these are, are deeper goals. So, see if y- when you explore your motivation for your goal, how deep can you go? Go as deep as you can. For some, it might be about communicating a dream, a message to the world. For others, uh, they want to teach, they want to serve. For others, they want recognition, and they want to have a place in their community. So there’s no right answer to this part about motivation. It’s really what is the truest thing for you. So we talked about goal. What is your goal? Be as specific as possible. We talked about motivation. Be as truthful as possible, and see if you can go deep, deep into your soul and really answer the question: Why is this important to you?

Why is this goal, this very specific goal, important to you?

[05:40] Motivation Example – Refreshing A Book

Let me give you just one example. I am working on copy edits for a book that’s already published. Why would I even do that? And it’s not easy. Copy edits aren’t easy for me, but they’re necessary. So I have learned a ton since I first published that book, and I wanna be really proud of this book today.

The version of me who published it years ago, that was the best I could make it.

So now I want to make it the best that I can today, this week, this month. And so I can stand proud beside it because it’s also a foundational piece of a larger storytelling universe that I’m involved in, and I really wanna feel like I put my best foot forward today.

So I’m giving it a refresh, and I feel like I’m reconnecting and recommitting to this story world, and to the characters, and all the bigger things that are, I plan to have coming from this book, like a TV show, maybe a film, who knows? It’s a big, ambitious project. So why not? I’m an independent author.

I get to do this, and I’m gonna do it, and I am doing it. So it, there’s a sense of bonding deeper, a recommitment ceremony, if you will, with this whole vast project and what I wanna do with it. It’s my Henrietta the Dragon Slayer series.

All right. So we talked about goal. We talked about motivation.

[07:03] Name The Conflicts

Let’s talk about conflict.

Our characters encounter challenges on the way to their goal. That’s what makes their goal hard. Same with us. We are going after our goal, and it’s not easy. That’s why we’re doing this exercise. What is in the way? What are the challenges? What are the conflicts?

There’s gonna be two main categories.

There’s gonna be the internal conflicts, and there’s gonna be the external conflicts.

Time, for example, is often feels like an external conflict, a limitation, if you will; another way of putting it: conflict, challenge, limitation.

So also, self-talk. Self-talk is often a challenge. We often put ourselves down.

I notice I’m constantly berating myself. Not very helpful. And I also have complainy voice inside. “Oh, this is so hard.” Yes, it is hard.

Okay. I’m gonna list that down as one of my conflicts. Judgment from any quarter, judgment from within, judgment from without. Those are all conflicts. We’re not trying to, we’re not trying to fix anything right now, we’re just noticing, acknowledging, writing it down. Being overly busy, having a lot of commitments that maybe you’re like, “Hey, I really wanna work on my book, but I have these other commitments,” and it’s like, and it’s clashing. That’s a real, a real conflict.

Our work obligations, our family obligations. Also hobbies. Maybe we have a lot of hobbies and writing is just, takes up some of that time, but other things take up that time. Those are real things. I’m not gonna judge you for that. What we’re doing here is we’re just taking an inventory of conflicts. We’re not solving any problems right now. Because once we know what our internal and external challenges, limitations, conflicts are, then we can take action. We can make choices. So this is a moment for taking inventory. So now we’ve done the goal, the motivation, the conflicts.

[09:07] Add Strengths To The Mix

Now what? I am not leaving you hanging.

I invented a fourth component, S for strengths. Because our characters, they need to confront their challenges to get to their goal, and we hopefully create characters that transform and grow, so by the time they are facing their biggest challenge toward the end of your story, they have also grown and transformed and gained strengths and allies and the ability to do something they couldn’t do at the beginning.

Well, same with us. Except we’re gonna harness your strengths right now. So let’s take an inventory of your strengths.

And strengths again are in two main categories. You’re gonna have the internal strengths, the gifts that you were born with, the things that you have learned, your mindset, your know-how, your life experience.

And we’re also gonna look at the external strengths: the people in your life, the environment that you’re in. The fact that you have tools, computer, phone, typewriter, pen, paper, desk, chair. These are all, I consider them strengths. They’re gifts. They’re parts of our life that allow us to do what we can do as writers, as creative people.

Other strengths can be humor, curiosity, intelligence, drive. Also, another outer strength that, that you might have is the ability to schedule time to write and the ability to go and write. Another one of my strengths is I have a long playlist that helps me write and that I put together.

So I would call that an external strength.

So there you have it. I just went through the writer’s GMC, goal, motivation, conflict, and the bonus one, strengths.

[10:59] How To Use GMC When Stuck

I recommend that you do a short brainstorm on these elements. Give yourself 5, 10 minutes, or set the timer for 20 minutes, which is one of my favorite things to do for timed writing, and just brainstorm on this.

Now, any time you are stuck, confused, overwhelmed, forget, wait, where am I? Maybe you’ve taken a break from your writing, and you’re like, “What? Wait, what am I doing?” Use the writer’s GMC to refocus yourself, reorient yourself, find your North Star, and take your next step.

[11:29] Wrap Up And Next Steps

All right, everyone, that’s it for this week.

Write long and prosper.

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061

Need instructions on how to leave a review? Go here.

***

Support our work for creatives: leave a tip: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

***

ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
EDITORIAL by Iman Llompart

c 2025 BETH BARANY

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

The post How to Self-Coach Toward Your Writing North Star appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do After You Publish by Kelley Way

Guest Contributor — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:00:32 +0000

Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Kelley Way as she shares with us “Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do After You Publish.” Enjoy!

***

Protecting Your Copyright After Publication

Last month, we covered what to do before publishing to protect your work, at least in terms of copyright protection.

Here is the self-publishing copyright checklist of things to do after publication:

1. Register your copyright with the Copyright Office.

Registration is not required, but it is very helpful in the event of a lawsuit.

The ideal time to register is within three months of publication, but you can register before publication or after the three-month window if you wish.

2. Keep an eye out for infringers.

Sadly, there is no one whose mission in life is to find all infringers, whoever and wherever they may be.

The only way you’re going to find someone selling illegal copies of your work is to look for them, or hire someone to look for you.

On the plus side, if you find your content on a website, getting the content removed is relatively easy.

On the negative side, stopping the infringer from reposting elsewhere is very difficult.

3. Periodically review your contracts.

You did the hard work when you created the contracts, but it’s good to take a look at them every so often to remind yourself what everyone agreed to.

In addition, you may want or need to renegotiate those contracts down the road as your circumstances change.

4. Keep a portfolio.

Few authors want to be a one-hit wonder; most authors expect to publish multiple books over the course of their career.

It’s highly recommended that you keep a portfolio or spreadsheet that lists your copyrighted works, their publication status, relevant contracts, who to reach out to for questions, etc.

It creates an easy reference point for you, and it makes life much easier for whoever may be managing your copyrights after you.

Final Thoughts

Don’t leave your book vulnerable.

Whether you need help registering your copyright, reviewing contracts, or tracking down infringers, the Law Office of Kelley Way is here to help.

Reach out at kaway@kawaylaw.com and take the next step in protecting your work.

***

Want to read more articles like this one Writer’s Fun Zone? Subscribe here.

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The post Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do After You Publish by Kelley Way appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Protecting the Creative Life: The Work Writers Don’t Give Themselves Credit For by Iman Llompart

Guest Contributor — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:59 +0000

Let’s welcome back Iman Llompart as she shares with us “Protecting the Creative Life: The Work Writers Don’t Give Themselves Credit For.” Enjoy!

***

The Scoreboard Is Broken

How do most writers measure success?

Better yet, how do other people measure your success as a writer?

When someone asks what you do, do you hesitate before saying you’re a writer?

Because you know what’s probably coming next.

“Have I read anything you’ve written?”

“What have you published?”

They’re perfectly reasonable questions.

But over time, they can quietly shape the way we measure ourselves as writers.

Most of us only count the visible achievements.

How many words have I written?

How many chapters have I finished?

Have I completed a manuscript?

Have I published a book?

Everything else seems to disappear.

We become so focused on what society tells us a successful writer should achieve that we overlook everything happening beneath the surface.

And that’s where the unseen work begins.

Everything That Happens Before the Writing

When you’re a creative running your own business, the invisible work is everything happening behind the scenes.

If you’re a one-person business, someone still has to send invoices, answer emails, manage contracts, schedule meetings, and, my personal favorite, the bookkeeping.

I love numbers (notice the sarcasm?).

That’s why I’m a writer.

None of these tasks are particularly glamorous, but they’re necessary if you want your creative work to exist within a sustainable business.

Then comes visibility.

How do you grow your audience?

As more writers build businesses around their books and creative work, marketing has become part of the job.

That means:

newsletters
social media
website updates
guest blogging
podcast interviews
networking
and showing up consistently, even on the days you’d rather stay hidden behind your manuscript.

I’m in the middle of all of this myself.

If I’m being honest, I’d much rather organize my inbox than post on social media.

Visibility has never come naturally to me.

But stepping outside our comfort zones is often what creates opportunities we couldn’t have planned for.

Where Stories Are Really Made

Then there’s the work most of us actually want to be doing.

Creating.

This isn’t always the easiest part, but it’s the place we long to return to.

It’s where we nurture that fragile creative space I wrote about in my previous article.

For some writers, that journey begins with research.

Others dive headfirst into a blank page just to see what happens.

I envy that.

From there comes:

brainstorming
character development (my favorite part)
developmental editing
reading
studying the craft
and slowly shaping an idea into something worth sharing

And if your goal is publication, another layer of work appears.

Querying agents.

Working with publishers.

Attending conferences.

Finding beta readers.

Planning a launch.

Little by little, it becomes clear that writing a book requires far more than simply writing.

The Work No One Sees

But the invisible work isn’t just the tasks we complete.

It’s the work no one sees.

Before I record a single podcast interview, there are:

guest emails
scheduling
reminders
collecting bios
preparing interview questions
recording the conversation
writing show notes
formatting an accompanying article
creating social media posts
and following up with my guest afterward

None of those tasks are the interview itself, yet every one of them is essential to making the interview possible.

Writing is basically the same.

You’re thinking about scenes while driving to work or cooking dinner.

You’re wondering whether Chapter Twelve still fits the story you want to tell.

You’re remembering deadlines, mentally drafting emails, weighing two possible endings, or trying to connect plot threads that refuse to come together.

Some of the most demanding work writers do never appear on a to-do list.

It lives in our heads.

I’ve taken enough writing courses to know that thinking is also writing.

I’m currently taking a class designed to keep us accountable.

Each week we set a word-count goal and discuss how things went.

Sometimes we meet those goals.

Sometimes we don’t.

But outlining, solving story problems, letting ideas percolate, and giving yourself time to think are all part of the writing process.

You’re still moving your story forward, even if you aren’t putting words on the page that day.

That’s work.

And it’s work that deserves to be celebrated.

Measuring the Wrong Things

I feel like I’m falling behind all the time.

I’ve been working on the final three chapters of my novel for about four months.

It’s easy to look at that and think I should be further along by now.

What I don’t always remember to count is everything else.

I’m building a business.

I have a full-time job.

I host a podcast.

I support clients.

I’m networking.

I’m learning.

I’m writing articles like this one.

None of those things add to my manuscript’s word count.

But they’re still moving me toward the life I’m trying to build.

I am doing things.

I’m just measuring the wrong things.

As creatives trying to grow sustainable careers, the urgent tasks naturally demand our attention.

Clients need support.

Bills need to be paid.

Emails need replies.

Marketing needs consistency.

Family deserves our presence.

Meanwhile, our creative work patiently waits.

The irony is that the work we care about most often receives whatever time and energy remains.

What If We Measured Differently?

So what if we measured our creative lives differently?

What if success wasn’t defined only by chapters finished or books published?

What if we acknowledged the full range of work that supports our writing, the visible and the invisible?

Maybe we’d realize we’re not as lazy as we thought.

Maybe we’d stop feeling guilty for not writing enough.

Maybe we’d make different decisions about where our time and energy go.

Protecting your creative life doesn’t begin with becoming more productive.

It begins with recognizing everything you’re already carrying.

Because before we can protect our creative capacity, we must be aware.

We have to acknowledge all the work that makes creativity possible.

***

About The Author

Iman Llompart is a Creative Systems & Delegation Strategist who helps writers, book coaches, and creative founders protect their creative capacity by building the structure around their work — through workflows, client systems, and operational clarity.

Take her Creative Capacity Check-In Assessment to identify where your business may be quietly draining your creative energy.

Instagram @imanllompart • Instagram photos and videos

The post Protecting the Creative Life: The Work Writers Don’t Give Themselves Credit For by Iman Llompart appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Editing Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel: Genre, Tropes, and Character Arc

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:16:26 +0000

Editing Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel: Genre, Tropes, and Character Arc – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 213

***

“Identify in your own book what are the tropes that you’re using that are identifiable by any reader. And notice if they’re all working for you.“ – Beth Barany

In this How To Write the Future podcast episode, “Editing Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel: Genre, Tropes, and Character Arc” host Beth Barany explains why the “Edit Your Novel Checklist” is a great resource for writers who have finished their rough draft, encourages you to think about your reader and genre expectations, and provides an example and walk-through of a story showing you how to problem solve issues with your character arc.

This episode also includes discussion of book tropes; how to hone in on the biggest problem in your story; the next stages of your story writing; and whether that stage includes beta readers or an editor.

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

RESOURCES

Support the podcast! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

Get the workbook: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

Join the Edit Lab! https://bethbarany.com/editlab

About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for episode 213 – Editing Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel: Genre, Tropes, and Character Arc

Editing Checklist Next Steps

BETH BARANY: Recently, one of my students in the Edit Lab asked for more clarification about how to edit their manuscript. Now, they already had the Edit Your Novel checklist, which I encourage you to go get, which is a high level review of your book. It encourages you to read your book, and make notes, and score yourself based on all the different parts of editing your novel, from the high level down to story, plot, structure, character development, and even punctuation.

Once you have that score, now what? This is what I think she was asking, now what? How do you dig deeper into editing your novel?

[00:45] Genre And Reader Expectations

I always go back to the starting point, which is what kind of story are you writing? Meaning, what is your genre?

Now, I’m talking to science fiction and fantasy writers. I assume you have a rough understanding of your genre, whether you’re writing science fiction, whether you’re writing fantasy or some kind of, some people call it science magic, or a fantasy, like fantasy romance, fantasy adventure, fantasy mystery.

Same with science fiction. Maybe you’re writing science fiction mysteries, like I do, or science fiction thrillers, which are very popular, or science fiction adventure, or fantasy adventure, which is also very popular, what we might also call epic fantasy. Maybe you’re writing a saga. Maybe you’re writing a cozy science fiction or a cozy fantasy.

So as you can see, I’m talking about genre and subgenre, and what do all these terms mean? They are basically reader expectations. And it goes with trends, we have put names to the kinds of stories we’re talking about

Now, these things are trendy. They change with the times. Some things stand the test of time, and that’s all relative, right? Like, what span of time are we talking about?

[01:57] Tropes And Comp Titles

So for today, for this month, this year, the last few years, look at your genre and sub-genre and sub-sub-genre and see if you can identify what are the tropes.

What are tropes? Tropes are things that reoccur again and again. If I were to tell you that I was writing a story about an orphan going on an adventure to reclaim their throne.

Okay, right away you start to piece all that together and you have a kind of story. I’ve just told you some main elements of that story.

What I haven’t yet told you is the kind of world we’re in, whether it’s a fantasy or a science fiction or a contemporary or historical. So those things can come in some more. Maybe I said there’s a magic sword and a secret pertaining to this orphan’s power, and there were magical pirates and wizards.

Right away, all those things I just said place that story inside of a fantastical world, a fantasy. So when it comes time to think about, well, now, now that I’ve done a high level analysis of my book, how do I figure out what to do next?

And I’m gonna say it again, here’s where you wanna really understand your genre and maybe study and look at the other books in your genre, which are called comps or complementary titles.

Identify in your own book what are the tropes that you’re using that are identifiable by any reader. And notice if they’re all working for you.

[03:40] Fixing The Character Arc

If you have a main character who’s an orphan, which is a very common trope, what is the change arc this orphan is gonna go through?

We all read for character transformation, I believe, in, in the genres, and literary can be a whole other conversation, and that’s not my specialty. So if you have a character who’s an orphan, by the end of the book, we want some kind of resolution to have happen, especially if being an orphan is what drives that character in some way.

So now we’re talking about internal character arc, and this is usually the first place I go when I start editing my story, and also my clients’ stories, is I’m like, is it clear what is the character changing starting at, and then a new place, they’re ending up at? So that’s one thing to look at. Is that change clear? And if it’s not clear, now what? Let’s make it clear at the beginning. I always come back to the beginning of the story. What is their starting point, their starting question? And now we start to get into questions of character development, and really being clear about what this character wants and needs, how they think of themself, how they think of the world, and what, from over here as the author position, the, the God position, do we know they’re missing?

They don’t know necessarily what’s missing. They might feel off or off-kilter in some way, but they don’t know what’s missing. But we as the author do.

[05:11] Wounds Lies And Identity

And some people call that the wound. Some people call that the lie. I don’t like to call it those two things because, well, actually, the wound is good, ’cause we’re often driven by our wounds, and I self-identify with them.

Like I am my wound. And I say we ’cause human beings, right? We base our characters on real people, are walking around with a wound that we identify as who we are. But somewhere deep down, we crave a change, and we crave to identify ourselves in a different way. So for example I am an orphan is an identity.

But what if, and I’m working on a story like this, what if my main character realizes halfway through that they weren’t orphaned by, by, from the beginning, that they actually have parents, and the memories of their parents start to come back to them?

So what if the change arc for my character is at the beginning she thinks, “Oh, I’m just an orphan, and I was in an orphanage, and then I left the orphanage,” and then by the end of the story, what if she’s realizes, well, actually, this big thing, this big tragedy happened, and I was orphaned. I was with my parents and they died because of this big conflict, and actually, I have a heritage that I come from, a lineage, and I can claim the lineage.

Before she doesn’t know her lineage, she just thinks she was p- plucked off the street, and put into the orphanage, but then she finds out later on that she actually has a lineage, and she is not an orphan anymore really. And by the end of the story, she could be thinking about actually, I belong to this long lineage, and who I really am is someone different, and then I, whatever that difference is, I would have her, I’m gonna have her declare that and say, “Oh, I am blah, blah, blah now.

I am a daughter of this lineage,” and I would make it be very specific.

[06:58] Hone In On Biggest Problem

So what I’ve done right now is I’ve honed in on one specific problem to fix in the story. And what I’m often doing in revisions is after I do my analysis and I, ch- check it out, see if this works for you, take the Edit Your Novel Checklist, do your read-through, analyze your story, score yourself, s- your story, and then hone in on the biggest problem.

For me, it’s always a character issue. For some writers, it’s plot. It really depends. You’re gonna have to try if you’re not sure.

[07:33] Beta Readers And Editors

Once you’ve fixed your character arc, and by fixed, I mean you’ve done your brainstorms, you’ve made your notes, you’ve made your changes in your story, now what? At this point, it depends.

Either you’ve taken the story as far as you can go and you’re pretty happy with the plot, you like your new character changes, you’ve cleaned up the manuscript as best you can with char- you know, with, with commas and punctuation and spelling. Now what? The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to start to bring it out to critique partners and beta readers, and maybe hire an editor.

