Recently, someone on Twitter asked if sensitivity readers are still a resource writers utilize and where to find them. Yes indeed, sensitivity readers are still a great resource, and since we interviewed Jordan Shapiro and a sensitivity reader he worked with on his book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist Dad . I hope you enjoy this re-airing of episode 266 the #AmWriting podcast. Hey all, Jess here. When I agreed to read and blurb Jordan Shapiro’s new book, Father Figure: How to Be a Feminist ...
Mar 17, 2023•47 min
This week, Jess and KJ talk to journalist, author, and lifelong knitter Peggy Orenstein about research, nonfiction writing, expertise, and examining the unexamined in ordinary life. Peggy’s newest book is , Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater. Peggy’s TED Talk: What Young Women Believe About Their Own Sexual Pleasure Why Fish Don’t Exist , by Lulu Miller Etymology of the term “ woolgathering ” Etymology of the term “ spi...
Mar 10, 2023•42 min
Hey all! Today Sarina brings you a fun but tricky topic: how to write a novel in three months. Should you do it? Maybe. It depends on the book. Not every book can or should be written in 90 days. But if you’re game to try, Sarina gives you: 4 things you need to know about the book before you start 5 tips for writing scenes more quickly 3 things to try when you’re stuck Links from the Pod The Astronaut and The Star , Jen Comfort 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What ...
Mar 03, 2023•30 min
True confession time: Sarina and I have always wanted to make something like this. I’m talking about The Storyteller’s Workbook , which is a gorgeous combination of structural writing guide and writing bullet journal created by Isabel Ibañez , the author of Woven in Moonlight and Written in Starlight , a fantasy YA series that’s a hit with TikTok and Time Magazine both as well as a designer whose work you’ve seen while drooling in the paper sections of stores like Anthropologie and Adrienne Youn...
Feb 24, 2023•42 min
As Leslie Hooton told me, “Some writers have a stroke of luck, I had a stroke at birth,” which left her paralyzed on one side of her body. Thanks to Dragon dictation (not sponsored, we’re just fans!), she’s learned to train her Dragon and “penned” three novels including her most recent release, After Everyone Else . As Jess hosts this episode, we delve into plenty of tangents on dictation, deleted text fragments, inspiration, and the wisdom of Wendell Berry. It may be that when we no longer know...
Feb 17, 2023•36 min
STOP. Do not think to yourself, well, I don’t want to write Erotica—why is this podcast/book for me? This conversation, and the book, How to Write Erotica , that inspires it, goes far beyond any pre-imagined specifics you have about writing scenes, stories and books focused on which bit of bodily anatomy goes where—because to write good erotica, you have to come back to the heart of writing any story (fiction, memoir, what-have-you: why this story, why this character, why now? Guest Rachel Krame...
Feb 10, 2023•49 min
Your query letter—or your jacket copy—KNOWS. It knows if you’ve got a whole story in there, if there’s an arc of change, if there are stakes, if there’s a why now and a why this and a why her/him. You just have to be willing to listen. Julie Artz, query coach extraordinaire, and KJ talk about mistakes writers make in our queries—and more importantly, the problems queries can reveal about our stories. DOWNLOAD JULIE’s 5 STEP QUERY LETTER AUDIT ! Links from the Pod Podcast: The S**t No One Tells Y...
Feb 03, 2023•48 min
Okay, some us (hand up here) start ALL THE THINGS. But some of us don’t like to start what we don’t think we will finish (and even those of us who start a lot sometimes beat ourselves up for that). But if you don’t start stuff you cannot finish stuff. So: here’s Becky Blades, author of Start More than You Can Finish (which—and this is a big deal—was recommended by the Next Big Idea Book Club — and you can listen to five ideas from the book by clicking that link) on why we should… start. More tha...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 2 min
On this week’s episode, Jess and KJ talk to Kristen Mei Chase, an OG mommy blogger, journalist, former professor, podcaster, CEO of the Cool Mom Picks Network, and now, novelist. Her book, Thousand Miles to Graceland comes out on January 24, 2002, and we discuss the long road to publication for her (very personal) story. #AmReading Kristen : Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You KJ : Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake Jess : Reading has been all disappointment recently so she names no names, bu...
Jan 20, 2023•44 min
Hello #AmWriters! Someone in the #AmWriting Facebook group asked about the best ways to connect and build relationships with bookstores, so we decided to revisit this older episode with bestselling author and Emmy-winning television host Mary Laura Philpott . Drawing on her many years working at Parnassus Books and launching her own books into the world, we talk about the benefits of working with your local bookseller in time for publication day. Got a writer-dilemma we could help with? Wanna co...
