#amwriting With Jess & Kj

Jess’s new book, The Addiction Inoculation, launches April 6th, and we talk about all the things she’s done to set herself up for feeling like she’s done everything in her power to make this launch a good one. We discuss the differences between launching fiction and non-fiction, first book vs. second book, non-covid v. covid, when to hire a publicist, turning a book into a speaking career and (as always) more.  #AmReading Sarina: Spoiler Alert by Olivia Dade Jess: 1619 by James Horn (watching: Jamestown on Amazon Prime) KJ: You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar Spring is coming (slowly here in New England) and we’re excited about the whole idea of change and new beginnings and birds and grass and—stuff like that. What does that have to do with #AmWriting? Maybe it’s time for a new beginning for you as a book coach? Just imagine enrolling in the classes, meeting a cohort, learning all the ways coaches are editorial and emotional support for writers and t

Today's guest, Olga Mecking, is a freelance journalist who’s enjoyed exactly the version of success many freelancers dream about. She went from publishing her own work on her blog to pitching outside publications, gradually reaching bigger and bigger audiences until her article The Case for Doing Nothing in the New York Times became a breakout success and led to a book contract for her new book Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. I know you’ll enjoy this interview—we go deep into building a freelance career and the nuts and bolts of making that happen. We’re shaking things up a little this week, and I interviewed Olga solo, which made a nice break for me from the novel revisions I’m working on, or at least staring at, this week. One thing Olga and I talk about is what it was like to go from writing articles to writing an entire book—and part of the answer was, painful! But it’s still the dream for many writers. If you’ve got a book in you and you’re struggling to bring it out, you should abso

Alisha Rai writes fun, joyful contemporary romances about smart, mature people who still struggle to find love. And by mature, we don’t mean old—I mean, these characters make good choices and try to understand themselves and other people, but it’s still not easy. We talk about those character choices, but before we dig in, we discuss Alisha’s decision to set her current book, First Comes Like, in a post-Covid world with special attention to what it’s going to be like as we emerge from a period of loneliness and loss—and still write a funny, entertaining, diverting romance.  #AmReading KJ: First Comes Like by Alisha Rai Sarina: Sweetheart by Sarah Mayberry Alisha: Big Bad Wolf by Suleikha Snyder Second First Impressions by Sally Thorne Love at First by Kate Clayborn Find Alisha: On Twitter: @AlishaRai On Instagram: @AlishaRaiWrites On TikTok: @TheRealAlishaRai Wish you had someone to discuss settings and characters and possible post-Covid worlds with as you work on

It’s a freewheeling conversation about writing fiction that tells a great story—and makes you think about the world beyond the story, with January Reese’s Book Club pick Anna North. Links from the pod:  Anna’s essay on the writing of Outlawed #AmReading Anna: In the Distance by Hernan Diaz How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang Jess: First Comes Like by Alisha Rai http://www.alisharai.com/ KJ: Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo And—if you’re in the midst of a project and you with you had someone to help you balance story and that not-too-pokey-stick point, our sponsor, Author Accelerator, can help find the right coach for you—or help you become that coach for someone else. Find out more at bookcoaches.com/amwriting.

Does this ever get easier? That’s the question we’re often asked by newer writers in the process of putting themselves out there and worried about how their work will be received. We were unanimous—yes, it does, and you don’t have to spend five years reading every single comment on your writing (and parenting, and intelligence, and everything else) from New York Times readers to get to the point where you can manage even the reviews you most dread without letting them keep you up at night. We talk types of bad reviews, strategies for coping with them and how to arm yourself for everything your pub date can bring.  #AmReading KJ: Cobble Hill by Cecily Von Ziegesar Eliza Starts a Rumor by Jane L. Rosen Sarina: Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer Jess: Studly Period by Sarina Bowen (on audio) Victoria: The Queen: An Intimate Biography of the Woman Who Ruled an Empire by Julia Baird In this episode, we talk about how Jennie Nash from Aut

In this episode, we go seriously pro, talking to Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist for the New York Times and the author of The Price You Pay for College and The Opposite of Spoiled. Ron shares his system for writing information and data-packed chapters—or columns—while making them relatable and digestible. Pro tip: it starts with “strip-mining” the brains of the top five experts you can find—and, as Ron says, being in the business of asking uncomfortable questions. Other great moments—waterproof shower crayons and how to highlight a tweet without interrupting the reading of your audio-book.  Find all things Ron here. #AmReading Ron: Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions by Jeffrey Selingo The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel Jess: Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by

Our guest today, Ethan Kross, is one of the world’s leading experts on controlling the conscious mind. His new book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness it, sits at that enviable intersection between academic and commercial nonfiction, and in a way that seems to be exactly where Ethan himself—who teaches in both the business school and the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan—sits, right there in the place where all kinds of things intersect, doing research into the ways our mysterious selves affect the ways we behave on the inside and on the outside.  We talked to Ethan about what we call “writer chatter”—those voices in our head that tell us we’re not good enough, smart enough, anything enough to write the things we want to write, and then we branched off into his experience transitioning from academic writing to writing for a wider audience and what his inner voices had to say about that. In the end, Ethan reminded us that we don’t want to live without our in