I myself don’t edit manuscripts just by themselves. I actually teach people how to become better editors of their own work, and I do that through my group mastermind for science fiction and fantasy writers. And that is a very small group, and you have to apply to that, and it’s really a place where you learn how to improve as a writer.

So I’m not the kind of person who will take your manuscript, edit it, and hand it back. There’s lots of great other editors out there who can help you with that, and if you need recommendations, just reach out to me. I know a lot of people.

[08:41] Wrap Up And Farewell

So that’s all I’m gonna talk about this week. If this,provoked, evoked any questions for you, let me know so that I can make a new episode on it.

I really believe that editing a novel is a very fruitful and wonderful endeavor, and it really pays for you to understand how to edit your own novel. Even if an editor does it for you, you still have to go in and make decisions. So making those decisions is our work as writers, and I know you can do that.

All right, that’s it for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper. And I hope you enjoyed that little clip with Rocket the Cat. Ciao for now.

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061

Need instructions on how to leave a review? Go here.

***

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ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
EDITORIAL by Iman Llompart

c 2025 BETH BARANY

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

Like the work we do? Tip us! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

The post Editing Your Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novel: Genre, Tropes, and Character Arc appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Wasting Time by Catharine Bramkamp

Guest Contributor — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:00:24 +0000

Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Catharine Bramkamp as she shares with us “Wasting Time.” Enjoy!

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The Fear of Wasting Time

How many years have we spent not, under any circumstances, wasting time?

I spent two decades panicked about wasting time.

There were too many things to do: the work, the relationships, the dinners, the laundry, the homework, the forced family fun.

In the throes of our thirties and forties, there was never enough time.

And if we did take time to create, to relax, to even rest, we called it stealing time as if napping was a felony.

Call us criminals.

When the Body Forces Us to Slow Down

Sometimes our push to be efficient and get it all done triggers a health issue that forces us to rest.

We are familiar with that phenomena, where our bodies express what our conscious minds deny.

Too much stress?

We have an accident, we catch cold, our bodies somehow manage to slow us down.

Do you always get sick in January — called flu season?

It’s the only response to the holidays our bodies can express.

The Myth of Self-Care

I also love the directive to “Carve out time for you.”

Or “Take time for self- care.”

If people weren’t overworked and underpaid in the first place, maybe the bubble bath wouldn’t be necessary.

Plus the idea that we can solve the systemic problems in our culture with bath salts is insulting.

Art Looks Like Wasted Time

Enter your art practice.

Art absolutely looks like a waste of time.

To make art, we must slow down to a human pace.

For two centuries we’ve worked at an increasingly faster rate but our ancient nervous systems haven’t kept up.

With the Industrial Revolution, with computers, with wonderfully fast cars, we’ve picked up speed believing that moving fast and breaking things is the way forward.

But breaking things may still be a bad idea and the only thing I really need to move fast is an ambulance.

So let’s re-think the need for speed at the grocery store.

Or in our garden.

Or with our art.

Slowing Down Is Part of the Creative Process

Don’t keep pulling up the tomato plants to examine the root system.

Allow that starting at a blank page or just figuring out how to hold a new instrument is part of the thinking.

Art is not fast, despite stop action films on Instagram.

No one does anything in under 15 seconds.

We don’t even do much in 15 minutes.

Give yourself 15 hours, then measure your progress.

One of the many benefits of making art is it demands we slow.

That’s how we get into our flow.

We must take time.

Even that phrase Take Your Time, resonates.

Take it.

Okay, steal it.

Take Your Time — Or Steal It

Think of time as the pile of fries on your partner’s plate.

You ordered the salad, but you wanted the fries.

And each fry you steal from their plate tastes better because they are an undeserved gift.

Time is the same.

Time tastes better when it was meant for something else.

The Gift of Unexpected Time

Remember how delicious a snow day was?

A sudden break in the schedule, all our appointments and obligations suddenly rendered impossible.

A whole day of — nothing.

Or the pretend disappointment over a cancelled meeting?

A free hour!

But you wasted it didn’t you?

Instead of walking in the park, you caught up on email.

Instead, what if that gift of time was spent on your art?

What If You Chose Art Instead?

Once you get into the swing of stolen time, a surprising (or dangerous) idea emerges.

What if you didn’t have to steal the time from a cancelled meeting?

What if you quit the group that holds meetings and do your art instead?

What if you replaced that committee time with art studio time?

Oh man, that is crazy talk.

Still . . .

Learn More

Look for my new book — Take Up Space — Art is Your Second Act.

***

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catharine Bramkamp is a successful writing coach, Chief Storytelling Officer, former co-producer of Newbie Writers Podcast, and author of a dozen books including the Real Estate Diva Mysteries series, and The Future Girls series. She holds two degrees in English and is an adjunct university professor. After fracturing her wrist, she has figured out there is very little she is able to do with one hand tied behind her back. She delights in inspiring her readers.

The post Wasting Time by Catharine Bramkamp appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

How To Use Notion AI for Developmental Editing

Kerry-Ann McDade — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:27:39 +0000

How To Use Notion AI for Developmental Editing – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 212

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“ My end goal is to be able to say to the writer, “Here’s where you’re weak, here’s where you’re strong.” – Beth Barany

In this forward thinking How To Write the Future episode, titled “How To Use Notion AI for Developmental Editing” host Beth Barany shares how authors can use AI ethically to help them in their writing, explains how she uses Notion AI for her clients, and includes a detailed work-through and the step-by-step analysis of how it works.

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

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JOIN: For fiction writers! You’ve finished your first draft! Congrats! Now what?

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About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for Privacy‑First AI for Developmental Editing (Without Uploading Your Draft)

Why This AI Episode

BETH BARANY: So I was recently talking with an author of mine who really liked this process I made for her using AI tools. And then also, another client of mine asked me, ” How is AI impacting your life?” I’m like, ” Oh my God, that’s such a big question.”

So I thought I would devote today’s episode to talking about the way I’m using AI specifically to help writers.

I understand there are writers out there who are categorically opposed to using any of these AI tools. This episode is not for you. This episode is for people who are curious about how to use AI tools and do it in an ethical way, and actually have it be helpful.

[00:50] Meet Beth Barany

So hi, everyone, I’m Beth Barany. I run How to Write the Future podcast. I’m your host and guide. I am a creativity coach and writer, writing teacher. I write science fiction and fantasy. I’m here to share tips, share my wisdom, share my point of view, and help you walk away with something useful.

Also, I really believe that our stories can help us reshape who we are as human beings. And so with that light, let’s dive into today’s episode about how AI can actually benefit you as a writer.

[01:25] The Editing Project

So I work with novelists, and I have one use case to share with you today. And that is I spent, gosh, a year, maybe more, working with this author, going through her chapters and offering up comments and edits. And then she would send it back to me with questions and changes, and then I would answer back with more comments, and I would also say, “Hey, good job here,” and answering her questions.

So about half her book, we did two rounds of edits, and then the second half of her book, I think we just did so far one round of edits. And when I speak about edits, in this case, we are staying in the realm of developmental edits. There was very few line edits in this this round. It was a first pass on her novel, and it was developmental edits. About character, about story, about plot, about world-building.

Okay, so there we are. We’re done. Whew. It’s took us some time to get through all of this, and because we were doing it over time in small chunks. She is a client of mine in the group mastermind program where she gets a monthly call with me, and I edit her book monthly.

And we did it, actually, we broke it into smaller pieces, and so in any given month, maybe I was looking at a piece of her novel every week. Sometimes twice a week. We just cut it into really small chunks so that it was easier to deal with. So every chapter has six parts, which was fine with me. I’m flexible.

[02:55] The Real Problem

So I had all of this material and tons of comments, 36 chapters. I touched her manuscript, nine times in every chapter. And that is what I needed to get analyzed.

My end goal was: how can I analyze and compile all of my comments?

Let’s look at the trends. What are the trends? What are her weak areas, and what are her strong areas?

Now, I knew intuitively that this was a great use case for using AI tools because this is what they’re good at. They’re good at compiling a whole lot of information and summarizing it.

[03:26] Privacy First Approach

But I wanted to do it in a way that I did not feed her book into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever.

I didn’t want her book to go into one of these engines at all. It… So I’m like, “But I still wanna use the tools, and I know they can shortcut this for me.” So here’s what I did.

[03:46] Notion AI Solution

I worked with Notion AI, Notion’s AI, and I pay for that. That’s the only place I pay f- to have access to the souped-up version, uh, the AI tools.

Not the free tools, but the paid tools. And AI, Notion, I believe, uses a combination of a few different…I think they use Anthropic, Claude’s Anthropic, and I think they use ChatGPT, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I could be wrong. If I am, it’s gonna be in the show notes, so don’t worry.

What’s important here is I told Notion what are my restrictions. I said, “I don’t wanna feed this book into an, into an LLM,” a large language model, which are used to build these tools. “What I want is to have you compil- or have a tool like you compile all my comments in a way that’s organized so we could see what’s going on in the prologue, chapter one, chapter two, etcetera, all the way to chapter 36.”

So I said, “What are my options?” I actually asked it to tell me all the options, and it gave me a bunch of options. A lot of them I eliminated because they were either feeding it into the LLM or too complicated or had too many steps. And honestly, I can’t remember what they are, but I can tell you what the solution is. What we came up with, which suited what I was already used to.

Notion is a land of databases, and I have already been working with different databases, so I knew their value.

[05:11] Building The Macro

What I ended up doing is having Notion write a macro for me that I loaded into Microsoft Word. Now, I have the lightest understanding of macros. They’re essentially code that are like shortcuts that can do multiple steps in a push of a button.

I understood the concept. So I worked with Notion’s AI to build a macro, and I, because I don’t read code, it wrote the code for me, but, and because I could read it but not understand it, I asked it to tell me what it does. And I went through that very carefully, what it doesn’t do, and it asked me questions, and I answered them, and it, I had it build this macro.

Then I tested it. I followed the instructions how to load the macro into Microsoft Word so I could use it anytime I wanted to. So I tested it, seemed to work fine.

[06:03] Workflow In Action

Here’s what I do now. Is I organize the chapter, I compile all the parts of the chapter. For example, I was looking at chapter three.

There’s 24 parts, and some of those are her things that she sent to me, and I can easily see what they are, and then some of it, half of it is my notes to her.

So I calculated. There’s 12 Word documents in chapter three that I want analyzed. So I open up each one, hit the macro button. It outputs for me a CSV file, a spreadsheet file. When I have all of those, I upload them into Notion. It creates a database. I don’t really, I don’t read the database. I ask Notion AI to read the database, and I’ve already told it what I want. I want it to compile a summary.

That’s my end goal. My end goal is to be able to say to the writer, “Here’s where you’re weak, here’s where you’re strong,” and, for chapter three.

And then eventually, I will have her strengths and weaknesses compiled for every chapter, and then I will do a macro analysis.

For every step of this analysis, I’m basically having Notions AI summarize my comments and put them into a readable format. Short paragraphs with bullet points, with subheaders. That’s it.

[07:20] Why It Works

I think this is a good use of AI. This is very detailed left-brained work that I’m not excellent at. I’m excellent at the emotional intuitive work, but also I understand story structure and I understand how to build a good story. So my comments to her are structural and also character-oriented.

And I’m thinking of how is the reader gonna relate to this? Is this interesting? Is it captivating? Does it grab me? And again, only on the story level and on the character level, not yet on the sentence level. Take a deep breath. This is what AI is good for. It’s compiling a whole bunch of information and organizing it.

[08:03] Ethical Tips And Wrap

So I encourage you to to play with this. You could develop your own macro. I would definitely support your desire not to feed your book into any of the AI tools because then they get to… it’s, they’re gonna take it, and it’s, if it’s connected to the master, databases, it could be used. You know, if you don’t check the right button, they could be training off of your data.

So if you don’t want them to do that, then go ahead and find a workaround. So this was my workaround. The writer is so grateful. She gets to see a summary with bullet points. It is so useful. So let me know, in the comments or write me what you think of this use case. If you’ve come up with any other use cases that both protect the privacy of the writer and of your own writing and help you, like a writer’s assistant, and help you in ways that maybe you’re weak and you’re strong over here and it’s helping you over there.

All right. So that’s it for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper.

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061

Need instructions on how to leave a review? Go here.

***

Support our work for creatives: leave a tip: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

***

ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
EDITORIAL by Iman Llompart

c 2025 BETH BARANY

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

Like the work we do? Tip us! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

The post How To Use Notion AI for Developmental Editing appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Memoir Writing as Therapeutic Practice by Nicole Plumridge

Guest Contributor — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 08:00:12 +0000

Let’s welcome back Nicole Plumridge as she shares with us “Memoir Writing as Therapeutic Practice.” Enjoy!

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Taking a trip down memory lane may not be the nostalgic journey many imagine it to be.

Memory lane may be a distorted, fractured place, laden with quiet skeletons ready to be resurrected at the slightest invitation.

However, anyone on the healing journey knows that this is precisely the soul arena that needs to be excavated — revealed to be healed as many within the wellness community advocate.

While there are many modalities to go about this — therapy, meditation, reiki, nature walks — what more resonant way for the writer than to write into the experience?

Memoir as Healing Modality

Memoir writing is not simply the act of reconstructing the past and logging memories in chronological order.

Memoir is a form of creative nonfiction where the page offers a safe space to unpick the narrative threads weaving life events together.

It is the act of remembering and re-interpreting the past as well as one’s relationship to it.

Through noticing triggers, patterns and experiences one is able to separate the events from the emotions involved, gaining a sense of detachment which makes processing the past easier.

Many writers find that moving from the experiencer to the witness allows them to see their past from a different perspective.

The role of the observer offers the possibility of witnessing the carousel of life without the emotional charge certain memories may carry with them.

Expressive Writing: An Emotional Container

James Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, developed a technique called Expressive Writing.

This protocol involves having individuals choose an emotionally laden memory and subsequently write about it for 15-20 minutes every day.

Research suggested that participants who engaged in the exercise regularly reported reduced stress and anxiety as well as improvements in markers associated with physical wellbeing.

While past events remained unchanged, one of the key contributing factors to the transformation was that the individuals were able to organize their experiences into a coherent framework.

Instead of fragmented thoughts, emotions and experiences floating chaotically within, the act of writing solidified the memories into a container, making it more manageable to process.

Historically, humanity has leaned on storytelling as a means to make sense of the world.

The container of a story offers both a sense of clarity over the past and a roadmap for the future.

While this is true on a collective level, it is also true on an individual level.

Through exploring our personal memories, inherited stories and belief systems we not only record the past but have the potential to rewrite the future.

When the Witness is Witnessed

Publishing your personal memoir can bring an additional layer of healing to the experience.

You are no longer operating in typical writerly isolation but being seen in your vulnerability.

Sharing can be among a close-knit few or it can be a more expansive endeavour, depending on what the story is ready for.

While the journey you have walked is uniquely yours, it can provide a framework for someone navigating similar experiences, searching for a guiding light.

Your story can be that lighthouse, offering hope to someone searching for a way forward amidst the choppy waters of life.

Keeping It Between You and the Page

While memoir writing can be shared, connecting you to others who have been through similar experiences and allowing you to create a sense of shared meaning, it can also remain a solitary healing process.

One of the beautiful things about writing memoir to heal the self is that there are no fancy bells and whistles necessary — no expensive computer programs or even past writing experience are required to engage with this healing modality.

Memoir writing is accessible to anyone with the ability and willingness to remember, notice and peel back the mythic layers of personal memory — discovering the lessons, insights and epiphanies nestled within.

Authoring Our Story: An Act of Empowerment

While we cannot rewrite the past, we do have agency over our future.

Sifting through memories, confronting the challenges while recognizing the wins remind us of our resilience and strength.

The page reveals the chapters of our lives which we have successfully navigated as well as the bookmarked ones, patiently waiting for us to return with fresh eyes and a heavy dose of compassion.

Careful reflection and reframing provide us with the tools to write the future, gently leaving behind the narratives which no longer serve, adding footnotes for further examination and ending chapters only to begin new ones.

Authoring our story not only helps us understand who we are, but how we came to be.

It gives us the potential to switch plotlines when we need to, introduce new characters and narrate new experiences so that we can decorate our narrative with the epic illustrations they deserve.

An Evolving Story

Memoir shows us that memories are not moments trapped in capsules of time relegated to a distant past.

Instead, through writing, it reveals that the past is a living entity, capable of puppeteering the narrative strings if we allow it.

Past, present and future converge on the page until a narrative which can only be yours finally emerges.

When this happens, each page flipped in the narrative of your story is no longer turned into trepidation and fear.

Instead, a longing fills that space — an excitement fuels the words as they tumble across the page, writing themselves in a scribbled, enthusiastic mess.

Instead of slamming your book of life shut at the end of the day, desperate for the escape sleep offers, you may find the quiet urge to explore just one more chapter before lights out.

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About The Author

Nicole Plumridge is a three-time published author whose debut novel became an Amazon bestseller.

Her work has appeared in The Poetryhood and Half-Light Magazine.

She is also a creativity and book coach who supports creatives in building creative practices and reconnecting with their inner magic.

Connect with Nicole and book a discovery call if your creativity is calling you.

Website: https://nicoleplumridgecoaching.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authornicoleplumridge

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-plumridge-39512368

The post Memoir Writing as Therapeutic Practice by Nicole Plumridge appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Write the Future: Our Five Themes

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:11:57 +0000

Write the Future: Our Five Themes – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 211

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“Writing craft is about meaning and the reader experience. I really don’t teach rigid rules because language is evolving constantly, and it’s all about choices.” – Beth Barany

In this How To Write the Future podcast episode, titled “Write the Future: Our Five Themes,” host Beth Barany shares the five themes often discussed on the podcast, which include writing craft tips, helpful advice, walkthroughs, and interviews.

Beth also explains why she believes our personal creativity can be used to reshape humanity and shares the one thing that she believes beats “the hustle” every time.

The five topic themes:

World building
Creative Process & Mindset
Publishing
Marketing
AI Ethics

Do you have a question on one of the topics above? Then Beth invites you to get in touch, and your question could be shared in an upcoming podcast episode.

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

RESOURCES

JOIN: For fiction writers! You’ve finished your first draft! Congrats! Now what?

Join the Future-Ready Writer membership and get premium weekly lessons and a monthly Q&A on Zoom. Subscribe: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061/subscribe

FREE: Sign up here to get your World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers

Overwhelmed by world-building for your sci-fi/fantasy novel? Use these prompts to brainstorm your story’s world: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

SHOP**: Sci‑Fi & Fantasy 24 Writing Prompts:** https://ko-fi.com/s/4ac9160a74

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FOR CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSIONALS – BUILD YOUR BUSINESS SERVING WRITERS

Support our work for creatives!

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GET SUPPORT FOR YOUR FICTION WRITING BY A NOVELIST AND WRITING TEACHER AND COACH

Schedule an exploratory call here and see if Beth can support you today: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/discovery-call/

About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for Write the Future: Our Five Themes

Introduction

BETH BARANY: Hi, everyone. Beth Barany here with How to Write the Future podcast. Today, I’m sick, so no camera.

All right, on to this week’s episode.

I wanna let you know some of the topics that we’ve been covering on How to Write the Future, for the last four years. I’m coming up on the fourth anniversary, so exciting, and there are five main topics that I have talked about, and of course can continue to talk about.