Jan 13, 2023•48 min
A few assorted 2023 goals that I have no doubt I can achieve: * Finish this box of Wheat Thins * Take down holiday decorations before July. * Read … some books. * Let the dogs in. Hey, look at that. Already I can check off #1. Jess, Sarina and I just aren’t feeling the goals this year. Oh, we have them. But they’re mostly “do that again” or “yeah, stick with that” kinda things. . I’m gonna write another book. Jess is going to promote her speaking and work on her fiction. Sarina is going to write...
Jan 06, 2023•36 min
We make a point of setting goals every year—and, even more importantly, actually looking back to see whether we achieved them, and why. We’ve talked a lot in past years about the importance of setting the right kind of goals (you can get a short PDF on goal-setting and a worksheet below)—by which we mean goals you can control. You can’t sell your book to a publisher—that’s not a goal within your control. Get an agent, make a best-seller list, same. But you can finish the book, get help with the ...
Dec 30, 2022•43 min
Finishing a draft is glorious. Realizing you have to revise it—especially the first time—is … not. That’s the focus of this bonus episode. We’re thinking, maybe it’s post NaNoWriMo, it’s December, and you’re sitting on on a draft, a real honest-to-gosh draft of your first novel. And you should be thrilled, happy, pleased as punch. But since you’re a #AmWriting listener, we know you know the next step is NOT pressing send on an agent query or designing cover art. Or even polishing each sentence t...
Dec 27, 2022•54 min
My motto for 2023 is “good writing comes last” but it might as well be “story first”, which is why we’re re-sharing this interview with Anna North , author of three novels, most recently Outlawed —the January 2021 Reese’s Book Club pick. Outlawed has a powerful theme and message and what we call, in the interview, a “poke-in-the-gut point”—but it also has, first and foremost, a can’t-put-it-down story. We recorded this in January 2021, and it deserves a listen any time. Bummed that there’s not a...
Dec 23, 2022•48 min
Hooks, tropes, high concept. Comps. The publishing world tosses those phrases around like juggling balls, and I for one (as usual it’s KJ here) had a hard time understanding them for ages, especially the idea of a hook. But now I get it. A hook, in short, is the thing that gets someone—agent, editor, reader, movie-goer, etc—to say, following a one or two sentence description of the book: SOLD. Fiction, non-fiction: same deal. So a hook COULD be high-concept. (What if a kid wished to be Big? What...
Dec 16, 2022•48 min
Hi all, Jess here! I’ve been getting a lot of questions in the #AmWriting Facebook group and in my DM/emails about speaking, so I’m going to do a series of bonus episodes about the topic. There’s so much to talk about, but since so many of the questions are about speaking agencies (working with them, getting one, how much of a cut do they take, how do you know which ones are good), I thought I’d start there. I hope this episode flattens the learning curve for you! Show Notes My agency, American ...
Dec 13, 2022•21 min
Sometimes you have to start with a memoir (that you never publish) to figure out who you are and where you’re going. Today’s guest has a nice impressive bio—but 8 years ago, she was just a writer staring at a screen and working on, as many of us do when we first start, a memoir. Emily Grosvenor is the editor of Oregon Home magazine , Willamette Week’s design publication Nester. She’s also written for The Atlantic , Salon , Good Housekeeping , and others. But ALSO like so many of us, she started ...
Dec 09, 2022•52 min
Hey #AmWriters! Jess here. I recorded a bunch of videos to answer all of your questions about creating video for book marketing but in the end, I figured an entire episode needed to happen in order to really get into the topic. I started creating daily videos based on the content in The Addiction Inoculation because I wanted to the information out there, and if it sold some books or rustled up some speaking invitations, great. At the time I’m writing these show notes, I’m 63 videos deep, and yes...
Dec 02, 2022•36 min
I know. I know. Long term listeners know what’s coming first but this first gift combo is an #AmWriting favorite for a good reason. The three of us own the same journal and nearly identical (save for the color of the elastic fastener and monogram) custom leather Fillion and we love them so much. Our favorite calendar/journal is, and has always been, the Leuchtturm1917 monthly planner with 136-page dotted notebook pages . We love everything about it - the monthly pages, the number of dotted pages...
Dec 01, 2022•10 min
Pain by Elsie Robinson Imagine discovering that one of the highest paid, most well known journalists in the world, whose voice dominated the Hearst media empire for more than 30 years, who wrote something like 9,000 published articles… has basically disappeared from living memory. That’s the story of Julia Scheer and Allison Gilbert’s biography: Listen World: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman. The story of this podcast is how Allison came to enlist Julia and finish...