This week Jess talks to Jacob Sager Weinstein, a writer who has done just about everything. He started out with highbrow aspirations, as he learned his craft from none other than Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, and has worked as a journalist, screenwriter, comedy writer as well as a fiction and nonfiction author. In his travels from Princeton to HBO to the sewers of London (really!) Jacob has learned the art of the pivot as well as the secret to finding joy in just about every kind of writing project. His newest book is How to Remember Everything: Tips & Tricks to Becoming a Memory Master and Jess, the worst number rememberer on the planet, can attest that the memory tricks on pages 64-67 are brilliant and work beautifully.  Links from the pod Jacob’s webpage The Hyacinth Series How to Remember Everything #AmReading Jess: The Mission: How a Disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Race, a Texas Tea Party Congressman, the Worlds Worst Typewriter Saleswoman, California Mountain P

Beverly Jenkins is best-selling, award-winning, and still having fun with all she does—in other words, all the things we writers aspire to when we sit down at the desk. But when she first got started, she “didn’t have a clue”—and that might have freed her to do exactly what she wanted to do.  We talk keeping history accurate but still making it entertaining, the joy of placing characters in a particular moment in time, bookshelf placement (“African American Literature”? “Men’s Health”?) and the pleasures of changing up your process for every new book. Am Reading Beverly: Shadows in Death by J.D. Robb Battle Ground by Jim Butcher Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse The Blood Heir by Ilona Andrews “If I could only have one author for the whole rest of my life it would be Ilona Andrews.” Sarina:  My Last Duchess by Eloisa James Dark Witch by Nora Roberts KJ: Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins Wild Rain by Beverly Jenkins Beverly thought KJ definitely needed to w

Hey kids, we’re getting back to basics this week with a down-n-dirty episode on pitching, focused on opinion pages everywhere. We’re talking to Lisa Levenstein, an academic, historian and feminist (and the Director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Greensboro) with two books under her belt: A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia and They Didn’t See Us Coming: The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties. Lisa took that expertise and those books and turned them into a growing career writing passionate freelance pieces of a kind that really appeal to editors—blending current issues with her special historic perspective on women’s issues. We talked about everything from subject lines to finding your topic to using one piece as a steppingstone to break into another market, and it was fabulous. Enjoy! Links from the pod Lisa’s piece on child care in

Last year’s words: Abundance. Practice. Magic. This year? Generous, Organize, Flow. It’s only now, writing these shownotes, that I see a pretty pattern… which is more that one of us chooses words she wants to embody, one chooses words she wants to shape her actions and the other seems to be counting on the muse in what may be a dubious way. Who’s who? It might surprise you.  Welcome to our 2020 year in review/2021 goals episode. We’d love to hear your plans for the year—and how last year went. Come visit us on Facebook and share! #AmReading / #AmListening Jess: Come Out Come Out podcast Scent of the Missing: Love and Partnership with a Search-And-Rescue Dog by Susannah Charleson KJ: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin Deep Work by Cal Newport Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing by Olga Mecking Frontier Follies by Ree Drummond Sarina: The Search by Nora Roberts The Shepherd, the Angel,

A little #AmWriting behind the scenes: as we headed into this recording, Jess texted KJ: Here’s the lowdown on Mark: I have been a fan of Mark Olshaker’s writing since I first encountered it in 1995. He may be best known for his work with former FBI Special Agent John Douglas, his writing partner since 1995, who pioneered the behavioral crimes unit at the FBI and inspired the Jack Crawford character in Silence of the Lambs. Together they have written many books including Mindhunter, about the role of behavioral profiling in catching violent criminals. His work with Douglas has landed him on the bestseller lists, but he has also written five novels and his nonfiction and documentary work covers subjects as wide-ranging emerging infectious disease, forensic emergency medicine, bioterror, the Lindburgh baby, and victims’ rights. He is also an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, as if that’s not enough AND, in a topic near and dear to my heart, he wrote, produced, and directed the film Discovering Hamlet, about one

Writing nonfiction outside the memoir space usually means finding sources and stories that are not your own. Narrative, self-help, history, economics, social sciences, nature—no matter what your topic, this form of writing requires reporting, just as many freelance assignments do. So where do you go when you’re looking for sources? Often, your own backyard—and for lots of us, that can mean we inadvertently only talk to people who share our perspective, and sometimes our privilege.  Nobody knows that better than Julie Lythcott-Haims. For all her books, and most particularly for her latest, Julie has made it a point to draw from sources that reflect the diversity of our larger national experience. We talked about finding those sources, owning the need to seek out specific points of view and how you know when you’ve got it right. Links from the Pod Ed Yong’s article in the Atlantic about what he’s learned as he’s worked to diversify his sources: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/i-spe