So if you have questions on these five topics, let me know. And of course, I accept questions on other topics as well.

[00:35] Podcast Focus and Optimism

My podcast is really for fiction writers. It is for fiction writers who write science fiction, fantasy, anything that falls under the speculative fiction umbrella.

I especially like genre mashups.

Also, my stance is one of obstinate… Can I say that again? Obstinate optimism.

Meaning I really believe that fiction and our creativity, can be tools for good and can be tools that can reshape humanity. and there’s some other core beliefs that I have.

Writing craft is about meaning and the reader experience. I really don’t teach rigid rules because language is evolving constantly, and it’s all about choices. Choices about your villains, the story structure or conflict or character motivation. It’s all in the service of aliveness, emotional resonance, clarity, and forward momentum.

What I care about and what I want you to care about is helping the reader be pulled through the story.

[01:44] Worldbuilding Through Character

The other stance that I have is that world-building is filtered through character.

We only wanna reveal what is important through your character’s perception in a way that it supports immersion and avoids info dumps. I have done a lot of episodes on world-building. And really culture and context belong in the foundation of your story, it’s not just decoration. I don’t care about adding more lore. What I care about is what your characters know and use and come from. That’s culture.

[02:17] Creative Process and Mindset

Thirdly, creative process.

I love talking about creative process. I believe that sustainable creativity comes from trust, compassion, and small doable steps.

Really my signature is around self-trust, being gentle with yourself around your messy first drafts, and practices that reduce shame or pressure on yourself. I treat mindset like a practical craft tool. How you write does affect what you can write, and in my mind, the sky’s the limit. You can write in a lot of different ways if your heart desires.

[02:54] Publishing and Marketing Values

Which brings me to publishing and marketing.

I have a heart-centered approach.

A heart-centered approach that’s values aligned, and that’s what I encourage you to have your focus on for your marketing. I think that beats hustle every single time, at least for me and people like me. Marketing and the business side of being an author is part of the creative path, not something outside of it, but part of it.

So the big question is, how can writers sell their books without selling their soul? And they can, because I think you can choose strategies that fit your strengths, build real relationships, and aim for long-term sustainability, not desperation.

It’s a whole other way of thinking about being in business, and I talk a lot about this in my creative entrepreneur incubator programs, and I bring it all here too as well.

[03:50] AI Ethics for Writers

And lastly, about AI and other technology.

I think we can be curious and ethical. I think we can use these tools without surrendering authorship.

In fact, I don’t think we want to surrender authorship. That’s what makes us unique. That’s what makes us human. We are not machines.

I really don’t take an all or nothing stance around AI. I really emphasize critical thinking, being aware of consent, being aware of rights, and really bringing your own human creativity and taking leadership.

Don’t cede your higher thinking skills to these machines.

I really encourage writers to understand the landscape of the AI and other tools coming and to respond intentionally. Not fearfully and not blindly. To really think about it for discernment.

[04:35] Wrap Up and Invitation

I thought I would tell you, the big buckets that I talk about, so you can ask me more questions about these.

The best way to ask me a question is to email me from howtowritethefuture.com and I will see your question. Also, you can @ bethbarany me on the socials. I’m on most of the socials. But really the best way is email. I could pull out some highlighted episodes that point to the things I listed here today, but there’s over 200, so I invite you to explore the backlog.

You can also see them all listed at howtowritethefuture.com, or if you’re looking for something specific, write me and ask me and I’ll help you find it.

So that’s it for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper.

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061

Need instructions on how to leave a review? Go here.

***

Support our work for creatives: leave a tip: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

***

ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade
EDITORIAL by Iman Llompart

c 2026 BETH BARANY

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

Like the work we do? Tip us! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

The post Write the Future: Our Five Themes appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Mother-Daughter Duo on Folklore, Family, Finishing the Draft: Rachel McLaughlin and Michele Burns

Iman Llompart — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:07:57 +0000

YouTube

Listen or Watch

Youtube | Spotify

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

In this heartfelt second episode, host Iman Llompart sits down with mother–daughter writing duo Rachel McLaughlin and Michele Burns for an intimate, meaningful conversation about creativity, fear, and the power of growing as writers side by side.

Rachel and Michele dive into how storytelling has shaped their family across generations, how they each found their way into writing during very different life seasons, and how creativity becomes both anchor and expression through motherhood, identity shifts, and self-rediscovery.

They open up about their deepest writing fears—being misunderstood, not being read, or exposing too much of themselves—and share the rituals and mindset shifts that help them keep writing even when the inner critic gets loud. Through laughter, honesty, and a rare look into a shared creative relationship, they show how writing can be a lifeline, a mirror, and a bridge between generations.

If you’ve ever questioned whether your writing is “enough,” this conversation is a reminder that every draft, every wobble, and every return to the page matters.

Episode Highlights

A beautiful glimpse into the creative lineage of a mother and daughter writing together
How life transitions—motherhood, career changes, self-discovery—shaped their writing journeys
Their biggest writing fears and how vulnerability plays into their work
The small rituals that help them move through overwhelm and get unstuck
The unique support system they’ve built for each other through honest feedback and encouragement
The surprising emotional depth and messiness they’ve discovered in the drafting process
Sneak peeks into their current projects—from morally complex women’s fiction to dark academia and speculative YA

Transcript for episode 2 – Mother Daughter Duo

Greetings

Michele: How are you?

Iman: Good. We’ll just wait a little bit then for Rachel to join.

Michele: Oh, she’ll, she, she’s ready. She’s, she’s ready. I’m just gonna tell my others not to, uh, FaceTime.

Iman: Oh, okay. Okay.

Michele: Uh,

Iman: okay, well then I’ll just, um,

Michele: Rachel, Rachel is, looks like she’s coming. She’s coming now.

Iman: Okay.

Michele: So Rachel and me online meeting, do not FaceTime cause we FaceTime each other a million times a day. Hello.

Iman: Hi, Rachel.

Rachel: Hello. Can you hear me? All right.

Iman: Yes, yes, we can.

Michele: Yeah, I’ve, I’ve turned off my fan because I didn’t want that to interfere.

Iman: Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Michele: And how hot is it?

Iman: Yeah. Yeah, it’s hot. But I mean, obviously a good thing is that for the most part, we’re always inside, so it doesn’t really affect all that much, but,

Michele: Well, it’s supposed to be cooler because it’s raining. It is not cooler. It is hot. It is muggy. It is. We haven’t slept, have we, Rachel?

Rachel: Oh my gosh, no. No. Although mine was probably because I had caffeine a bit too late yesterday as too hard. Yeah. Yeah. That was my fault. Um, yeah, I’ve told the boys to be quiet and um. They’re doing all right so far. I’m slightly worried that my video’s just gonna do that thing that it likes to do sometimes where it freezes.

Iman: Oh, okay.

Rachel: If it does that, I will just have to turn it off and back on again, but we’ll just,

Michele: Yeah. ’cause it usually freezes on the most unflattering pictures.

Iman: Yeah, of course. That’s always the case. Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah.

[01:51] Starting the Meeting

Iman: Okay. So I just wanted to thank you guys for, for joining, making the time. Obviously I know that both of you have a full busy lives and families and everything to take care of, so I really appreciate it. Um, and I just wanted to give just like a little bit of an intro first before we get started. Then I’ll read both of your guys’ intros and then we will get started with questions.

[02:24] Introducing the Guests

Um, okay, so this is, my name is Iman, obviously, and this is Beyond the Rough Draft. The series I started while fighting through the chaos of my own romantasy draft. You guys obviously know everything about that. Um, it can feel like such a solo mission, but it doesn’t have to be. So in each episode I’ll be talking to people like you, uh, writers from all stages, how they manage the messy parts of creativity. Uh, because I feel like obviously people who are in our same situation, if they hear something like this, maybe they can find, um. Either adopt, copy, any mantras or rituals that you guys use to help get them unstuck and move forward with their draft.

So I will read a little bit about your bio first, Rachel. So based in the UK, Rachel is a writer currently working on her debut, An NA Speculative novel about the power of dreaming. Her background is in English literature and psychology two areas she hopes to bring into her writing with the focus on mental health, neurodivergence and inclusion. She is a keen reader of SFF, obviously science fiction fantasy. Psychological thriller and romance and when not reading or writing can be found chasing after two children or frolicking at a fantasy themed ball.

And Michelle is a busy lady with six grandchildren, six cats and dreams of seeing her stories in bookshops. And maybe even the big screen. As an ex deputy head teacher, singer, and academic journals contributor, storytelling is the thread that has run through her career. Her academic background is in computing and English language and literature, and she’s on the final edit of her debut novel whilst resuming a second she started 40 years ago. Wow.

So obviously no one knows this, but I will mention this now that both Rachel and Michelle are actually mother and daughter. So I feel like that is an extremely rare dynamic, um, that happens in the creative field. I feel like most of us, like I mentioned before, most of us feel like we’re doing it alone, so. The fact that you two are able to do it together and bounce ideas off of each other and kind of each other’s support system in that aspect, I feel is, is really great. So I feel like when I’m talking, I’m talking to my parents or to my sister about it they kind of get that this glazed look, sometimes.

They don’t understand what it is that I’m talking about.

My mom was telling me, oh, I just watched a movie about a novelist and I thought that all you had to do was just write the damn thing and that was it, you’d be published. I’m like, there’s a little bit more to it than just that.

Rachel: Yeah.

Iman: Yeah, I wish it could be that easy. But yeah, it’s just so much

Michele: Me too.

Iman: So much that goes along with it. So obviously I’m not saying that they’re not supportive, they’re definitely, uh, they definitely are, but it’s just different of course, when you’re going through the same thing. So, um, something else too that obviously the audience is not aware of is that Rachel and I know each other, we have, um. We have a, uh, biweekly meeting that we do to try to help each other, motivate each other to finish our books, and we met at a Jericho Writing Festival last year in London. So, um, yeah, that’s, I feel like that’s a nice, uh, fact to let people know that we’ve been through this journey for a little bit now together.

Rachel: Yeah.

Iman: And yeah, definitely feel like without your encouragement, I still would’ve been stuck on like the first. I’m still stuck, but I would’ve been, I wouldn’t have pushed through as much as I have. So yeah, I really appreciate, appreciate it. So I’ll just get into like the questions now.

[06:12] Rachel’s Writing Journey

Um, I just wanted to know like between, obviously Rachel in your case, creativity does run in your family growing up because obviously your mother’s also a writer, but, um, Michele in your case, was, was that the same, like, were your parents creative or did they nurture that when you were younger?

Michele: Um, very much so in that, particularly my mother. My Dad was very creative, um, in terms of, um, electrical things and building things he could do, and he then very unusually, actually got into computers. He ended up working for, um, Amstrad and Sugar, um, and helped sort of design the first computer. So he got into computing and was really creative with things to do with wiring. So he had a massive mast in his garden that he could do his radio hand to people all over the world, which was unheard of. You know, he was the first people to have color TV that he would wire up to some magical thing. Um, but my mom, my lovely, lovely, nearly 91-year-old mom is very much at the heart of this. She is so creative. She can turn any piece of material into beautiful clothing. Not so much now with the arthritis, but she always told us stories, and I know Rachel and my other two children will remember. She has a knack of personifying everything, be it a pencil or a sausage in a pan or a bird outside.

And she would tell us all stories, um, throughout our whole life. So, I’m very lucky in that I had her, she’s definitely a massive contributor to both me and Rachel and my other children’s sort of journey.

Iman: Oh, okay. Wow.

So then, I mean, in terms of both of you, obviously Michele with, uh, Rachel growing up, like, um, how did you nurture her creative energy or when was the fir, when was it that you saw that she was really, when did she really come to you telling you that she was interested in writing?

Michele: Well, Rachel being my first. As most first children don’t come with a book that tells you how to deal with them, so you have to kind of work it out.

Iman: Mm-hmm.

Michele: And it didn’t take very long to work out that, Rachel, be careful here ’cause your head might grow a bit. She’s very smart, um, very, very observant and uh, had a very serious side to the world. So when people would lean into her pram to smile, she’d kind of lean back and be thinking about it. Um, and so she would play for hours with little small creatures making up stories and sorts of things and draw. So, I used to spend Saturday mornings would be a drawing I’d get rolls of old wall paper and um, and, and, and even buy cheap ones.

Roll them out on the table and we’d have all sorts of pens and papers and, um, we would sort of draw stories really. So, you know, who, whoever was at that end would draw something on the other end. And then I would set up her toys at night when she went to bed so she’d always wake up in the morning and she’d always tell stories with her little figures and, um, read.

I think that’s one of the key things. If you can read to your children and get into them a love of reading. A lot of it happens in here, um, because I love movies of books, but the books are no match for any of them because it’s all in here. And I think Rachel was like that so young. Um. It was easy to foster ’cause she’s interested in the world.

She’s observant and and loves her loves her books.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah. And what about you, Rachel? Like when was it that you realized that you wanted to write? How long did it take you to actually push yourself to do that? Or were you, did you not have any um, I guess fears in terms of doing that right away?

Rachel: Oh gosh. Um, I don’t know. So, I suppose I made, made up stories a lot when I was little. I remember writing a story when I was in year seven. Um, so I must have been about, I dunno, twelve or thirteen in school. Um, and really getting into it and like filling up half of my, my book in school, which is, was not what we were really meant to do, but I kind of got carried away and really loved it.

I mean, it was kind of based loosely on, um, uh a game called Zelda at the time. Zelda and the Ocarina of Time. And I really liked, um, some creatures in there. So I made up a whole story about someone going into their world. Um, and I loved it. Um, I, I dunno where that is. Um, but that was probably the first full story that I wrote.

And then I think I wrote on and off for, wow. Years, really. Um, and then I did an English literature degree and decided I’d had enough of stories for a while, um, and didn’t read a lot after that. And so, I think it took quite a few years of bits of stories. I still, in fact, even now when I’m sort of clearing out, I’ll find a notebook or sketchbook with jotted down ideas or like the first 10,000 words of something written and think, oh yeah, I remember that, but it’s not been until the last couple of years, I actually sat down and wrote something fully. Um, just ’cause life gets in the way. And I think there’s that feeling of, you know, am I really qualified to do this?

Can I actually write, you know, writers are people over there that, that are kind of, they know that they’re gonna write and they sort of, you know, they’re born thinking, yes, this is for me. Um, and, you know, do it as a first career. Um, I’ve obviously since learned that’s not at all the case. Um, but yeah, I think it took a long time before I felt like I could actually write something in full as an adult.

Iman: Yeah.

[11:55] Michelle’s Writing Journey

And so then Michelle, were you already, um, writing when you had Rachel, or did you start writing a lot later?

Michele: Yeah, I, I started writing really, really young. There was a, a movie that, that you may or may not know and, and listeners may or may not know, called Rosemary’s Baby, which is quite scary.

And I remember being completely unsatisfied with the end, so I had my little typewriter that my mom and dad had bought me, and I typed my own rewrite of the end and what happened next because I wasn’t satisfied. I even remember in, in sort of, oh, I dunno how old I must’ve been, six, seven. I remember in school writing a story that the teacher particularly loved and decided to read it out.

So I’d always done it for fun. I liked writing for fun. And then, um. As Rachel said, life does get in the way and, and on on the, you have to go to work and you have to do things and, and we didn’t have technology to help us then, and we didn’t have, uh, we used to cook a lot more and do a lot more things so time was very short, but I used to write, uh, about being pregnant and my, um, birth stories, and Rachel is my oldest of three. Um, I was pregnant for five years running and had three children in three years, so I had a lot to write about. And so, I had some things, uh, included in National Childbirth Trust Magazine

So, I decided to do some writing and submit, um, things like jokes, um, some of which were adopted because I do quite like humor.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow.

[13:33] Family Influence on Creativity

So then Rachel, like seeing your, your mom already doing this type of thing. Do you think that that helped you maybe move forward in that same path or,

Rachel: Yeah, I think so. I think because, um, because storytelling’s always been such a big part of our family, so my nan’s always told stories I think as well. When we were little, mom used to record stories for us to listen to when we went sleep as well. So, we’d hear her stories and there’d always be a, okay, I finished the story, now it’s time to go to bed. If you would like one more, you know, here’s another one. And there’d be another story and we’d just sit and listen to them like half the night. Um, so I think telling stories and writing stories, that has always been there.

And I think when you see someone do that, it feels more accessible. Um, so yeah, absolutely. I think, um, there’s a lot of writing and storytelling and art as well in our family. Um, and because we just did that a lot since we were little, um, yeah, it felt, it felt more accessible.

Iman: And do you both like bounce off ideas also maybe like with, obviously Rachel, your grandmother in your case and Michele, your mom, or.

Michele: Definitely, definitely. I mean, um, it’s thanks to Rachel that I’ve kind of got off my backside and started getting serious about finishing all the stories that were started and I mean, there are a lot that I’ve sort of started a lot of ideas scribbled down in various notebooks or whatever, and it was only when Rachel thought, I’m gonna have a go at this. I thought, why have I left it this long? Why have I done that? I, I’d kind of got, I’d kind of gone sideways by writing in some academic journals, um, being a teacher. And it was actually when I did my Masters of teaching, I was approached by one of the lecturers who asked if I would write something with him.

Um, and then approached by somebody, um, about the use of computing and IT, and lessons. So, I kind of got sidelined a little bit and, and did some published work there, but all the time are these ideas that I’ve shared with Rachel and, and the other two, um, about comedy I like, I like comedy and I like to write about comedy.

Um, so it has always been around, but I have to say is thanks to Rachel sort of knuckling down that I’ve got myself into gear really.

Iman: Well, yeah, that’s good. I mean, that’s why I feel like having this dynamic definitely can help inspire each other to move forward. Yeah.

Michele: Definitely.

Rachel: Yeah, and I think as well, so I guess it’s not just us.

So you have shared, you know, your novel at the moment with, with Nan. Um, and she’s read things like my, when we did short, uh, flash fiction competition, we sent that to her, so she’s looked at those. Um, but also my sister and sister-in-law as well. So, they’ll Beta read. Um, so, um, and my cousin as well has Beta read yours.

Um, and so yeah, I think we kind of as a family bounce off each other and share ideas. I often find if I have an idea for a story in order to get a plot sorted in my head, I just need to tell someone I need to just sort of like get it all out in one go. And that. I’m not, I’ll normally do that to mom.

Michele: Or a good example though is it was my birthday recently, and we, we shared a takeaway round at my daughter-in-law’s house and there was Rachel, my daughter-in-law, my other daughter, and we spent the whole time talking about what we’d written, books so on, and Rachel’s, uh, latest idea.

We talked it all through, at the table. We all chipped in about what we thought. Fabulous. Absolutely fabulous.

Rachel: Yeah. It’s like it ends up being like a workshop, so it’s, uh, yeah, really nice.

Iman: Yeah. And a free workshop too.

Rachel: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and we, people read that kind of genre, so it’s really nice.

Iman: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

[17:31] Facing Writing Fears

Um, what is it about writing that scares you both the most and how do you face it, whether it’s individually or together?

Michele: I think we do face things together because I will, I will speak to Rachel and say, oh, it’s rubbish. What I’ve written is rubbish or no one’s ever gonna want to read this. And Rachel has done similar to me.

However, we’ve been very lucky that we’ve both been, not been in that same place at the same time. So, we’ve been able to encourage each other, and actually, I think the scariest thing for me is that nobody will want to read it really.