Nov 25, 2022•49 min
Ever feel like some things are just outside your ken? I’m that way with literary magazines. And I’ve never found the right retreat or residency, or applied for a grant, and I know sometimes it’s just that I don’t think I belong in that world. But worlds don’t usually just reach out and drag you in. That’s a fave theme of ours around here—you can’t be published unless you write something, etc. If you want to be part of a literary world you have to find it and start looking around for a door. This...
Nov 18, 2022•52 min
Many of you have heard me (this is obviously KJ) whine about my revision in process. Well, I’m here to report that it’s done, and successfully. Below is a full description of the process, and in the episode you’ll hear me talking about it with Jennie Nash. I detail everything except the Peeps that fueled me, and I decided it was wrong to leave them out. So, in addition to a lot of butt-in-chair time and a surprising number of hours spend really just staring the at screen, I should own that I als...
Nov 11, 2022•51 min
Sometimes your first book is a gateway. For me—KJ—it was Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos , a book I wrote in 2006 with Susan Straub. Susan was the expert and I was a rising writer with a lesser expertise riding on her coattails. We pitched the book before I had many bylines at all—but adding the words “is the author of the forthcoming book…” to my pitches opened a lot of doors. The book itself was shorter and much differently formatted than standard non-fiction. Many writers get started t...
Nov 04, 2022•38 min
I (KJ here) adore Nanowrimo. Tell me it’s impossible to write a whole novel in a month, especially a month with Thanksgiving in it, and I will set out to prove you wrong. My first novel, The Chicken Sisters started as a NaNo project, as did Playing the Witch Card (which is probably coming out in Fall 2023). I… cannot NaNo this year (yes it’s a verb), because my next set of revisions, with an accompanying deadline, will be heading my way in the last week of October. But Jess can and will! So I of...
Oct 28, 2022•41 min
Listeners, we’re sharing this interview again because if you’re not already subscribed to Theodora’s substack, you should be. We sent you a taste of it this morning on top of this episode. We adored talking to TT, as we like to call her around here—but now that she’s revved up her Substack, every single time we’re texting back and forth about its brilliance. “Butter” has joined our official #AmWriting lexicon. So, enjoy a favorite that you might have missed when it originally rolled out over the...
Oct 21, 2022•44 min
Listeners, you KNOW we got granular with this one because there are just plain so many links! Terena Elizabeth Bell has been writing all her life. Her first short story was published in a literary magazine when she was in college—almost thirty years ago, and she’s published many since and won multiple awards. She’s also written for more than 100 publications, including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Playboy, MysteryTribune, and Santa Monica Review . Platform-o-rama, right...
Oct 14, 2022•52 min
If you’ve listened to any of us for any time at all you know we love Laura Vanderkam, author of I Know How She Does It and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think . People often attribute to KJ a piece of advice she learned from Laura: People are a good use of time. We think of Laura every time we start to call ourselves “too busy” and then remember that much of what fills our time is a choice, and if we want to do it, we’ll find a way to get it done. One glorious result—we’re all much bett...
Oct 07, 2022•44 min
Alexis Hall describes himself as a genrequeer writer of kissing books. You may know him as the author of Boyfriend Material and Rosalyn Palmer Takes the Cake , both of which we’ve talked about here. But like recent guest Emily Henry and so many others, those successes were far from his first rodeo. Head to his website, quicunquevult.com , to see the evidence. (Why is it called that? You’ll have to listen to find out.) Alexis has written, and still writes, everything from paranormal and fantasy t...
Sep 30, 2022•36 min
Kids, this interview with Gretchen Rubin is just too good not to share again. Find more about Gretchen, and sign up for her always interesting newsletter, here . Want to know which tendency you are? Take the quiz here . And which tendency would you attribute to your hosts? Answers coming soon… (or maybe in the episode…) Don’t forget that Author Accelerator is your one-stop for getting a coach on board to help you with your work, no matter where you are in the drafting game. Need a pro? Click her...
Sep 23, 2022•47 min
THIS EPISODE. “Overnight success” Emily Henry reminds us that she’s not—she published three sad-and-serious YA novels before she embraced her real calling and wrote the book she craved— Beach Read , which she says “I never expected to send to anyone.” This discussion was so true to our hearts (KJ writing, Sarina co-signing). It’s hard to for some of us to give ourselves permission to write fun books in a world where “things we like” and especially “things women like” are often dismissed as less ...
Sep 16, 2022•35 min