Whew! This week, Sarina and KJ (that’s me writing as it usually is) both launched books—Sarina came out with Loverboy, second in KJ’d favorite Sarina series, The Company, while KJ FINALLY and after many many months got to see The Chicken Sisters come out into the world. Notice the different verbs there? That’s because our launches come from very different places, and we talk about that—as well as, of course, ALL the Reese Witherspoon Book Club backstory.  You can grab a copy of Loverboy in all kinds of ways: 

Who wouldn’t want a step-by-step process for revision? In her book Intuitive Editing, this week’s guest, developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin, lays out an approach that will help keep you organized, although sadly there is no magic wand involved. We talked to her about the big picture questions she asks before diving into someone else’s work:  Is the main story question clear? Do the characters drive the story? Do we/the characters end up somewhere different than where we began? Where does the momentum flag (because it will, somewhere) and why? Then we deep dive into questions of finding objectivity in your own work, micro-suspense, suspense vs. tension, writing manuals and—most important of all—how important it is to know that all first drafts are terrible and revision is part of the work.  A few links from the pod If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland How to Grow a Novel by Sol Stein Stein on Writing by Sol Stein *FREE* Editorial Summit - December 6th #AmReading

It’s the gifts episode! Here are the links you’re looking for:  KJ: Redbubble ❄️ Stamp blocks ❄️ Stamp blanks and stencils ❄️ Frixion Pens ❄️ Leuchterm planner Jess: Planner cover ❄️ Jess’s favorite sticky tabs ❄️  Sarina: Hedgehog Pencil Holder ❄️ Post-its that fit over planner months ❄️ Corkicle (it doesn’t come with the sticker, sorry… but actually I (KJ) have extras and if you asked me I could probably mail you one if I don’t get too many asks! Just reply to this email and I will see it.) #AmReading Jess: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir KJ: The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow Sarina: The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes by Xio Axelrod Zowie! Thanks for listening. If you want to check out our last gift episodes (and guides), click the years: 2019 2018 2017. If you’ve got other ideas we should know about, share them in the #AmWriting Facebook group. And if you’d like to s

Every writer craves that high concept idea that leads to the breakout book, or in this case breakout series. For Lyssa Kay Adams, it came from that joke women often make about wishing their male partners read romance—and a moment in 2016 when she “just wanted to live in a world full of men who get it.” She created The Bromance Book Club, about a group of men who read romance to understand their relationships and their partners. That became her first novel, quickly followed by Undercover Bromance and Crazy Stupid Bromance, and we three have read and loved them all. We talk indie v. trad, breaking out, building a series, writing diverse worlds and more. Links from the Pod Jason Rogers’ Men’s Health article Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid Kobo Libra Overdrive #AmReading Lyssa: Just a Heartbeat Away by Cara Bastone Snapped by Alexa Martin Sarina: Again the Magic by Lisa Kleypas Jess: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder Crazy Stupid Bromance KJ: Ties That Tet

It’s a new #AmWriting episode! There’s a style of creative nonfiction in which a gifted writer tells someone else’s story. The story of a house being built, or a life in the wilderness—or, in the case of Lauren Sandler, the story of a young single mother in search of housing during her first year of motherhood. Lauren’s subject—a smart, driven young woman caught up in the system because of her own history, and desperate for not just housing but an education, a career, and love and a life of her choosing—was unlikely to ever find a way to tell her own story without Lauren’s help.  “She chose me as much as I chose her,” says Lauren. We talk to Lauren about how that relationship was formed and how, although the act of observing something changes it, Lauren tried to let Camilla’s story unfold as though she weren’t there, even while her own daughter was demanding to know why they didn’t just let Camilla sleep on the couch. If you’re interested in long-form journalism, or just in the process of embedding your

We don’t have a lot of repeat guests, but Seth Godin can come on the podcast any time he wants. Seth is a fountain of wisdom about writing, pitching, selling, and building your audience, and his new book, The Practice: Shipping Creative Work, is a great addition to his (substantial) body of work.  Seth Godin is not only the master of the short pithy book of helpful advice, he’s the master of dishing out that advice straight from his brain to yours, as well. He does not have to stop and re-frame. He does not meander about his point. Not one bit. He’s a fountain of quick sentences that wallop you upside the head with their truth and clarity and demand to be written down. Here are just a few from this interview, which you won’t want to miss:  “Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions" “There is never enough reassurance from outsiders”  “Don’t let your audience expect another greatest hits album every time” “Be the boss of the process” “Creativity is an act of leadership” Jess, Sa

Campers, this week we’re talking about a topic near and dear to all our hearts, but most particularly Sarina, whose productivity levels are epic and who is always looking for something that will help her ramp up. We talk hardware and software that makes the writing process easier, or at least more varied; handwriting-to-text, voice-to-text, AI, editing software, citation software and throw in a few other ideas for good measure. Links to everything we discuss are below. Post-It App: Capture Dragon Naturally Speaking Otter Rev.com Whitelines ProWritingAid Nebo BookEnds Dabble Scrivener #AmReading Jess: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer KJ: His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie Thanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially—we hope you’ve been loving recent treats like the Minisodes from Jess: What Really Sells Books and KJ: Why I Love Plotting Books (and which to grab) and the