That that how awful that you’ve spent so much of yourself and time and energy and people aren’t interested makes me feel quite sad just saying it.

Rachel: It won’t be the case. It won’t be the case. I mean, I think that I would be right of worries about isn’t it, that you know, no one’s gonna really understand it or they’ll misinterpret it or think what you’ve written about is somehow some something deeper meaningful about you in a certain way that it’s not, um, or it would, yeah, it would just get misunderstood, really.

Um, and yeah, I think that’s, that’s tricky. I think the other thing that I find difficult I suppose it’s more of a challenge than a fear, but is the, when you are writing and editing, there seem, it seems like there are infinite possibilities of how you can write that chapter or that scene or that sentence and that thought of, have I picked the right one?

You know, have I said that in the way that expresses the thing that I have in my head. Um, have I put it on the page in the right way? And are other people gonna be able to interpret that? Because obviously, you know, we can’t know. We can only see it from our perspectives. Um, so I think that’s one of the things that I find quite difficult.

Um, yeah.

Iman: Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately most of, most of creatives, I feel like their biggest fear is that no one will like their work.

Michele: Yeah.

Iman: Yeah.

Rachel: Mm.

Iman: And how is it that you, um, try to move past that fear? So, you basically just talk to each other about it. You reassure each other

Michele: Yes.

Iman: That you’re going on the right track?

Michele: Yeah. I call Rachel, um, I, I or I turn up randomly at her house, which I do quite frequently. Um, and I just say, oh, I just, oh. Or actually Rachel has noticed that I haven’t been writing. And we’ll say, have you done any writing? Oh no, I haven’t done any today, and then I’ll spill the, oh, I just think it’s awful and I dunno how to move from A to B and, and there’s always, there is a something in talking it through with each other I find.

Rachel: Mm-hmm.

Michele: Do you think so, Rachel?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think chatting through, and I think Iman, we found this as well in our, in our kind of working groups as well, that just having someone else to bounce ideas off of or, you know, we’ll sometimes say, you know, could we do something this way or could we do it that way?

Or we’ll say, I’m worried about this, and then we’ll end up saying to each other, actually, no, that sounds great. That sounds fine. And it’s just that little bit of reassurance. Um, I think the other thing that I find really helps is just reading, um, and particularly listening to stories. So, I think because maybe because we’ve got so much of that storytelling, I guess from Nan telling the stories a lot as well as reading. I really like to, I like to read physical books, um, and I like to read on Kindle as well, but I really like to hear them. Um, there’s something about having someone tell you the story. Um, and then for me, it kind of helps me imagine telling myself the story, if that makes sense.

Iman: Yeah.

Rachel: Um, and, uh, or, or imagine a, you know, a narrator that you particularly like telling you your own story. I find that really helpful to, to get back in the swing of things, um, or, or just being somewhere different. I find that really helpful as well. Or I space, it kind of helps me get out of my own head.

Um. So getting

Michele: That’s very true actually, because we’ve talked about this before, haven’t we? About writing outside the house and um, obviously Iman, you mentioned Jericho writers. We’ve found that having people like yourself, having a community of people who get it, is hugely important. And but thinking back to what you were saying, Rachel, about being in a different space.

I, um, recently was due to go on a cruise with, with my friend, and, um, day before we were due to go, she got poorly and couldn’t go. So I went on my own and thought, okay, I’m gonna treat this like a writing retreat. So, I moved around the ship everywhere with my laptop and my headphones so I could just get in.

I did not get a lot of editing done because everyone was so lovely and stopped with a, oh, you on your own, do you wanna, you know, come sit with us or whatever. But being near seeing the sea and being relaxed and having enough sleep and letting somebody else do the cooking and just provide this food got me in such a space that I came up with a whole new idea for a book and Rachel knew it was coming throughout the week it sort of developed. Um, and I also found myself lots of beta readers who were like, oh, what are you writing? Oh, that sounds interesting. It, I think it’s, it’s incredible to have a, different spaces b, get in the relaxing space and c, your community.

Iman: Yeah. So did a lot of these beta, beta writers. Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I pronounce it differently. Um, did a lot of them come through?

Michele: Uh, they’re doing it now. They’re doing it right now.

Iman: Oh yeah?

Michele: Yeah.

Iman: Wow. Yeah. That’s great. Wow.

[23:22] Finding Inspiration and Overcoming Blocks

So then when it comes to like trying to move forward with any, um, when you’re stuck or anything like that, that’s, those are basically the mantras or rituals that you guys have adopted, maybe going somewhere else, speaking to people about it.

Rachel: Yeah, I think going to, um, conferences or going to author panels, so hearing other writers talk, um, as well. I think just being generally near like-minded people and, um, hearing them talk about their ideas is Inspirational. It doesn’t necessarily move my idea forward in that I’m not having a conversation with them about my idea, but I think it just, it kind of gets the creative juices flowing a bit and it gets you feeling ready to move forward. Um, so yeah, I mean, like we said, we, you know, we’ve all been to Jericho Festival. We went again this year and I’m now kind of on the lookout for lots of different conferences and I’m kind of, of the mindset actually, the more that I say yes to, the more I can go to the, you know, the more helpful it will be because, it’s just, it’s, I think just being around people that love writing and love reading just helps you get in that head space.

Iman: Yeah

Michele: And on a practical note, you, you don’t have to actually go out if you don’t want to. And I’m, I’m thinking of a lovely editor we met who, um, is, um, confined to a, a mobile scooter most of the time.

And you know, if you are in that position or you are, like I was, I had three very young children couldn’t go out. We are lucky that there’s so much online now and there’s so much free stuff you can access. You don’t have to spend a fortune. You can buy writing courses and all sorts, but you know, a, for the communities, and b, just for listening to other people, there are podcasts and there are all sorts out there, and it just, as Rachel says, gets you going. I mean, there have been days when I’ve thought, oh, I could never write like that, but of course you can’t. That’s not you. Um, but yeah, you don’t have to spend any money. You don’t have to actually go anywhere, although obviously it works for me. Um, just, just get creative, go looking online.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

[25:28] Balancing Writing with Family Life

And I mean, both of you, obviously, like I mentioned before, have your families, you have kids. So, I mean, what would you say to like the mothers who want to write but feel like they don’t have the time to write or they’re, they have too much going on?

Rachel: Yeah, so I guess, um, I know a lot of people really like to set goals of like a 1000 words a day or 500 words a day. I think it, if it works for you, it works for you. If, if it means you’re gonna end up feeling like you failed, if you don’t reach that target, then maybe it’s not a helpful thing. Um, I found that, uh, the notes app on my phone is my friend. So if I’m somewhere and you know, I’m putting fish fingers in the oven or I’m, you know, on my way to work or something like that, if I’ve got an idea, I can jot it down quickly and then I can know that it’s somewhere safe and I can come back to it later.

Um, I think also. You know, there’s a lot of advice out there that says you are not writing the book unless you’re sat down writing the book. But also, for all of that, there’s a lot of advice that says, writing doesn’t always mean words on the page. It can be thinking about your characters, imagining a scene.

You know, if you can’t get in front of your laptop or computer or whatever it is, you can still be forwarding the story, like advancing it by thinking through dialogue or you know, looking at a new place and thinking, oh, that might be a, a nice location for my next scene, or, hey, that conversation I just overheard, sparked something for the character dialogue that I want to move on.

So I think it’s just about finding a rhythm that works for you and just grabbing bits of time where you can, that’s, that’s what I found anyway.

Michele: Oh, you are absolutely right. And. It does depend on you and you have to try things to know if they work or not. But, um, you know, the notes app on your phone or whatever is your friend but so are notebooks. I mean, I, this, this, um, novel that I’ve resurrected after 40 years. I have got written notes on that. I’ve even got, um, a back of an envelope where I started writing something when I was out once. I’ve still kept that from a long time ago. And then, you know, I, I find a nice fresh notes notebook and a nice pen will often get me writing, but then it stops.

So I think use everything. Use everything. You can use notebooks, um, use bits of paper, use notes use voice to text. Speech to text is so underrated. Um, but you get ideas at any time and you will find, everybody says this. I certainly get this from comedy writers who suddenly see something and it pings an idea and you have to get it down because if you don’t, you never quite remember it, you know, as you think it was.

[28:12] Inspiration from Everyday Life

And I think because we, we both work with people, working with other people and seeing other people often makes you think, oh, what if the classic question. And I was, I was picking up one of my grandchildren in, in school and I was looking at this lovely, lovely old lady. She was just so lovely. I say that and I’m quite old, but lovely old lady and she was so sweet, and I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if she went around killing people?

People asked her to because they were horrible. And I was stood in the playground getting this whole idea in my head thinking I need to write this down somewhere. So thinking time is also hugely important.

[28:51] Creative Collaboration and Brainstorming

Plus, plus, as Rachel has said, we are quite arty. So, um, we have had, we do have creative days, so that will be Rachel and my other daughter and my daughter-in-law.

And, uh, my daughter-in-law may sit and sew something and my my daughter, who’s an artist will probably draw something or say something and I will be there with bits of paper drawing out characters and linking up on a diagram, and Rachel will be doing the same. So whatever works for you is right.

Rachel: Mm.

Iman: Yeah, makes sense.

And yeah, I mean, I’ve heard that too, where people say, you know that only if you’re writing it means that you are actually writing. And that’s not the case. At least not with like, um, meetups and, uh, writing sessions that I’ve had. They always say also in the beginning, you know. Brainstorming, outlining, thinking of things up in your head.

I mean, um, trying to even brainstorm, just like you said, um, without writing anything down is also part of the writing process.

Michele: Hmm.

Iman: But yeah, just obviously eventually you write it down because otherwise

Rachel: Yeah.

Iman: You can’t just have it all in your head all the time, so, yeah.

Michele: No, you can’t.

Iman and Rachel: Yeah.

[30:03] The Writing Process: Good and Bad Days

Iman: Um, what does the writing process look for both of you like on your good and bad days?

Rachel: Oh, okay. Um, uh, a good day would be I’m, I wake up and I’m really in the story. So I wake up thinking about a scene and I think, great, I’ve figured out a problem to whatever plot hole or whatever issue I was having the day before. And I’ll get up and I’ll sit down and I’ll, I’ll be able to write, and I’ll write a few 1000 words.

Obviously that’s assuming I’m not at work, no one else needs me at the time, you know, I don’t get distracted by chores. Um, all of those kind of things. Um, and, and, and then I’ll feel like I’ve made some progress, whether I go back the next day and change or is another matter. I’ve, I’ve kind of done some, um, a bad writing day I think will be, um.

Uh, a day where maybe I feel uninspired, or I feel a bit stuck. Um, and then added to that there are too many other responsibilities and things that are happening that mean that I don’t have time to sit and work it through in my head. So, I know that I’m stuck and I also know that I don’t have time to move on from it.

Um, so either I’ll do no writing or I’ll do a small amount and it’s kind of like in pieces and I’m sort of doing a sentence here and there and I go back and look at it and think it just doesn’t hold together. Um, and why did I bother with the time that I had? Um, yeah. So, I think it really varies for me.

Iman: Yeah,

Michele: It, it, it, you are so right and I think a good day you just know that something has worked or you’ve moved something forward and you have to acknowledge that even thinking through something is moving it forward. A, a bad day, well, I think, I think it’s when Rachel FaceTimes me and I’m sat here is a good day, and if she FaceTimes me and I’m sat in front of a TV in the other room, it’s a not very good day.

Um, I just, I just find it very difficult some days to to get into that mode, you know, you’ve been to work, um, I dunno, the washing machine’s broken down. Um, you’ve got a letter asking you for some money for a bill. You’ve paid all these other life things that need sorting out and I sometimes just cannot put them over there to get to writing.

I think sometimes you just have to acknowledge, I I’m not gonna get much done today. So, I console myself with her. But actually, not doing it today means I’ll be fresher tomorrow. So, I’m always trying to put a positive spin on the bad days because you, you’re gonna have them.

Iman: Mm, yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Do you feel like you both have more good days than bad or good way around?

Rachel: Uh, I mean, I would say I, I would say I have more good days than bad.

Michele: Yeah.

Rachel: I would say, again, a, a bad day can be turned into a good day if you’re talking to other writers.

Michele: Yeah.

Rachel: I think that, you know, one of the things that we were told quite early on was the Find your Tribe, and I think I really underestimated how important that is.

Um, and how nice it is to have other people to talk to. And I think you can feel really stuck and speak to someone and then, you know, not necessarily write anything, but somehow move it on in your head and then it feels productive again. Um, so yeah, I, yeah, I would say I have more good days, but probably because I rely, you know, on other people, like both of you to kind of help move on if I’m feeling a bit stuck.

Iman: Yeah.

Michele: Yeah, I would say more good days than bad days because even, even on a bad day, I’m thinking I haven’t written anything. I haven’t finished that scene, or I haven’t wr written that. So that’s kind of a good day. So yeah, definitely more good days.

Iman: Yeah. And I also kind of feel like sometimes good days and bad days are subjective, right?

You know, someone thinks that bad day is really bad because instead of writing like what we were saying, Rachel, instead of writing maybe 500 words, they only wrote 200. Um, in reality, that can be a good day because at least you’re 200 words further than you were before.

Rachel: Yeah. And those 200 could be a 200 that, that sticks throughout all of your drafts.

You know, you might change loads of other things, but you spent so much time on those 200 that actually they endure and they, they just really work. I can find that sometimes I’ll write paragraphs and paragraphs, and then I’ll go back to I and think, oh, actually, I, I didn’t need this entire scene. I can kind of summarize this as that happened yesterday in a few sentences.

Um, and then that’s, you know, thousands, couple of thousands of words gone. Or I’ll have something where I’ve written a sentence and then it stays from draft one. Um, and you just, I, I guess you don’t know what those. What those days are gonna be. Which ones are the ones where you have the work that stays and the work that you, you rehash, but you know, any, any progress is progress.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah.

Michele: I think, I think between us, we’ve just kind of worked out that there aren’t any bad days. They’re just days where we don’t necessarily measure in the ways we’d like to.

Iman: Mm-hmm.

Michele: So maybe we’ve just invented a new, a new way forward.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because also, I mean, you could also feel like maybe you’re having a really good thing, like, Hey, I’m inspired, I’m writing all this, and then you read and you’re like, it, this is crap.

Rachel: Yeah, it happens. It really happens. Yeah, absolutely.

Michele: I did, I recently, I wrote this lovely thing and I thought, you know what? This has no value at all, and it was gone.

Iman: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it can definitely be really subjective. Just because you think you might have had a bad day doesn’t necessarily mean that’s actually the case, so, yeah.

[35:24] Overcoming the Inner Critic

Um, how do you guys quiet the inner critic? Or maybe not quiet ’cause I don’t think that’s possible, but try to, uh, maybe l not live with it, but move past it. Kind of keep it there, obviously there with you, but kind of, um, be able to kind of, uh, write over that, that obstacle, that internal obstacle.

Michele: I think it’s what you were saying, Rachel, about find your tribe.

[35:54] The Importance of Writing Communities

I think, you know, you need to find your own ways, your support systems, and you know, we, we do rely on each other and, and family for that. There’s no doubt. But, we’ve also got, um, uh, as well as, um, I know Rachel speaks to you regularly. We’ve also got another little band that we met in Jericho, um, not this year, the year before.

Who are ladies uh, more my age. Rachel was the youngest group and we just help each other by letting each other know how we’re doing, what’s going on. And there is such wisdom in the group. You know, there we’re women from very different places in terms of not just geographically, which is the case, but in terms of life commitments and writings styles and genres, and what we are doing and where we are. And literally just talking to them can make me think, Yeah, it’s okay. I can do this. You know, everybody else is having the same problem. Do you think Rachel?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, I think you’re right, Iman, that you, you never get rid of that inner critic, and I don’t know that you always want to, because I think that’s sometimes what pushes you to go actually, is this as good as I can make it? Um, we had a very interesting talk, I think it was Ruth Ware, uh, spoken.

Michele: Yes.

Rachel: And she was saying, actually, I, you know, would I want it to go possibly not, because it helps me be a better writer. It kind of challenges me to say, is this the best that I can make it? If not, let me push it further, and, and I think that’s a really valid point.

Michele: Yeah. Um,

Rachel: Um, so I think being able to learn to live with it, listen to it when you can, don’t let it stop you altogether. Um, but I think just remembering that all writers have had it, and you know it, like you said at the start, writing can feel really lonely. I think even when you know other writers, even when you’re related to other writers, when you are in it, um, you know your story is yours, um, and, it can feel like a lonely process, but every, every other writer has been there and every other writer has had that moment where they’ve kind of completely doubted their story or, you know, maybe it’s just a chapter or a paragraph or a sentence, but that self-doubt is I think, just a part of writing, which is

Iman: Mm-hmm.

Rachel: Tricky in an industry where there are lots of rejections and lots of waiting, uh, you know, and lots of, uh, lots of gray areas.

[38:18] Motivations Behind Writing

Um, but yeah, and I think also remembering why you are writing in the first place. You know, are you doing it because you have a message that you really want to get out into the world, or are you doing it because you just love it and it would feel wrong not to write, you know, are you doing it? Um, you know, I guess whatever reason it is, maybe it’s a combination of those, maybe it’s something else. Um, but I guess going back to that motivation, um, that I find for me sometimes then can outshine that little, that voice that’s like, oh, actually is this good enough? Can you do this? Are you sure this is for you?

Um, yeah.

Iman: Do you have that? On um, because I remember when I was first trying to figure out, you know, how I could move forward and get past the, uh, inner critic and that internal obstacle that we all have. Um, I saw somewhere where they said that you should, right in front of you, wherever it is that you do your writing, put why you’re doing it.

Like maybe write a post-it notes or put it on the whatever bulletin board that you might have hanging up and put why the reason exactly the exact reason why you’re writing? Like do you guys, do you do that or do you have something like that?

Michele: I, I, I don’t have anything written, but I know, I know why I’ve written the book that’s, that’s done now. Um, and I, I wrote that because I needed to write down, in a sort of cathartic way and a sort of support way for me how awful it was to watch my dad, who is was so smart, watch him die of dementia and watch people who I thought were experts in his nursing home who weren’t and it was so traumatic in the sense, and you know it’s coming and you know, they can’t do anything about it.

But the whole thing was just so, um, unexpected. The feelings. I just had to get it down. Uh, it’s sort of a tribute to him. But also, once I’d realized it’s a tribute to him, I thought, there are so many other people that need to know this. There are so many other people that need to understand. Um, so I’ve, I’ve, that is really firm. With my novel I started 40 years ago, I think there is gonna be a similar message that, that a about that, um, it, it’s very different. Um, but it, there is a message there and it is about dealing with your own thoughts. It, the characters are not me. And, and as Rachel has said before, people sometimes think that everything you write is you.

Um, and you do draw on things. But I think because I’ve got that strong feeling inside, I know why I’m doing it. I, I don’t need to write it down. It, I know it, I do. Have you written it, Rachel? Anywhere?

Rachel: Um, so I’ve not written that. I do have, you probably can’t see, but I do have a sort of, that more has kind of, I guess, themes for that particular book that’s on there.

Um, and those link to, I suppose sometimes it’ll be messages that I wanna get across. Um, for me, I suppose there is that, just knowing that now I’ve kind of refound writing and, and, I got back into it as an adult, I can’t imagine not doing it. Um, so I feel like that’s just always gonna be a driving force.

Um, but I think the other thing is being able to write and share your writing is, is actually a, a real privilege, um, whatever form that takes. Um, being able to feel, um, safe enough to have the capacity to have the time to write stuff down and share it with others, um, it is a really brilliant thing and I think, um, sharing, writing and, and thoughts is, can be really powerful. You know, like we all know lots of examples of books that kind of change the world and, um, how much kind of trends, um, can come about. Um, you know, if you think about romantasy and things, how, how, how much a few select books change the reading taste of like, you know, hundreds and thousands of millions of people.

Um, but I think that’s a really, a really powerful thing, um, and a really brilliant thing to be able to do for anyone that does it. Whether your read your readership is, is big or small, you know, whatever that looks like. Um, so I think that’s quite a nice driving force, just knowing that actually being able to do it in the first place is quite a privileged thing.

Iman: Yeah, that’s true.

Michele: It’s also a vulnerable thing, I think. I think it, you know, it, it is, I think people forget that it is quite vulnerable. People are looking and criticizing and, um, yeah. So, yeah. Powerful. Yes. Vulnerable too, I think.

Rachel: Yeah.

Iman: Mm-hmm.

Rachel: Yeah. It takes a degree of bravery, I think, um, to share stuff. Um.

I think even, I know we’ve been doing it for a few years now, but even when you sort of hand something over to someone to read, it’s kind of like this to read it, but I also don’t want you to read it.

Iman: Yeah,

Rachel: Yeah. I dunno that that will ever go away. I, I often hear other, uh, authors kind of talking who are much further down the line, like decades and decades in with lots of published books and they seem to feel equally as awkward and squeamish about sharing network work for the first time. So I think it’s just part of writing.

Iman: Yeah. What is it that they say? It’s basically like sending your child out into the world, so, yeah. Yeah,

Rachel: Yeah. Absolutely.

Michele: Yeah.

Iman: Um, have you ever, have either of you ever considered giving up writing, and what was it that pulled you back to it?

Michele: I mean, I never thought, I’m not going to write again. I didn’t write for a few years because I had babies to look after. I was single mom. I had things to do and, and it was just very hard. But I don’t think I have ever thought I’m not gonna write. And I think it, it’s just, as I say, you know, Rachel’s a big part in pulling me back into just do it.

Um, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought I won’t ever write again.

Rachel: Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of giving it up forever. I think. You know, the idea of being able to pursue it as a career, um, which is obviously what I’m kind of aspiring to, is something that maybe a decade or so ago I felt wasn’t, didn’t feel very feasible, you know, when, when you are kind of just outta university or just into kind of the workplace and thinking about things like finding somewhere to live and paying bills and all of those kind of things. The idea of trying to rely on or make a living through writing to me felt like, like it was something that I couldn’t achieve.

Um, and I, I think I didn’t have confidence in my ability to do it or the stability, I guess, of, of the whole writing and publishing world to be able to make a living to do it. Um, but I think, um, so, so I think I kind of parked it for a really long time. Um, but I think getting a little bit older, just realizing that it’s something that I love, I can’t imagine not doing it whether I ever make any money from it or not, um, it’s just something that I love to do. So, I, I can’t, I don’t think, since rediscovering it, I’ve had the thought of, um I don’t wanna do it anymore. But I guess then that’s, that’s a request to you, Iman, is if I come into the writing group and say, I’m gonna give it up just remind me of this.

Iman: What did you say when we were doing the recording? You said No.

Rachel: Never. Never. Yeah,

Iman: Exactly.

[45:53] Writing Strengths and Challenges

What are your, um, what do you think are your writing strengths and where do you still feel challenged in your writing process?

Michele: That’s so interesting. I, I am an underwriter, not in terms of insurance, uh, when they underwrite things, but I, I, I wr get to the point quite quickly.

Um, which is a strength and a weakness, but I think my biggest strength is probably writing dialogue. I have always seen and heard things, and I think that probably goes back to the fact that I really, um I, in my head, everything I’m writing is on TV or a screen. I can see people, I can hear people having worked with people all my life.

Um, and so I think dialogue is my biggest strength and my underwriting is a bit of a weakness. You are very different, aren’t you, Rachel?

Rachel: Yes. So, I think, um, I guess because my background’s, you know, psychology and sort of emotional mental health, I think being able to imagine what a character’s going through is something that I really enjoy and I’ll give a lot of attention to because I really enjoy it.

Um, but then I’ll have a tendency to overwrite, um, and really get into a character’s head and that then I find dialogue more challenging and that kind of um, really interesting and fun to play with, um, tension between everything that’s going on inside and then what is said on the outside. Um, so whereas I think mom, you tend to have kind of, uh, smaller drafts first time round.

I tend to have huge drafts first time round, and then we’re kind of working in the opposite. You are, you are kind of filling yours up and I’m, I’m cutting mine down. Um, so yeah, I think, yeah, definitely being able to whittle down what I want to say into something a bit punchier. Um, that takes some time for me.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah. I felt like in the beginning when I first started writing, I was like, your mom, Michele. You know, I was, I would underwrite, but I feel like dialogue is always one of my biggest, biggest strengths. But then when I was being told in the very beginning of the process that I needed to write more, dialogue I feel for me is still pretty good, but now I feel like I’m writing too much. I’m like, what’s going on?

Rachel: So, it’s so hard, isn’t it? You swing one way and another.

Iman: Mm-hmm.

Rachel: It’s, uh, it’s tricky.

Iman: Yeah. Uh, what has surprised you both most about the writing?

[48:24] The Journey of Writing Across Generations

Journey. Um, especially maybe seeing it unfold across generations between the two of you.

Michele: It’s so hard.

I mean, you said very early on, Iman, about just write the damn thing. And that’s what I used to do, I used to just get an idea and I used to just write it, uh, type it out my little typewriter when I was younger and then thankfully we’ve got computers, but I have handwritten stuff and just spit it all out and get it all out and then think, hang on a minute, there’s, there’s, there’s no real hook in the first 500 words. And why? Why, why do I need to know this here and where is this going and where does this loose end tie up and hang on a minute, um, do I need that person to say that? It is really a difficult thing to do.

Editing is really hard. You have to kind of step away and I think learning that there is so much to it. You know, you have to be in the head of every character. You need to understand what’s going on in the setting. Um, and it, it’s, it’s not an easy thing to do.

Rachel: Mm-hmm.

Michele: Rachel, what, what do you think?

Rachel: Yeah, so, yeah, so I really agree with that. I think also I think I had, and it’s probably my perfectionist tendencies, but this idea that if your idea for a story was really good, you know, your first draft would be amazing because, because the idea is so good, it would naturally, if the, if the book itself is good enough, it would come out you know, shining and it would, it would be in a, a close to polish state, um, since redrafting, a lot of times, a lot, a lot, a lot of times. Um, I realized actually I can kind of keep the idea, but chopping and changing and rewriting a lot doesn’t mean that that original idea was a bad idea. It just means that it took a lot of time and it’s taking time to kind of polish and refine. It’s like sort of chipping away at a marble statue idea, isn’t it? It’s, you know, you start with a chunk of rock and that is okay, it’s gonna take time to make it the thing that needs to be. Um, yeah. And so I think that maybe stalled me a bit in the process that I thought actually, if I’m having to re-edit and change this and redraft, does that just mean this isn’t, you know, this is a no go for this or not, but actually I think I’ve learned hearing other writers talk about the process that’s not the case at all. Actually, redrafting is a huge part of it, and that is normal. And that doesn’t mean the idea’s bad.

Um, I think the other thing is. Uh, you know, we’ve said it, we’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. People, you know, you’re writing

Michele: Yeah.

Rachel: Or your, I think I underestimated how important knowing other writers is, um, for the process and helping each other out, but also just general writer wellbeing. Um,

Iman: Yeah.

Rachel: And feeling good about what you are doing and not feeling alone. Um, and you know, like we said, obviously we have that within our family, but I think it’s, it’s really important to have it broadly and really nice to speak to other people in your genre and different genres. Um, that I think the importance of that is, is way more than I ever expected. Um, yeah.

Iman: Yeah. Yeah. I mean all, well, I was gonna say all three of us, but I’m interviewing you guys. Um, I know that, I know that, um, both of you are working still on books. You don’t have anything self-published or out there in, in the moment at the moment, but I know you obviously will very soon. So in terms of that, um.

[51:51] Current Writing Projects and Future Plans

Is there something in terms of what you are working on now that you want to share with us? Like what is the latest project that you’re working on? Can you give us some information on that?

Michele: Always. Um, so the one I’ve sort of alluded to is, um Book club women’s fiction, very bittersweet with a, a, a, a moral dilemma.

A very morally complex family dilemma of assisted dying, but with dark comedy. Um, and, uh, as I say, beta reader feedback is very good. I will be querying in the next few days I’ve already spoken to, uh, an agent who, um, is happy to hear from me. Um, and I was invited last year actually to, to submit the full manuscript, but I hadn’t finished it at the time, so I’m pleased to say that’s finished.

And, and cheekily the other one that I’ve dug out from, um, 40 years is another black comedy um, set in 1985 before body positivity has hit the masses. The sort of Sweeney Todd meets Bridget Jones is coming soon too.

Rachel: Yeah, so I am, I’m querying the new adult speculative dark academia. Um, so in the query trenches and trying to distract myself as much as possible, which is why I’m working on a second dark academia novel, which is, I suppose is more sort of paranormal. Um, but again, in that speculative new adult space. Um, yes, that’s, that’s helping me get through the waiting of querying, which has anyone who’s queried knows is very stressful.

Michele: But that novel that Rachel’s written is really good.

Rachel: You have to say that.

Michele: I don’t, I could have, I could have moved on to something else.

Rachel: You do. You do.

Iman: Yeah, I was gonna say, I’m sure it is. Obviously, I read the, the one that she has changed now, the um,

Michele: Yeah, it is very different.

Iman: Broken Dreamer one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The architect ones. Uh, but yeah, I told her I was, I was jealous of her writing chops. I was like, damn, I feel like I would have to get maybe five or six edits just to get to the level that she did.

I’m sure was very few edits. So, yeah. But that’s something else that all creatives do. We need to stop comparing ourselves to other people.

Michele: We, we do, but we never will. We never will because

Iman: That’s true.

Michele: We, we have to, in, in order to make sense of something, we have to judge it and put in it in a little compartment in our head.

And so we will never stop comparing. And I don’t think we, I don’t think we can. I think we’ll always do it. But we need to just switch it into that positive mode because sometimes you could admire somebody’s writing and think, actually that wouldn’t work. I mean, honestly, if Rachel wrote the book I’ve just written, and vice versa, we could not use as writing styles that we have, and actually, Rachel, you’ve missed the opportunity to say that my book is good too. That should have come a bit sooner.

Rachel: I, I was, I was, I was coming with that. Of course. It’s amazing. Of course it is. But I have to say that No, no. It is amazing. Um, yeah, absolutely. I think, yeah. Yes, it is. Um,

Michele: Just appreciate, just appreciate other authors for what they’ve done.

Rachel: Yeah.

Michele: And, and, and know that they were where you are and you might be where they are. And just appreciate the fact that we are all so different. I mean, I have no idea why I like killing people in a funny way in books. I have no idea. Uh. I just don’t know, but it makes me laugh and I like to laugh and that’s just my thing.

I thankfully, Rachel, if Rachel had written something similar, people might look at our family and worry just a little bit, but it hasn’t happened. Um, that doesn’t mean you can’t kill anyone in your books, Rachel, but, um, it, it’s, you know, it’s, I have to say is fantastic to have her to be able to rant at, or more often than not, we’ve come through, uh, you know, I’ve said, how about this? And we’ve ended up giggling at all the ways that how can kill people or things that can happen and, you know, somewhere in the book. And it, it’s, it is brilliant.

[56:13] Supporting Fellow Writers

Rachel: Yeah, I think it’s nice as well, just that like with writing groups as well, just sharing each other’s successes. So, I, I know that when you know mom gets a, an agent and a book deal, I think I’m probably gonna be as excited as you are and vice versa.

I think it’s just, you know, in the same Iman for us in our, in our group. I think there’s just, when you kind of build up that, that network of people, you, you share those successes together and it’s just such a nice thing. Um,

Iman and Rachel: Yeah,

Michele: I know, but I’m your mom, so, when you were, when you were just invited to send off a manuscript and you were excited, I had to be all cool and calm and you know, there are ways you have to behave as a mother because you are coming to, you know, there’s a role.

Rachel: Of course, of course. But no, I think, yeah, I think the other thing I’ve seen a lot of is writers helping out, other writers, you know, and we’ve had as well, obviously Iman, you beta read mine and, and we’ve kind of, you know, in our writing group, we help each other and, you know, those are things that obviously we will do for each other for free, um, just because we want to help each other. And I think that’s part of that sharing success, um.

Michele: And are, aren’t other writers fabulous?

Rachel: Yes.

Michele: You know, other writers that we’ve met are fabulous. I remember, you know, that, that idea that if I tell somebody something, they might use it. Forget that everything’s kind of been done.

Just share and be as helpful and open as you can because you get it back. Uh, writers are fantastic people.

Iman: Yeah, yeah, there really are.

[57:41] Final Thoughts and Encouragement

But yeah, I mean, thanks so much guys for making the time and for coming on here, Michele and Rachel, and uh, thanks everyone else for tuning in. Just wanted to say, obviously every writing journey has its own rough patches and your story might be the one that someone else needs to hear.

So everyone just needs to keep showing up for your draft and for yourself. And that’s me included. So yeah, thank you so much.

Rachel: Thank you very much for having us.

Iman: You’re welcome. Speak soon. Bye.

FEATURED GUEST: RACHEL MCLAUGHLIN

Based in the UK, Rachel is a writer currently working on her debut; a YA speculative novel about the power of dreaming. Her background is in English Literature and Psychology; two areas she hopes to bring into her writing, with a focus on mental health, neurodivergence and inclusion. She’s a keen reader of SFF, psychological thriller and romance, and when not reading or writing, can be found chasing after her two children or frolicking at a fantasy themed ball.

Connect with Rachel:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachel_j_writes/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rachelmwriter

FEATURED GUEST: MICHELE BURNS

Michele is a busy lady with six grandchildren, six cats and dreams of seeing her stories in bookshops—and maybe even the big screen. As an ex- Deputy Headteacher, singer, and academic journals contributor, storytelling is the thread that has run through her career. Her academic background is in computing and English language and literature and she’s on the final edit of her debut novel whilst resuming a second she started forty years ago!

Connect with Michele:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/michelej_burns?igsh=MTY1MWJoYWxxYTU1OA==
X: https://x.com/mjmothership
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@michelejburns
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mikki.burns.948/?_rdr

ABOUT THE HOST: IMAN LLOMPART

Iman Llompart is a Spanish American romantasy writer and interviewer based in Dubai. She’s working on her debut novel and hosting Beyond the Rough Draft in collaboration with Writer’s Fun Zone.

Iman’s mission is to create space for honest conversations with writers — the kind that reveal both the doubt and the discipline behind the craft.

Connect with Iman:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imanllompart/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iman-llompart-2a13741a9/
Email: isllompart17@gmail.com

RESOURCES & LINKS

Writer’s Fun Zone — https://writersfunzone.com/blog
How To Write the Future Podcast — https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast
Email Iman to be a guest — isllompart17@gmail.com

ABOUT BEYOND THE ROUGH DRAFT

Beyond the Rough Draft is a new interview series hosted by Iman Llompart on Writer’s Fun Zone, the creative hub founded by Beth Barany.

The show dives into the messy and meaningful process behind writing — the moments of self-doubt, breakthrough, and transformation that shape every story.

Each conversation pulls back the curtain on how writers stay creative, curious, and resilient in the face of chaos.

Because writing isn’t just about word count — it’s about becoming who you are through the process.

ABOUT WRITER’S FUN ZONE & BETH BARANY

Writer’s Fun Zone, founded by Beth Barany, is an online creative hub that supports fiction and creative nonfiction writers through coaching, podcasts, and resources.

Beth is an award-winning author and creativity coach whose mission is to help writers craft their best work and bring their stories to life.

Learn more: https://writersfunzone.com/blog
Listen to Beth’s Podcast: How To Write the Future

CONNECT WITH THE SHOW

Listen & Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/beyondtheroughdraft

Follow on Instagram: @bethbarany | @writersfunzoneblog | @imanllompart

Want to be featured?

Email Iman Llompart at isllompart17@gmail.com

CREDITS

Host: Iman Llompart
Guests: Rachel McLaughlin, Michele Burns
Produced in collaboration with: Writer’s Fun Zone
Edited with: Descript https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA
Distributed by: Spotify https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/beyondtheroughdraft

The post Mother-Daughter Duo on Folklore, Family, Finishing the Draft: Rachel McLaughlin and Michele Burns appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Beth Barany Talks Writing Careers, Genre-Bending Stories, and Creative Coaching with Amy Ayres

Iman Llompart — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:30:05 +0000

In this podcast interview, Beth Barany Talks Writing Careers, Genre-Bending Stories, and Creative Coaching with Amy Ayres.

Beth Barany recently joined Amy Ayres for a conversation about writing careers, creative growth, genre-bending stories, and the many paths writers take to build a sustainable writing life.

In this first installment of Amy’s conversation series, Beth shares insights from her experiences as a novelist, creativity coach, developmental editor, podcaster, and entrepreneur.

Together, Beth and Amy discuss their early writing experiences, the evolving publishing landscape, and how writers can stay connected to their creativity while navigating the practical realities of a writing career.

Beth Barany is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelist, creativity coach, and developmental editor who helps science fiction and fantasy writers plan, write, revise, and market their novels with practical tools and a sustainable, heart-centered approach.

Through her coaching, courses, and membership programs, Beth supports writers in building strong stories, consistent habits, and lasting creative confidence.

When she’s not teaching or coaching, Beth writes magical tales of romance, mystery, and adventure that empower women and girls to become the heroes of their own lives. She also hosts the How to Write the Future podcast, where she explores storytelling craft, mindset, creativity, and the changing landscape of publishing.

If you’re curious about Beth’s fiction, check out her freebies and newsletter!

Newsletter: https://author.bethbarany.com/newsletter-sign-up/
Freebies: https://author.bethbarany.com/free-books/

In this episode, Beth and Amy discuss:

Building a writing career over time
Early experiences that shaped their creative journeys
Genre blending and writing beyond traditional boundaries
Creative coaching and supporting writers through challenges
Sustainable approaches to creativity and publishing
The evolving world of writing and storytelling

This conversation is especially valuable for writers who are looking for encouragement, practical wisdom, and a reminder that there is no single path to success in publishing.

About Amy Ayres’ Podcast

Amy Ayres hosts The Neurodivergent Writer’s Playbook, a podcast and Substack dedicated to helping writers embrace their unique creative processes and build sustainable writing practices. Through conversations with writers, creatives, and publishing professionals, Amy explores storytelling, creativity, publishing, mindset, and the realities of building a writing life. Her interviews encourage writers to develop meaningful creative habits, navigate challenges with confidence, and create work that reflects their individual strengths and perspectives.

Listen to the interview
https://amymarieayres.substack.com/p/my-conversation-with-beth-barany

Connect with Beth Barany
Website: https://www.bethbarany.com
Podcast: HOW TO WRITE THE FUTURE — http://howtowritethefuture.com

Free Resource Mentioned in the Episode
Edit Your Novel Checklist:
https://bethbarany.thrivecart.com/edit-your-novel-checklist/

More interviews with Beth:
https://writersfunzone.com/blog/category/podcast/

Interested in interviewing Beth?
https://writersfunzone.com/blog/contact-beth/

The post Beth Barany Talks Writing Careers, Genre-Bending Stories, and Creative Coaching with Amy Ayres appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

When the World is on Fire — Create! by Nicole Plumridge

Guest Contributor — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:15 +0000

Today we welcome a new guest writer to Writer’s Fun Zone, Nicole Plumridge who is stopping by to chat with us about “When the World is on Fire — Create!” Enjoy!

***

The Essential Nature of Creativity

It is precisely when times are tough, when the entire world is bubbling over in upheaval, that we need to lean on our creative practices more than ever.

Many of us are conditioned early on, either overtly or covertly, that creativity and artistic expression are nice — but only as hobbies.

They are something to do if you finish all of your responsibilities and ‘important’ tasks first.

This is the messaging creatives face on a good day.

On a bad day — such as when the world is on fire — this perceived indulgence may not only be judged, but vilified.

Who are you to think that when there is chaos and disaster that you can sit down and put words on the page?

When the news is churning out horror after horror, how can you even think of flipping through the whispering pages of a much-loved poetry book, letting your mind wander through lyric and rhyme?

How Art Has Helped Us Survive

A strange collective amnesia takes hold — one where we forget our origins.

It was not just bricks and mortar that built civilizations.

It was not only sophisticated plumbing and agricultural practices which anchored communities.

It was art.

Symbols and images carved into caves, words surviving centuries on stone tablets creating legacy and culture — these traditions are what allow us to be in conversation with our ancestors today.

It is through these creations that we can see how they lived, processed the world, understood events and learned from their experiences.

The act of creation is not only a conversation which could be passed down through the ages, but also one we have with ourselves.

It is through creation that we connect with ourselves and cultivate an understanding of who we are as well as our place in the big wide world.

Storytelling, myths, legends, and fairy-tales are ancient practices creating meaning out of the mayhem which mere existence on this planet brings.

It is especially when times are tough, and the world is a confusing mosh pit of chaos, that we need to be able to lean into ways to make sense of it.

Creation as Regulation

The act of creation is regulation.

It is how we find calm amidst the storm.

It may be said that it is selfish to create when others are suffering.

It is an indulgence which cannot be afforded.

However, finding ways to manage your emotions and maintain calm is an act of integrity and self-awareness.

The more one is able to maintain a sense of equanimity, the more this effect will ripple out within that person’s social circle.

The more one creates and alchemizes the pain and confusion into works of art, meaning and beauty, the more others are given permission to do the same.

The more we focus on the bright, beautiful and brilliant, the more we can carve out little spaces in the world which reflect this.

It can be in creating a commonplace book or inspirational collage to put up in your study.

It could be painting a mural or reciting poetry at an open mic event.

These little acts of creation lend themselves to creative thinking, out-of-the-box problem solving and innovation — all necessary skills to have within the changing landscape of the world.

Art: A Quiet Rebellion

To create during times of uncertainty is an act of much needed rebellion.

It is focusing your time and attention on that which you can control.

Do what you can for social justice — sign petitions, donate to important causes, raise awareness — but also, create art!

Write a poem to process the world.

Switch off the news and switch on your laptop to review the final draft of your book.

Pick up the paintbrush and splash red paint all over the canvas.

This is how we help ourselves and help others in meaningful and tangible ways.

This is how we cope and build resilience.

While the world may tell you creating is an act of frivolity, we would not survive without it.

Humans need meaning, connection, and, dare I say it, a little magic to get through the days.

We need these little glimmers to hold on to when the world is dark around us.

Small acts of creation are the sparks which keep the soul alive.

Creating when the world is in upheaval is an act of love for both yourself and those around you.

It is time to remove the sting of stigma from the creative process and normalize prioritizing passion projects, elevate hobbies to the status of meaningful work, and begin a quiet revolution where the world recognizes how creativity nurtures, holds and heals the human soul.

Poetry from the trenches shows us that no matter who we are or where we are, the need to express our feelings, fears and desires is deeply rooted in the human psyche.

Creativity is alchemy.

It is a magic as old as time, a superpower which humans have always had at their fingertips.

It is time to embrace this and observe how we can add just a little bit of sparkle to our pocket of the world, offering a beacon to those who need it.

***

About The Author

Nicole Plumridge is a three-time published author whose debut novel became an Amazon bestseller.

Her work has appeared in The Poetryhood and Half-Light Magazine.

She is also a creativity and book coach who supports creatives in building creative practices and reconnecting with their inner magic.

Connect with Nicole and book a discovery call if your creativity is calling you.

Website: https://nicoleplumridgecoaching.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authornicoleplumridge

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-plumridge-39512368

The post When the World is on Fire — Create! by Nicole Plumridge appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Crafting a Compelling Villain: Goals, Motivation, Conflict

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:14:50 +0000

Crafting a Compelling Villain: Goals, Motivation, Conflict – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 210

***

“In addition to your villain’s goal, they need a motivation. They feel like they’re the hero of their own story. They have a good reason for wanting what they want.” – Beth Barany

In some stories long after the final page is closed, the villain often captivates the reader over a hero. Their backstory, portrayal, beliefs, and even down to certain acts of heroism, but how do you make your villain compelling?
In the latest How To Write the Future podcast episode, titled “Crafting a Compelling Villain: Goals, Motivation, Conflict” host Beth Barany, shares how to craft a compelling villain to engage readers, drive the plot of their story, and ways to build an in-depth conflict within their journey.

Use the steps outlined in the episode to plan and draft out your villain and apply it to your story.

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

RESOURCES

JOIN: For fiction writers! You’ve finished your first draft! Congrats! Now what?

Join the Future-Ready Writer membership and get premium weekly lessons and a monthly Q&A on Zoom. Subscribe: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061/subscribe

FREE: Sign up here to get your World Building Workbook for Fiction Writers

Overwhelmed by world-building for your sci-fi/fantasy novel? Use these prompts to brainstorm your story’s world: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/world-building-resources/

SHOP**: Sci‑Fi & Fantasy 24 Writing Prompts:** https://ko-fi.com/s/4ac9160a74

Want to be interviewed on the podcast? => Email us!

FOR CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSIONALS – BUILD YOUR BUSINESS SERVING WRITERS

Support our work for creatives!

Buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

GET SUPPORT FOR YOUR FICTION WRITING BY A NOVELIST AND WRITING TEACHER AND COACH

Schedule an exploratory call here and see if Beth can support you today: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/discovery-call/

About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

Transcript for Crafting a Compelling Villain: Goals, Motivation, Conflict, How To Write the Future podcast, episode 210

Welcome and Focus

BETH BARANY: Hi, everyone. Beth Barany here with How to Write the Future podcast.

My focus is on helping specifically science fiction and fantasy writers. In that light, I talk about craft, the writing craft.

[00:14] Villain Goals That Drive Plot

So today I’m gonna talk about tips on how to craft an awesome villain. Let’s get started.

You wanna give your villain a goal, a reason for their goal, and conflict.

Because guess what? Your villains are people too. In their own mind, what they’re doing is reasonable. So give them a goal that is specific and active. Remember, a compelling villain isn’t trying to be evil. They’re actually trying to achieve something, and they can justify that.

[00:47] Make Goals Concrete and Urgent

So first off, think of your villain’s goal as a concrete verb phrase. They are there to seize or protect or punish, expose, restore, control, purify, stabilize. Also, make their goal time-bound or urgent. In this way, it will create plot pressure. So perhaps your villain wants to seize property to protect their domain, or they want to stabilize the magic so that things don’t go out of control into chaos. Legitimate.

So when you think of your villain’s goal, you want to think of it, explain it like this. Be able to say this or write this: My villain wants goal by method before deadline, because otherwise consequences.

[01:49] Motivation and Core Beliefs

Now, in addition to your villain’s goal, they need a motivation. They feel like they’re the hero of their own story. They have a good reason for wanting what they want. They don’t wake up thinking, I’m the bad guy. No, they believe they’re right. They believe they’re justified. And usually, and, you know, this goes for every character that you assign a goal to in your story, their motivation has an emotional engine.

It could be fear, it could be grief, or entitlement, ideology, revenge, shame, love, devotion, or a hunger for order.

See if you can design your villain’s core belief that underpins their quest for their goal as a sentence they might even say out loud, that they would defend in public. What would they say if they had to defend their goal? If you can write that in a convincing way, then the readers will feel the villain’s logic even while they disagree or even hate the villain, and that’s okay.

To make our villains compelling we have to make them relatable, and we do that by hinting at or revealing their surface-level motivation but also their deep motivation for what they want. And in some writing craft explainer books, they will call this the want. The need is the goal, and the want is the motivation.

I find that a bit confusing.

[03:21] Backstory Prompt for Motivation

I think if you classify it as the motivation and keep asking why and go down deep, deep to the core belief that stemmed. Often they stem from either childhood experiences or some amazing crisis turning point in their early life, in their teen life. Our core beliefs are changing and shifting all the time.

Your character could also be motivated by a recent event as well that shaped why they want what they want.

So here’s the prompt. So write down for yourself: “My villain believes X. They learned it when, at some point in time. So now they must act a certain way.”

[04:03] Conflict Mirrors the Hero

Let’s move on to conflict. You wanna design your villain’s conflict as a mirror of the protagonist’s goal. Conflict isn’t just, oh, the hero fights the villain. Rawr.

No, you need a specific thing that blocks the villain’s goal, and that is most often the protagonist’s values, choices, or very existence.

[04:29] Internal Cracks and Escalation

So a strong villain will also carry their internal conflicts. So they won’t just have their external conflicts, usually represented by the protagonist, but they will also have internal conflicts. It will be blind spots or contradictions or even self-justifying stories they tell themselves, that can get in the way, too.

So you wanna see if you can make your villain’s strength a direct pressure point on the protagonist’s weakness, and vice versa. You wanna make your protagonist’s strength a direct pressure point on the villain’s weakness. And then see if you can add one internal fault line or crack in the villain that makes their approach tragically inevitable if you wanna end the story with the protagonist being triumphant.

Of course, if you’re writing a tragedy where the pr- antagonist succeeds over the protagonist, then that fault line could be inside of the protagonist.

So here’s the prompt: the hero blocks the villain because some value or action. The villain can’t adapt because some blind spot. So the villain escalates by some action.

[05:49] Wrap Up and Farewell

So today we talked about the goal, motivation, and conflict of your villain. If you can define this clearly for yourself, now you have created a compelling villain.

That’s it for this week, everyone. Write long and prosper.

Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2012061

Need instructions on how to leave a review? Go here.

***

Support our work for creatives: leave a tip: https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

***

ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade

c 2025 BETH BARANY

For more “How To Write the Future” episodes, go here.

If you’d like to invite Beth onto your podcast, drop her a note here.

Like the work we do? Tip us! https://ko-fi.com/bethbarany

The post Crafting a Compelling Villain: Goals, Motivation, Conflict appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do Before You Publish by Kelley Way

Guest Contributor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 10:00:43 +0000

Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Kelley Way as she shares with us “Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do Before You Publish.” Enjoy!

***

Protecting Your Work Before Publication

Let’s face it, traditional publishing is not for everyone.

The number of self-published authors continues to grow as technology makes the self-publishing process easier (until it comes time to market, but that’s a whole different conversation).

With so many authors choosing self-publishing, it’s more important than ever to know what to do to protect your work.

Below is a checklist of copyright-related tasks to take care of before you publish:

Verify Rights and Permissions

1. Make sure you have all the rights and permissions you need.

Double-check that all your content is original to you.

If there’s anything that’s not original to you, make sure a) it is not copyright-protected or b) you have permission to use it.

2. Make sure you have contracts in place for any co-authors or service providers.

I’ve known a number of authors over the years who came to grief because they did not have a written agreement in place with their co-authors, ghostwriters, illustrators, or other people who put their hands (physical or digital) on the manuscript.

Save yourself the hair-pulling and have signed agreements that state who owns the copyright and how and when people will get paid.

3. Fill out the copyright notice page.

This is the page at the front of the book that states what year the book was copyrighted and who the owner is.

Some other information you can put on this page:

- Contact information for permissions. This tells people how to contact you if they want permission to use your work.
- Disclaimers. This is more for trademark or right of publicity issues, but a disclaimer can be helpful to show that you’re not trying to claim ownership of a trademark or model a character after a real person.

For example, most movies have a line in the credits that says something along the lines of “This is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance to real people, living or deceased, is coincidental.”

- Permissions or limitations. You could give limited permissions on this page, e.g., saying it’s okay to quote from the book as long as the quote is three sentences or less.

You can also put limitations on this page; a popular one these days is “You may not use this work to train AI software and/or large language models.”

4. Keep copies of notes and drafts.

There are two reasons for this.

First, it can show the work is original to you and not AI-generated.

Second, it can establish that the work existed in a certain format at a certain time.

If there is a copyright infringement lawsuit or if the Copyright Office claims the work is AI-generated, having these drafts and notes will prove helpful.

Final Thoughts

Those are the key steps to take before you publish to protect your work.

In Part 2 next month, we’ll cover what to do after your book is published to maintain and enforce your rights.

If you’d like to take a closer look at your manuscript or make sure everything is properly in place, feel free to reach out at kaway@kawaylaw.com or visit https://kawaylaw.com.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The post Self-Publishing Copyright Checklist: What to Do Before You Publish by Kelley Way appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

How To Find the Right Illustrator for You with Anna Leitensdorfer

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:50:18 +0000

How To Find the Right Illustrator for You with Anna Leitensdorfer – How To Write the Future podcast, episode 209

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“Since it was my first book cover there, I learned a lot. There was a big process involved. Lots of figuring out, print lingo, making sure things are where they should be. So it was definitely a learning process.” – Anna Leitensdorfer

In this How to Write the Future podcast episode, titled “How To Find the Right Illustrator for You with Anna Leitensdorfer” host Beth Barany interviews book illustrator Anna Leitensdorfer, who creates maps, character art, interior illustrations, and recently completed her first book cover.

Anna explains how authors can choose the right illustrator by narrowing in on style and, for covers, matching genre expectations through comparable titles.

She shares ways to avoid scams, including watching for unsolicited DMs, inconsistent portfolio quality, and verifying prior projects, referrals, and a clear online presence.

Anna discusses timing for commissioning maps and character art, emphasizing the importance of knowing trim size for print work and planning ahead for an artist’s lead time.

She outlines her process and booking system, including contracts, revision stages, deliverables for web and print, and provided specs and files. She also notes she specializes in fantasy and romantasy and enjoys collaborative communication.

00:00 Welcome and Introductions

00:38 Meet Anna the Illustrator

01:18 From Maps to Book Covers

02:38 Choosing the Right Style

05:52 Avoiding Artist Scams

09:09 When to Commission Art

13:01 Booking and Lead Times

14:39 Anna’s Mapmaking Workflow

18:56 Genres and Creative Freedom

20:29 Write the Future and Farewell

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

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About the How To Write the Future podcast

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This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

ABOUT ANNA LEITENSDORFER

Anna Leitensdorfer is an illustrator specializing in fantasy art dedicated to assisting authors with bringing characters from their books and scenes from their worlds to life in a visual format. With a background in animation, her art style reflects cinematic framing and dynamic posing while also channeling that inner old-timey fantasy vibe! The best part? NO AI in ANY of her work! Projects with dragons are particularly her favorite. She currently lives in Missouri with her 2 Shetland Sheepdogs and is working on writing her own novels while pursuing doing illustration full-time.

Website: https://www.annaleitensdorfer.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valkyrie_hero/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anna.leitensdorfer

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-leitensdorfer-288558138/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@valkyrie_hero

Transcript for Hiring an Illustrator Without Getting Scammed with Anna Leitensdorfer

Welcome and Introductions

BETH BARANY: Hi everyone. Welcome to How to Write the Future podcast. I’m your host Beth Barany, and I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, editor, and teacher. I’m also a keynote speaker and filmmaker. Yep. I have a lot of irons in the fire, and one of the things I’m very passionate about is talking to other creative people who are part of the creative process and making our books, but also do some amazing things that can help us.

So I’m very excited today to bring in Anna. Anna, why don’t you introduce yourself. Tell us what you do and Yeah, I’m excited to jump in.

[00:38] Meet Anna the Illustrator

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: Well, thank you so much, Beth. Hi everybody. My name is Anna. I am currently based in St. Louis, Missouri. Co, I studied animation in college and, things just, one thing after the next and, job wise, it was a very competitive job market out there.

So I decided to look into something a little different. And as it turns out, I illustrate for books now, so I do all kinds of author services for them when it comes to the art side of their books, so they don’t have to worry about it, because that’s my job. I get to make so many, so much pretty artwork and I love doing it and I can’t wait to do more. This is this is my third year doing it, so I’m super excited.

BETH BARANY: That’s so great.

[01:18] From Maps to Book Covers

I don’t remember how we met. It may have been in some other networking group, but I was really excited to hear about what you do both from, just from a filmmaker’s perspective too, because I’ve been working with designers over there, and as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I daydream about the maps. I daydream about my settings. So one of the things I saw on your website is that you make maps and you do character art. Do you also do covers?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: It’s funny you say that. I actually did my first book cover last month.

Right now it’s just the ebook. The author already has it uploaded to Amazon ’cause she was so excited. It was just a surreal feeling, seeing my cover on Amazon. But, working on the paperback version as we speak. Since it was my first book cover there, I learned a lot. There was like a big process involved. Lots of figuring out print lingo, making sure things are where they should be. So it was definitely a learning process and it’s like a, it’s like a witchy romance or witch fantasy romance, that sort of thing. So she’s just like, we gotta have the two characters on the front cover. And I was like, say no more. I got you.

So, I’m in the middle of finishing the second half of that.

BETH BARANY: Ah, that’s so exciting. So, you’ve written a few articles for our blog Writer’s Fun Zone, and so folks wanna read more about how you work with authors that can go there. But since I have you.

[02:38] Choosing the Right Style

Can you tell us, and this is something I’ve thought about as well, how do you find the right illustrator for your book? And by illustrator are we talking about people who do maps or people who do inset art? like what is the kind of art that you have been providing? And then how do authors find the right illustrator for them?

How to vet them to avoid scams?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: So I think what it comes down to is just style. What style do you like? And of course that applies depending on which aspect. So character art, you could look at a bunch of different styles, maps, bunch of different styles, but book covers are a bit more narrow. In the sense that if you have a specific genre, you book cover needs to reflect other, you have to look at other comparative titles in that genre. So what those covers will look like. And that’s what your, your cover artist is gonna look at too because when I’m walking around a bookstore and I want to find a, romantasy cover, I’m not gonna be looking in the nonfiction section because all the nonfiction covers are gonna be, bold colors, simple text. Like they’re not gonna be, a bunch of filler gray and like skulls and roses and all that other stuff. So that’s a bit more narrow because you do have to fit the genre expectations when it comes to covers.

Now of course you can do other things as well, but just, keep that in mind.

However, when it comes to maps and character art, you’ve got a little more freedom and it’s just what you like style wise. And what I mean by style, I mean that illustrator’s signature look. So like children’s books have a very distinct style to them.

They’re very whimsy, they’re very colorful. They’re very stylized. I attribute them a lot to fun little, like watercolor paintings. Like children’s book illustrators have a very distinct look to them.

Other styles include anime, cartoony, stylized, painterly, semi realistic, realistic. So when you look for illustrators, narrow down what style you want because you don’t want somebody commenting or placing in a bid and their style is the complete opposite of what you’re looking for.

So that’s how you can narrow down other illustrators.

I have three, roughly three different styles that I’ve been working on over the years. A lot of my interior illustrations, full pages and my illustration boards, which you use to pitch to film studios back in the day. I love doing that size, but that’s more, painterly. So it’s very stylized, very painterly. There’s no outlines, very colorful. With my background in animation, I lean a lot towards cinematic framing, like if I were filming this on a camera for IMAX, what would this shot look like? So I am very partial to something like that.

And then also when I draw character art, that’s a little more stylized on the cartoony side, because in animation, they taught us, take a character but exaggerate, certain features and just keep, drawing it and drawing it until you get a good silhouette or proportions that you really like or just fit that character.

So there’s all kinds of tests involved. So my character art is very, noticeable by line art. I like to do dynamic poses. And I will line art the characters and either painterly the background or line and color the background as well. So mine are a bit more on the stylized side, what you would probably see them in more an animated feature.

So they’re a little bit more on that side as far as style.

[05:52] Avoiding Artist Scams

BETH BARANY: How do you advise authors to avoid any kind of scams with shopping for an illustrator?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: A lot of authors will be on threads and they will put a call for artists, whether it’s, book cover, character art, maps, what have you. They’ll be like, Hey, I’m looking for a character artist.

They’re gonna get a flood of comments saying, X, Y, Z. There are legitimate ones, but there’s also a bunch of scammers in there. And a big ginormous tell is if they direct message you without your consent. If you both do not mutually agree, for example, in the comment section, then that’s a big tell.

That’s a scam.

And then the second thing is looking at art, their art style.

So, granted I have three art styles and I’m constantly evolving, learning them, how to get better at them. But another big tell is when an artist or a scam account has drew something really bad, two weeks ago, and then they post again and it’s so fully rendered it’s like crazy. And it’s this doesn’t add up. Something isn’t, there’s no way they got that good in two weeks. You wanna see a natural progression. You wanna see styles that are similar. ‘Cause some artists they just work in one style and that’s all they post, which is completely fine.

And then other thing is when you’re vetting artists, look for previous projects. So, for example, on my website, I am not shy. I always ask the authors, Hey, how would you like me to credit you for your IP on my website? ’cause I want people to know this is who I did the work for. Go check out their book ’cause it’s freaking amazing.

So I will name the author and their book and I’ll also name the publication date if it is applicable. Some of ’em, they get the art done way ahead of time, and they don’t have a publication date yet, and some are already published. So depending on that I also list the publication dates so it’s easy to find them because then if you want, you can message the author directly and be like, Hey, I got a question. Well, how was your experience working with this artist? So they know it’s a real person.

So another thing is also asking other authors is a good way to vet illustrators because a lot of authors will find out if their illustrator was AI and they’ll cancel the project and be like, Hey, beware this person, they charged me X amount for AI and not, actual human hand-drawn artwork.

So referrals are also a big thing, because you can always search up. If you’re scrolling Instagram for some reason and you follow a lot of authors and you see artwork pop up and you’re like, Ooh, I love that character art, nine times outta ten, it’ll be signed by the artist, either with their signature or their tag online, and then you can go and find them. Or the author will have them tagged in the description or in the comments so other people can look them up as they want as well which brings me to my next point is their presence. If the illustrator has a very good social media slash online presence, that will do wonders.

My tag on Instagram is the same as threads, TikTok, and X. So it’s easy to find me everywhere and I also like websites because you can showcase your portfolio to a much wider audience.

I like to communicate through email a lot because that way we have records for the both of us. Everything is in writing, so that way we we all make sure we are on the same page.

[09:09] When to Commission Art

BETH BARANY: Let’s jump to timing. Let’s talk about scheduling.

Like, there I am. I’m editing my novel and is now a good time to think about maps and character art for marketing? I personally start thinking about cover design in editing process. I haven’t yet hired anyone to do maps, and I’ve only done some playful, character art, as I was starting to explore my film process for the project.

But I’ve never really tied that kind of thing to the book production process. So what do you recommend? When do authors need to start thinking about, oh, I wanna map, I’m ready to put some funds aside for that, or, oh, I want character art for my Kickstarter or for, marketing.

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: So when it comes to maps, if you’re putting it in your book, I’ve done maps as early as the author had written the first few chapters, and they’re like, I need a map so I know where my characters are going. Like, this is insane. I need to get this mapped out so I know what their journey is. So I’ve done it as early as that, but I always ask them, what is your trim size?

Because if you plan on putting this in your book, you need to know the trim size of your novel. And that goes for any KDP. One of the standards for romantasy, for example, is six inches by nine inches. So anytime I draw the map, I do it based off of those measurements. But I always tell the author, Hey, I can sketch out everything, but I need to know, finalize what your size is before I ink, line, and color, because that is gonna be very hard to change if your trim size changes. So you gotta know your trim size. And that goes for book covers, that goes for children’s books, that goes for interior illustrations. You’ve got to know your trim size and even though you’ve just written a few chapters and you’re like, oh, I still need to finish, draft one, but you’re really set on getting the book done. You gotta know your trim size. Very, very big.

So I can get started on that map as early as draft one or when you’ve edited everything and it’s ready to be published, you just need to put a map in the book. So maps are flexible in that regard. And then as far as character art, that can be done pretty much whenever. I think the best timing for that though, if you really wanna utilize it, is, pre-release of a book. You can use it as a teaser. You can use it as a newsletter, sign up, grab like, Hey, if you wanna see this, if you wanna see character from my upcoming book, you gotta come on, gotta join my newsletter.

So it’s a way authors can, I wouldn’t say suck you in, but draw you into the book so you’re ready for it when it’s published. And I’ve seen, you can go as early as, three or four months before your book releases. But depending on what artists you choose, you gotta look ahead and see A, their prices and if it’s within your budget, and B, if they have openings for that time and see how long it will take them to do. So for me, character art takes about two to three weeks, for a fully illustrated thing with all the fixings. So I can get that done relatively quickly, where some artists, depending on their style, it might take them two months.

So just, touching base with the artists, asking them, Hey, how long is it gonna take you to do this? So you have it in time for your release. Now, you can also get character done after the book has been published as a fun incentive to be like, Hey, if you want a special edition of this book, it comes with character art as well.

So it’s a great marketing tool. And it’s fantastic to use to draw, ’cause I’m an artist, I see pretty art for a book, I’m gonna go run to find out where the pretty art came from. And if it has a book attached, I’m probably gonna buy the book because it looks fantastic.

Character art is just great before the book is out in my opinion because then you can really get that audience, tease them. Then once the book releases, they’re gonna be chomping at the bit to find out what more to the story.

BETH BARANY: Yeah. Great. Yeah. Great promo idea.

[13:01] Booking and Lead Times

And lastly, let’s talk about how people work with you, because you were saying, every artist that you wanna hire is gonna have a lead time.

You need time to make the art of course. There’s also, we gotta build in time, to hire someone. And I’m a producer, so I’m thinking about all of these, like there’s the end product and say the publishing date is here, how early do they need to come in and talk to you? and then how do you work with the authors?

What’s the process that you take the authors through?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: So I’m gonna start with, looking ahead, So for me, every artist is a little different. I do everything in six month chunks. So at the beginning of January I opened up slots from January till June. And, just letting people know you can book me out as far as June right now.

Now, next month in May, I will open up slots for the rest of the year. So July to December. I’ve already got people asking me and I was like, I’ll open those up in May and then you can pick your slots. But that’s just how I work. Some artists they do it on a month by month basis or they book out as far as a year in advance.

So it really depends. I have a booking schedule on my website. So I have it all on there, like, Hey, here are the slots that are currently open for these months. So even if you’re not ready or you need to save up, you can look further along in the year to see if I have an opening, because you can have the contract signed and ready to go as early as May for work in October, but that just means you’ve solidified your spot. Nobody else has taken that spot so that way you have time to save up the money. And I also offer half and half if that works better within your budget.

So just communicating with the artist, see what their booking schedule is like.

[14:39] Anna’s Mapmaking Workflow

As far as me, I’m gonna do a map example. I love my map example. So when you commission me for a map, we talk all the dirty details. We make sure, do you want continent, regional? Do you want any of these add-ons? ’cause I do offer illustrated borders, icons, accent color, texture, background, and full color. So those are all different add-ons. You can pick and choose which ones you would like, or if you just want the base, that’s totally fine too. So we hammer out all this details in email.

And once those are all finalized, I send out a contract and licensing agreement for the author to sign. I always tell them, please read it over carefully because some, sometimes I will accidentally misspell something or I will have the wrong number. I always tell them, please read it over carefully before signing. That goes for any artist, not just me. And that goes for any artist you do a contract with. So that being said, once all that is done, say it’s for the month of May 1st, I get started. If it’s for a map, I will do three silhouettes. So I’ll sketch out three different silhouettes for a continent, for example. I’ll place all these cities and towns that they described ’cause the author will send me either a sketch version of their map and or a Word document with a bunch of descriptions, and I interpret from there. And then I send the sketches to the author in a flat book with my branding via email and they will, they can either pick one and you’re good to go, or they get a revision stage as well. So if they wanna pick one and make changes or if they wanna see three entirely new silhouettes, perfectly within, it’s built into the price. So revision stage. And then after that revision one is approved, I move onto line art.

So I ink everything I write everything down, put in the name city towns names, put it together. Put in a flat book, send it to the author, after that is revision two. So at that point, checking for spelling, checking for, readability, all that other fun stuff to make sure your map is coming away exactly how you want it. So you get a revision stage after that. And then once that is all approved, then we go on to the finals.

So if your map has any color that will be put in there, any final renderings. And then once that is finished, it gets put into a flat book sent to the author for a final round of revisions if needed.

So there’s three revisions built into my mapmaking process, and then they can either revise or they’re like, Hey, looks good. Good to go. I package it up into a final package. I have an RGV folder for web digital, and I have a C-M-Y-K folder for print. Everything is, everything is prepped and ready to go depending on where you wanna put it.

I also put in a Word document, which has all your specs. So if you ever have like a book designer who’s like, what size is this map? I put it all in the spec sheet so you don’t have to go digging for it. And then I also include a bleed example. So if your book is in print, I give you a bleed example with the gutter and the bleed on the outside.

So when you’re sizing your book, yourself, for example, and a formatting software, you can see how to size the map properly,on the pages. So the bleed area is just what gets cut off. It’s just me showing the author, Hey. Here’s a visual, here’s where the gutter is. That’s why nothing important is in the middle of your map because it’s all going into the center of the gutter. That’s why you don’t wanna put anything important around there ’cause it all folds in. So I gave a bunch of examples that way. And then I also include the Photoshop files that I worked in, because I’m not scared about sharing my process.

The reasoning behind that is in the event your book designer needs to fix something small or they just make a, a couple minor adjustments to suit the size of the book or whatever ’cause that stuff happens. They’re like, yeah, by all means you do you, all I ask is that is the only thing those Photoshop files are used for.

They’re just to make sure you get your tiny little adjustments. They’re not to be used for anything else. So they’re just me just being transparent and letting here’s your files. Have at it.

BETH BARANY: That’s really great. And just for those of us who don’t know, what is flat book? Is, that’s a piece of software?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: It’s a PDF, with my branding on it, and it’ll have my name, the author’s name, the project type for example, your fantasy map and on the back it’ll list, if it, what stage it was or what revision it was. You can look back and see like the progress made or if it’s like your, for your records kind of thing.

So it’s just a way for artists to showcase their work in a professional manner.

BETH BARANY: Well, I think you’ve given us a really thorough discussion and overview of what it’s like to work with illustrators, what it’s like to work with you.

[18:56] Genres and Creative Freedom

Is there anything else that you wanna offer up to authors? What’s your favorite kind of genres do you work with? Is it science only? Science fiction and fantasy, romantasy, that kind of thing. And what do you, who do you like to work with?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: Going back to our style conversation earlier is when looking for artists, look at what genres they specialize in.

So I specialize in fantasy and romantasy. I love drawing creatures as well. So like unicorns, dragons, love that stuff. I also have done some sci-fi, some dystopian maps.

I’m open to other ones.

BETH BARANY: Mm-hmm.

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: If you like the style, so it just comes down to the style. Authors I love working with are ones who are just like, here’s a general overview or here’s the scene that I want drawn, but do whatever you want, man. So they can give me the scene, but I could draw it differently than how it’s depicted. I think like a camera movement. If you’re looking at something dead on with a camera, well, I might be thinking of the scene as an overhead shot. So a little different than what the author had in mind.

So I like doing a lot of that. An author I’m working with right now. I was like, Hey, How would you like me to draw this dog for your interior? And she’s just like, well, here’s some descriptions of him, but honestly, do whatever you want. And I was like, okay, I love that. I just like little bit of freedom is nice, but I also wanna make sure that it’s exactly what the author had in mind and communication is real big.

So when me and the author are just messaging back and forth, just nerding out over sketches, it’s so much fun. I enjoy it so much.

BETH BARANY: That’s so great. Oh, I love it.

[20:29] Write the Future and Farewell

As we wrap up this interview today, I wanted to ask you a question that I like to ask all my guests, which is, when you hear how to write the future, what does that bring up for you?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: To me, it brings up, changing the norms, taking genres and changing them up a little. Because from personal experience, some of my favorite genres, romantasy for example, but I wanna see something a little more. Something a little different, but still in the same genre. So I think how to the future is thinking of unique ways to I wouldn’t say reinvent the genre, but make it your own. Just make it something that that you really love.

BETH BARANY: Yeah. I love it. Oh, I love it so much.

And just to remind everyone where they can find you on the socials, on your website, what’s your tag? What’s your website?

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: So my website is www.AnnaLeitensdorfer.com. And on my socials, I am on Instagram, TikTok and Threads mainly. I do have an X, but I mainly post to the other three. My tag is AT (@) all lowercase valkyrie_hero.

BETH BARANY: Fabulous. I love it. I love it. I love it. Well, thank you Anna. And everyone, be sure to check out Anna’s work on the socials on your website. Also, Anna writes for our blog where she goes into great depth on how to work with Illustrator, and other awesome tips for authors and working with illustrators.

So thanks again, Anna, for coming on to How To Write the Future. I so, so appreciate it. Everyone. That’s it for this week.

ANNA LEITENSDORFER: Thank you so much for having me.

BETH BARANY: Write long and prosper. Alright, that’s a wrap.

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Create Your Own Art Community by Catharine Bramkamp

Guest Contributor — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:00:56 +0000

Let’s welcome back monthly columnist Catharine Bramkamp as she shares with us “Create Your Own Art Community.” Enjoy!

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“Community helps me be a better artist. It’s imperative to be able to ping pong ideas off other creatives & makers. There’s also a social energy that comes about when artists get together in a room together. Ideas begin to flourish and it’s a remarkable thing.” — Jeff Golenski, A photographer for JetPack.

Artists Need Other Artists

I searched through my library to find examples of creative communities and after collecting a dangerously high stack of books, realized there are few artists who did not belong to an artistic community.

From the pre-Raphaelites to the Impressionists to the Surrealists to the women of New York City’s 9th Street to the Beats to you, artists need each other.

We need to discuss our art with people who understand the language.

We need inspiration and helpful criticism.

We long for support and feedback.

We need to know we are not crazy.

We need our friends.

Lady Gregory and the Irish Renaissance

Lady Gregory (1852 – 1932), married an English Lord but was a life-long resident of Ireland.

She not only was devoted to preserving the indigenous Celtic language but she also headed and supported the Irish Renaissance and was the founder and sustaining member of the Abby Theater specializing in Irish plays.

She supported WB Yeats, and helped him master the local dialects in his plays.

She defended JM Synge’s inflammatory The Playboy of the Western World (1907).

Lady Gregory researched, wrote, and produced her own plays, which were more popular than either Synge or Yeats (together).

More importantly, she nurtured and encouraged Irish artists in their efforts to return Irish history and traditions back to their own people.

Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Artistic Haven

Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879 – 1962) was born to be a salon hostess.

Her well-to-do family encouraged her to follow her bliss.

She first concentrated on collecting art then advanced to collecting the artists themselves.

She retreated from the industrial north to New Mexico renovating and building out the Mabel Dodge Luhan House attracting both writers and visual artists like DH Lawrence, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ansel Adams.

Luhan offered accommodations, and respite, but her job was Artist Muse.

She encouraged and at times, bullied her artist friends to create and be their best selves.

And they did.

The Bloomsbury Group

Finally released from catering to her overbearing father, painter Vanessa Stephen (1879 – 1961) started up evening salons in her home.

She essentially created what was even then called the Bloomsbury Group.

From her husband Clive to her sister Virginia Woolf, this group of friends gathered every week to talk, paint, organize shows, and inspire each other to do their best work.

Clive Bell, Vanessa’s husband was a formidable art critic and Roger Fry, Vanessa’s lover, was the first gallery owner to show the work of the Post Impressionists inspiring the art changing exhibit in New York City, The Armory Show (1913).

These infamous community members argued, fought, featured each other in novels and paintings, slept with each other’s partners and ultimately served as the Muse to improve their art and increase the opportunities to share their art with the world.

Many were wealthy enough to not care if the art sold or not, a very nice place to be.

Why Community Matters

Can you go it alone?

In the beginning when you are just getting your work together and figuring out your vision, yes.

But eventually, or even tomorrow, you’ll want and need a group, your people, your tribe.

Tribes are important.

Ezra Pound started, essentially, a Go Fund Me campaign to raise enough money so his friend TS Eliot could quit his bank job and write poetry full time (Eliot declined the help).

Lady Gregory’s lover, John Quinn, defended Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap during their 1921 obscenity trial in NYC.

The work?

Ulysses, which Sylvia Beach took on and published in Paris in 1922.

Creative Communities Through History

Artists are famous or infamous for shocking their staid community.

Lady Gregory shocked audiences by accident but some of her playwrights did it on purpose and she stayed with them.

Members of the Bloomsbury group shocked on purpose, as did the Beat Poets.

In post-war Paris, women like Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Beach fled US Prohibition and cramped ideas about gender to find their own loves and lives in the City of Light.

When artists move into an affordable town or urban neighborhood, they immediately upgrade and improve the space.

The city of Detroit even offered artists the chance to live in abandoned houses rent free.

The artist need only agree to contribute art to the community.

To date, several homes have been restored, and the program, though small, is lauded for its creative approach to neighborhood revitalization.

Research on Creativity and Collaboration

In their article Collaboration and Creativity: The Small World Problem, authors Brian Uzzi and Jarrett Spiro commented, “ Many of history’s great creators — such as Beethoven, Marie Curie, the Beatles, and Maya Angelou — were involved in creative networks in which members critiqued, encouraged and collaborated on each other’s projects.”

Building Community Around a Project

A big project will often create its own community.

A friend is writing a play on a forgotten philosopher, she is also writing the annotations and history of the play.

She is contacting theaters and spaces to bring the play to life.

She meets with conference organizers and scholars.

She even met the philosopher’s granddaughter.

The entire project has gathered a creative community around her.

She is self-publishing her play/annotated book because she may not have much time to waste with traditional outlets.

She is 87.

Start Small: One Friend Is Enough

Community can be as simple as one friend.

When Natalie Goldberg was writing her first book (Banana Rose concurrently with Writing Down the Bones) she scheduled meeting a friend at a local cafe at 3:00 PM.

Whether the friend actually showed up wasn’t the point.

At 3:00 PM, Natalie showed up and wrote for an hour.

It was her way of creating accountability, and getting out of the house. Invite one friend.

Encourage her to invite another friend — he invites a third.

Online Communities Count Too

Or meet online.

Many newsletters and missives I receive, invite readers to join the online writing group.

Members Zoom in, check in, then write together.

Artists must meet, they must exchange ideas.

Artists worked together out in the fields (haystacks, lakes, train stations).

For female artists, working with another artist was necessary, as working in public was risky.

If you are a musician and you play in a band or symphony you are lucky, there is no other choice but to literally play nicely with others.

Create the Community You Need

Creating your own artist community is worth the effort.

The group will support you and your art will thrive.

More importantly, you will too.

Learn More

Look for my new book — Take Up Space — Art is Your Second Act.

***

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The post Create Your Own Art Community by Catharine Bramkamp appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Protecting the Creative Life: The Fragility of the Creative Space by Iman Llompart

Guest Contributor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:00:44 +0000

Let’s welcome back Iman Llompart as she shares with us “Protecting the Creative Life: The Fragility of the Creative Space.” Enjoy!

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Discipline

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with this word: “Discipline.”

I love it because it keeps you organized.

It speaks to consistency.

It’s tied to results.

You see the fruits of your labor sooner when you’re “disciplined.”

But the hate part comes from how it’s used.

Because when people struggle with discipline, myself included, it’s often labeled as laziness.

And I’ve made that comparison, too.

When someone says they don’t have time to write or work on a creative project, the immediate thought is:

Well, maybe they don’t actually want it.

Maybe they’re just not disciplined enough.

And we hear the stories all the time — writers waking up at 4 or 5 a.m. to write before the day begins.

So, we know it can be done.

I wonder, could I be one of those people, writing as the morning glow breaks through the horizon?

Absolutely not.

And that used to feel like a failure.

The Myth of Discipline

But here’s what I’ve come to realize:

When you are a creative founder or entrepreneur, discipline is rarely the problem.

You are already doing a lot.

You are running a business.

You are managing clients.

You are showing up, delivering, and figuring things out as you go.

That is discipline.

So when the writing doesn’t happen, or the creative work gets pushed aside, it’s not because you lack discipline.

It’s because of something else.

It’s because of the noise.

The invisible noise.

The Invisible Noise

Think about everything a small business owner is holding at once:

onboarding new clients
sending emails
creating content
posting consistently
scheduling
managing inboxes
organizing files and archives
handling admin tasks
sending invoices
not to mention, planning and visioning new business projects

Just writing that list makes my heartbeat pick up a little.

That’s not laziness.

That’s load.

And all of it takes up mental bandwidth.

No wonder the creative work, the thing that made you start in the first place, starts to disappear into the background.

It becomes something you’ll get to later.

And later rarely comes.

These tasks are repetitive.

Ongoing.

Never fully finished.

It starts to feel like Groundhog Day.

And slowly, the invisible noise builds.

Until one day, the thing you loved — the reason you started your creative business — feels heavy.

Or distant.

Or even… you feel resentful.

And then comes the word we all know too well:

Burnout

Creativity Needs Containment

Here’s the shift that changed everything for me:

Creative people don’t need more pressure.

They don’t need perfect routines.

And they definitely don’t need rigid systems that suffocate them.

They need a container.

They need a structure that feels safe.

A structure that holds things in place so their mind doesn’t have to.

Once you put that structure in place, you get:

clear workflows
fewer decisions
defined processes
protected time

Because when those things are in place, something important happens:

The noise quiets down.

And when the noise quiets down, creativity has somewhere to land.

Structure Is Not the Enemy

I know a lot of creatives resist systems.

Especially now that AI is entering the picture, there’s even more hesitation.

There’s a fear that structure, or systems, or tools will somehow take away from the work.

That they will make things too easy.

Or worse — less meaningful.

And to some extent, that concern is valid.

If you use AI to replace the creative process, then yes — you lose something.

You lose the friction.

The problem-solving.

The tension that often leads to something beautiful.

But that’s not how systems are meant to be used.

Systems are not here to create for you.

They are here to support you.

When used correctly, systems don’t kill creativity.

They protect it.

They take care of everything around the work — so you can return to the work itself.

What Protection Looks Like

Protecting your creative space doesn’t require perfection.

It requires intention.

It can look like:

Creating simple, repeatable workflows
Delineating clear client onboarding
Setting up tools to capture meeting notes and summaries
Initiating boundaries around your time
Delegating what drains you
Using tools to hold information so your mind doesn’t have to

Even something as simple as having everything in one place: your client details, notes, tasks, and all the moving pieces you’re trying to hold in your head, can create a sense of relief.

Because you are no longer carrying everything at once.

You are supported.

A Different Way to Think About Discipline

So maybe discipline isn’t where we start.

Maybe structure is.

Structure creates clarity.

Clarity reduces noise.

And reduced noise creates space.

And in that space — creativity can return.

Final Thought

Most creatives do not need more discipline.

They need more protection.

If this article resonated with you, I created a short Creative Capacity Check-In Assessment to help you identify where your business might be quietly draining your creative energy — and where structure could support you instead.

***

About The Author

Take her Creative Capacity Check-In Assessment to identify where your business may be quietly draining your creative energy.

Instagram @imanllompart • Instagram photos and videos

The post Protecting the Creative Life: The Fragility of the Creative Space by Iman Llompart appeared first on Writer's Fun Zone.

Turn Your Wish Into Story Fuel with Brownell Landrum

Kerry-Ann McDade — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:14:34 +0000

Turn Your Wish Into Story Fuel with Brownell Landrum

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“I researched over 70 different scientists. And so it was really, really fun to go into that exploration of what are the sciences of wishing.” – Brownell Landrum

Do you know what sciences we use in making a wish? When blowing out the candles become more than a birthday moment?
In this captivating How To Write the Future podcast episode, titled “Turn Your Wish Into Story Fuel with Brownell Landrum” host Beth Barany interviews storyteller and inventor Brownell Landrum where together they discuss Brownell’s novel where she shares the science exploration behind making a wish and how she researched over 70 scientists calling it a “cosmic whack-a-mole.”

Platforms the podcast is available on: Apple Podcasts | Buzzsprout | Spotify| YouTube

RESOURCES

JOIN: For fiction writers! You’ve finished your first draft! Congrats! Now what?

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About the How To Write the Future podcast

This podcast is for you if you have questions like:

– How do I create a believable world for my science fiction story?

– How do I figure out what’s not working if my story feels flat?

– How do I make my story more interesting and alive?

This podcast is for readers, too, if you’re at all curious about the future of humanity.

ABOUT BROWNELL LANDRUM

Brownell Landrum is a storyteller, speaker, inventor, and change catalyst. She’s the author of over a dozen books, including The Art & Science of Wishing and the upcoming The Art & Science of Wishing at Work. She got curious about the sciences involved in wishing while writing a novel entitled A Love Story to The Universe. Brownell combines her corporate and entrepreneurial background and logical, business-oriented skills with a compelling storytelling style. The motto for her stories is “Lose yourself in the fiction… Find yourself in the truth.”

Site: https://brownelllandrum.com/

Here’s the link to Chapter 1 of the Art & Science of Wishing

Link to Part 1 of A Love Story to the Universe

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/a4s6x8lwk5

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brownell.landrum.author

X: https://x.com/BrownellLandrum

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brownelllandrum/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@brownell.landrum

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brownell.landrum

Transcript for Turn Your Wish Into Story Fuel with Brownell Landrum

Welcome and Premise

BETH BARANY: Welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I’m your host, Beth Barany. I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy novelist and a book coach for science fiction and fantasy writers. I run this podcast because I love talking to people about wonderful new ideas, and my whole premise here is about how can we bring our new visions of how we could be in the world and with each other into our story. So I have a special guest with us today. I’m very excited to introduce you to her, and we’re gonna have a conversation that I’m sure is gonna be wide ranging and full of interesting, fun things. I would like to introduce you to Brownell Landrum. Brownell, please introduce yourself and, and welcome to How to Write the Future.

[00:43] Meet Brownell Landrum

BROWNELL LANDRUM: I’m excited to be here. I, I, I love your show and I love this whole realm. So I, obviously, I’m a writer. I write fiction and nonfiction and, and so the latest thing is I like the idea of how can fiction, which I think is part of what your message really is, is you’re writing the future. Can you write something that’s fiction that actually manifests in the future, in reality, right? And helps us envision another future. And so, and that. Kind of what I did. So I’ve written, I get into, my novels are kind of in the realm of, kind of in a metaphysical kind of realm. So like, I came up with the trilogy, a little over a year, a year and a half ago.

That’s this epic reincarnation, mystery and love story about a famous couple from history who’s brought back today to fulfill a prophecy, you know, that kind of big, epic adventure. And then I have a, another book that I came out with after that that’s semi autobiographical that I’m sure you’re gonna ask me about.

And then I have a nonfiction book that’s new, so I cover a lot of ground.

BETH BARANY: That’s so wonderful.

[01:38] From Novel to Wishing Science

And let’s talk about a semi autobiographical novel called how The Art and Science of Wishing, is that the right title?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Actually the novel’s called A Love Story to the Universe, and then that spun off on a nonfiction book that’s called The Art and Science of Wishing. So that’s, that’s kind of how it all worked, is like, and, and you’ve probably been there. That, you know, I was writing this book and I was writing it kind of in this fantasy world of what I call upstairs, you know, and these guides that are up in this other realm and they’re looking at these humans going what are y’all doing?

And how do we get, how do we corral these humans that are doing these crazy things? And so I was writing this book, and, and that’s a whole nother thing that I can get into as far as if you wanna know more about how that story. And then, but I, it’s written in sort of four parts. And the fourth part got into, the, I was creating this realm of wishes and wishing, and I had these wish fairies that were, you know, seeking out wishes and how do you sort wishes.

And they had this huge realm, I called it Astraya. And like, and they, so they go find wishes and then figure out who deser, you know, where they go and, you know, the whole world of wishes and wishing. And then, and one thing that’s so interesting about science fiction, right? Is like, there’s science and then there’s fiction.

Well, I kind of, I kind of bridged that gap, in a, in a unique way, I think is, so I was doing world building, right? And, you know, I’ve seen your show, when you’re talking about the world building and how you have to make some decisions about what’s your world. And I’m having to decide what’s the difference between a wish, a prayer and a goal, you know?

And so I’m, I’m getting my brain on this topic, and then while I’m writing this, I am, sometimes I’m kind of weird and I listen to science lectures to help me fall asleep. So when I can’t fall asleep, I listen to science lectures.

[03:18] Researching Wishing Sciences

And, one night I was listening to a lecture on neuroplasticity, and it made me wonder, I was like, wait a minute.

Is there science in wishing? And that led me into this huge, like, I call it a game of cosmic whack-a-mole ’cause these sciences just kept popping up everywhere. and that led me to write The Art and Science of Wishing, which is, nonfiction. And I researched over 70 different scientists. And so it was really, really fun to go into that exploration of what are the sciences and wishing.

And, did you know that every time you make a wish you engage over a dozen different sciences?

BETH BARANY: I did not know that. So are, is it because we’re using all different parts of our brain and biology and physics and chemistry?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There’s so many different anthropology, right? With, with rituals, because usually ritual wishing comes around a ritual, whether it’s blowing out candles on a birthday cake or, you know, seeing a time on the clock or something like that. So it just got really, really fun looking at the different sciences, and that’s what led me to, to write the. It’s kind of like, you know, the, the, if you look at some of the episodes like of the Simpsons and then they predicted things that happened in the future, you’re like, this, this, this idea of wishes. And then I was like, wait a minute. How do we, how do I learn from that? How do I apply the science to that? And then how do I bring that into the world to create a better future? Right? So that ties into your whole theme is like, because the theme of my novels is Lose yourself in the fiction. Find yourself in the truth.

BETH BARANY: That’s beautiful.

[04:48] Testing Wishes in Real Life

As you were working on your nonfiction book, did you notice this operating in your own life? Or did you make some experiments on yourself around wishing and then go, oh, look, look what I manifested, or any kind of things like that?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, because the way I look at, it’s like I’m very clear, I’m a storyteller, not a scientist, right? And so, and when I meet people that are scientists or people who are listening, that might be scientists, I’m like, I respect you. If you got questions or concerns or improvements or any, you know, corrections or anything like that, I’m, I’m all ears.

And and so I feel like, like I, maybe I’m more like one or two steps ahead of most people because I’ve done the research, but I’m still kind of learning as I’m going through this. And when I was first writing it, like I said, the the fiction book, the A Love Story to the Universe, I was making wishes myself and I was like, wait a minute, this is an unusual way to make a wish.

Is that, what’s the impact? And it led to this kind of question of what would happen if people stopped wishing. You know? And, and that’s that kind of the fantasy world, right? Is that there’s a crisis on earth where the main character stops wishing as she, she flips the script on wishing, and then all of a sudden there’s chaos upstairs because what would happen, and it’s happened before in history. And so they have kind of these experiences where, you know, there could be a whole system shut down.

And and so that’s kind of the. Jumping off point is what would happen if we, if we lost it? And then, and so that was part of the exploration. And then the next part of the exploration is what would happen if we started wishing together.

BETH BARANY: Which we kind of do in our collective rituals that we do, through religion, through sports, through song, through performances. You could even call all of those collective tools.

BROWNELL LANDRUM: I talk about the four responses to a wish. And they’re “yes,” “no,” “wait,” or “something better.” And so when you ask like, am I experiencing this? Yes, there are things that I’m experiencing it and learning my own process of the sciences, to apply the sciences to the wish and watching my own world expand.

And one area I think you probably really like is, I, in fact, I’m getting ready to do a Ted Talk. And I’m super excited.

[07:03] Writing Rituals and Brain Modes

I’m gonna be talking about this and I’m gonna be talking about something called the Default Mode Network. And as a creative person, you know what that is, right? You know, when we get into this mindset and we’re trying to come up with something, it’s hard but when then we go wash the dishes or take a shower like Aaron Sorkin, you probably know that his thing is when he can’t, when he is in writing mode, he’ll take seven showers a day sometimes just to get into the default mode network. So it’s just fun stuff, you know, the science is fun.

BETH BARANY: I like washing the dishes and I also like walking. Walking is key to my writing ritual and then sometimes it’s self-talk. So walking and talking before I sit down to write.

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Right. And then sometimes if you’re writing and you get stuck, right, sometimes those little breaks, and what’s happening in the brain, it’s turning off one part of your brain and turning on another part and that’s what the default mode network is. So you think, oh, I’m zoning out. And especially if you start out with a wish.

So I think here’s a ritual for your writers is start out with the wish. What do you wish for this book? What do you wish for this story? What do you wish for your audience? What do you wish for your characters? And write from there. And then all of a sudden you’re gonna see it’s gonna turn on something called the reticular activating system, which is going to be looking for those stories.

And then the default mode network happens in a different level of the brain that says, okay, well, I’m not thinking about it is when the ideas come and then you have to capture ’em when they do, right?

Because sometimes they go and come and go and then we’re like those middle of the night ideas. We need to, you know, write down or voice record is what I use.

BETH BARANY: Yeah, I was gonna say voice recording is great. Writing them down. I have a lot of pencils and notepads by my bedside ’cause pens don’t always work. And a pencil will work even if you’re like lying on your back trying to write upside down. Yeah. And getting into the habit of capturing your ideas as they come.

That’s great. I love those questions. They are core to anytime I’m stuck in the editing process, I go right back to those questions in terms of: What is this story really about? What does my character want? What do I want as an author? And what do I want my my readers to experience? And what are they reaching for? So those are such great, great core questions.

[09:10] Prolific Output and Writer Tips

So understand, you’ve got the novel that led into the nonfiction book, and then you said there’s another, is it a fiction that you have after that?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Before that, that’s the big epic reincarnation, mystery, and love story. It was a trilogy. I’ve written over a dozen books, so it’s like, well, which one? ‘Cause I do have a, a Tetralogy, which is four books of a more like a love story, but it’s, it’s a metaphysical, you know, going into past lives, and then the fantasy of this, of that.

And then the most recent one it’s called We Meet Again and it’s a trilogy. And then who knows what’s next.

I’ve written a bunch of screenplays. The couple of screenplays that I’m, I’m halfway in the process of writing. One’s a, a young adult, kind of adventure kind of thing and it gets, you know, it all gets into the mystical and metaphysical and things like that. So it’s, it’s fun.

BETH BARANY: I love how creative you are too in working on scripts.

[09:57] Whats Next and Free Resources

So when you are, uh. and about in the world. Do you offer any goodies or freebies or anything that people can go, Ooh, I want that. So people, can sign up for, do you have a newsletter people can sign up for?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: Yeah, I’ve got, you can read the, the, the A Love Story to the Universe is written in four parts. So the first part, I can give to your listeners, for free, and if you wanna read the first chapter of The Art and Science of Wishing, I can also offer that. So.

BETH BARANY: Oh wonderful. Yeah, be sure to give me the link for that. So we’ll be putting that everyone in the show notes and people can find you @brownelllandrum.com. Right?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: That’s right. I’m the only Brownell Landrum, so I’m on all the social media and I’m gonna be building my YouTube channel. Look for that because we’re gonna be having some fun things with what I call cosmic wishes. And, it’s gonna be really, really cool. So, please, please stay tuned back.

[00:10:46] Writing the Future Closing

BETH BARANY: I love that. Well, as we finish up, I love to ask my guests this question outta the blue, but not so much, which is when you think of how to write the future, what does that make you think of?

BROWNELL LANDRUM: It makes me feel like there’s a responsibility to deliver something that has enough meaning and purpose. Like I talk about cosmic wishing needs to be peaceful, positive, and purposeful. And if it’s purposeful, then you can actually guide people toward a better future and more positive future.

BETH BARANY: I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much Brownell, for coming on today at How to Write the Future Podcast. And I just wanna say to everyone here, write long and prosper. Bye.

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***

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ABOUT BETH BARANY

Learn more about Beth Barany at these sites:

Author site / Coaching site / School of Fiction / Writer’s Fun Zone blog

CONNECT

Contact Beth: https://writersfunzone.com/blog/podcast/#tve-jump-185b4422580

Email: beth@bethbarany.com

CREDITS

EDITED WITH DESCRIPT: https://www.descript.com?lmref=_w1WCA (Refer-a-Friend link)(Refer-a-Friend link)
MUSIC CREDITS : Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/fuzz-buzz License code: UMMKDRL02DFGKJ0L. “Fuzz buzz” by Soundroll. Commercial license: https://musicvine.com/track/soundroll/fuzz-buzz.
DISTRIBUTED BY BUZZSPROUT: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1994465 (Refer-a-Friend link)
SHOW PRODUCTION BY Beth Barany
SHOW CO-PRODUCTION + NOTES by Kerry-Ann McDade

c 2025 BETH BARANY