Sinopsis
A show about writing, reading, and getting (some) things done. Jessica Lahey writes the Parent-Teacher Conference column for the New York Times' Well Family and is the author of "The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Children Can Succeed." KJ Dell'Antonia is a columnist and contributing editor for the New York Times' Well Family. In their podcast, they talk about writing short form, long form and book length, give tips for pitching editors and agents and constantly revise how they tackle the ongoing challenge of keeping your butt in the chair for long enough to get the work done.
Episodios
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441: Creativity, Compromise, and Commercial Viability
28/03/2025 Duración: 53minMichael Dante DiMartino graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Film and Animation. His directing credits include the primetime animated series King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Mission Hill. DiMartino is the co-creator of the award-winning animated Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender and its sequel, The Legend of Korra. From 2002 to 2014, he served as executive producer and story editor for both series. He continued Korra’s story as the writer of the graphic novels Turf Wars and Ruins of the Empire. His other projects include authoring the fantasy novels Rebel Genius and Warrior Genius as well as creating and writing the Audible Original fiction podcast, Sundown: A Time Capsule Society Mystery. His latest novel is the YA coming-of-age story, Both Here And Gone. Currently, DiMartino serves as the co-Chief Creative Officer of Avatar Studios, developing new content for the Avatar-verse. You can find out more about Michael by visiting his website www.michaeldantedimartino.com,
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440: How (and Why) to Submit to Literary Mags and Small Presses
21/03/2025 Duración: 40minLet me start with this: if you have any interest at all in literary magazines or small presses, you want this book: How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses. It’s a wonderful book and a great guide, and will lead you into this world and help you feel good about your journey without your getting lost in the universe of scattered information that’s available online. We’ve included a ton of links to that scattered universe below, but I encourage you to buy the book, which will ground you in your own journey. I loved doing this interview, which felt like a return to my own roots in magazine work. As Dennis puts it in the book, there is something about doing the work of shorter pieces and pushing your own boundaries that can be remarkably helpful whether or not you’re also engaged in long form book, and there’s nothing I love more than a roadmap and a checklist. Start, please, by reading and exploring in this world, and then we hope to hear about you contributing. Se
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439: A Peek Inside a Hybrid Publisher
14/03/2025 Duración: 45minThere are many misconceptions about what a hybrid publisher does or doesn’t do, and why it may or may not be a good choice for a writer. I thought hearing from a hybrid publisher directly would be educational for our audience, so I’m pleased to be speaking in this episode to Dr. Nick Courtright, CEO of Atmosphere Press. Check out Atmosphere Press here or submit a manuscript here.
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438: The Outer World of Publishing
07/03/2025 Duración: 40minHey ho, Jess here. This week, all four of us discuss some of the happenings out there in the publishing world. First up: Super Bowl Sunday is apparently a great reading day. Sarina sent us a screenshot of her sales (she was tipped off by another author) and found out what many people are reading during the game: So that’s fun. Next up, Sean Manning of Simon & Schuster announced no more blurbs (yay!)…unless you want to (boo!) in Publisher’s Weekly and everyone had a lot to say about it. The New York Times, LitHub, lots of others. We add some perspective to the conversation as both blurbees and blurbers. Here’s that wonderful AJ Jacobs NYT piece about not blurbing. And Rebecca Makkai’s piece on not blurbing anymore in her Substack. PEN America The Authors Guild. Please join. Authors Against Book Bans. Please join. Is Sarina Bowen going to jail? We sure hope not. Here’s OK SB593, the legislation we discussed by the dude in Oklahoma. Make sure to check out the language on pages 10-11. Don’t
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437: How to Have a Thick Skin, with Lauren Blakely
28/02/2025 Duración: 29minHi listeners! Sarina here, with a topic that has been on my mind for years. When I began my career, everyone told me I had to develop a “thick skin” to do this job. But it turns out that a “thick skin” is one of the only things you can’t buy on Amazon. Today I invite my friend Lauren Blakely onto the podcast for a frank discussion of all that we’ve learned about resilience, one-star ratings and feedback these past ten years or so. Together, we offer the beginnings of a handy framework for how to think about feedback. We offer some actionable advice for what to do, where to turn and how to process unsolicited criticism. You do not have to attend every conversation you’re invited to. - A wise stranger on the interwebs. Since avoiding negative feedback just isn’t feasible, we discuss the following coping mechanisms. Checking in with a friend and having friends in the business How to make sure that good feedback is as available and memorable as the bad Recognizing that clinging to negatives
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436: Writing Partnerships with Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson
21/02/2025 Duración: 40min“If the language isn’t there, I have difficulty showing up for the idea” - Jenny Anderson Jess here. Rebecca Winthrop, Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and Jenny Anderson, award-winning journalist, paired up to write one of my favorite education and parenting books in recent memory: The Disengaged Teen. While I adore the book and could go on for ages about it, that’s not why I invited these two to come on the podcast. I am fascinated - and strangely horrified - by the idea of co-writing. Maybe it’s my control issues, who knows. I’ve asked Sarina Bowen about her writing partnerships with Tanya Eby and Elle Kennedy (come ON now, have you read their award-winning trilogy, Him, Us and Epic?) so I thought I’d give her a bit of a break and ask Rebecca and Jenny to tell me all about how their writing collaboration went with this book. I learned a lot during this podcast, but the thing I’m definitely taking with me is the concept of “clearing” before a collaboration or
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435: Wrangling the Doubt Monster with Amy Bernstein
14/02/2025 Duración: 37minDo you have a Doubt Monster? (Doesn’t everyone?) Amy Bernstein is an Author Accelerator certified writing coach, an #AmWriting Blueprint Challenge coach, a writer, a creative coach and many other things—but for our purposes, the author of Wrangling the Doubt Monster—a delightful book that you can open on any page for help wrangling your own doubts into something that you can live with, in the vein of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art or Gretchen Rubin’s Outer Order, Inner Calm. In this episode we talk—what else?—doubt monsters, declaring ourselves as writers and all the ways we live with our self-doubt and write anyway. Links from the Pod Bancroft Press Amywrites.live Persephone Books The Making of a Marchioness, Frances Hodgson Burnett Beacon Street Books
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434: Consider the Sweep of Your Whole Writing Career
07/02/2025 Duración: 41minOne of the things I think we do well with on this podcast is addressing the long game of writing. It’s not just about writing a good book or pitching one or selling one, but about the work of doing it over and over again, of succeeding and failing, of PERSISTING. That’s why I love this conversation with Tiffany Yates Martin, who is an author herself under the penname, Phoebe Fox, but who also for 30 years has been a developmental editor working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors. She is a respected leader in the writing education field and my friend and colleague. Her new book, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow and Sustain a Happier Writing Career addresses the long sweep of a writing career. And I think there's a lot for all of us to learn from this book and this conversation. You can find Tiffany via her website, on Instagram at @tiffanyyatesmartin, or check out her books Intuitive Editing and The Intuitive Author.
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433: Social Media: What Happens Now?
31/01/2025 Duración: 46min“I put my effort into building trust, showing up, and being present for people who have opted into my universe.” A slight paraphrase of Jennie Nash On the day we recorded this episode, no one really knew what was going to happen to TikTok (Jess thinks it’s going away, everyone else doubts her) and Sarina was attempting to manage all the emails from people asking her why she was promoting businesses on The Place Formerly Known as Twitter (she wasn’t, she quit that app and someone promptly squatted on her name, pretended to be her and began promoting for-profit businesses). What do we do when we can’t trust the people in our social media circles to be who they say they are and what is the future of social media as a whole? We discuss these and many other questions. Things we talk about: “I’d rather be taken than be hard” Sarina quoted this via “a pastor,” and search as I may, I can’t find an attribution. We discuss the sentiment. The OpEd Project founded by Katie Orenstein Mighty Networks I called it the
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432: Treat your writing like a business in 2025
24/01/2025 Duración: 09minI’m Sarina, and I’m a business nerd. Hi, my name is Sarina, and I’m a business nerd. I was born this way. I can’t help it. I realize that not everyone gets excited about spreadsheets, but if you have any writerly income at all, I’m begging you to make 2025 the year you treat your writing as a business. There are actually two reasons to do this: First of all it’s centering. Treating your writing as a grownup activity helps you frame your goal-setting around writing. It holds you accountable to your goals Secondly, and more practically, it makes tax time is so much easier, and it might save you money First, let’s do a little primer on how writerly income affects your taxes. Unlike a job, which sends you a W2 in January, writers are technically self-employed. In fact, the first time someone pays you for a book or an article, you have just become an entrepreneur. So, congratulations on your promotion from artist to businessperson. Let’s go over what that means for you. I must offer a disclaimer here
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431: The Making of a Workbook
17/01/2025 Duración: 50minHi #AmWriters, Jess here. I’ve been wanting to do an episode on workbooks forever - on any form of companion text that pairs with nonfiction books, really. How do you propose them, write them, format them? You know me, I like the granular details. Fortunately, Ned Johnson and Dr. William Stixrud are publishing The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child in March, and Ned was willing to come on the podcast and teach me all about the nuts and bolts of putting a workbook out into the world. This episode truly flattened my learning curve, and I hope it does the same for you. People and things we talked about in this episode: William Stixrud Katie Hurley and A Year of Positive Thinking for Teens Tina Payne Bryson, The Whole-Brain Child and Bottom Line for Baby StrengthsFinder2.0 TriMetrix Moo.com Can you make custom post-it notes? Yes, yes you can. The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson LAST Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge If you have big goals for 2
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430: A People Pleaser Learns to Write the Book She Wants to Write
10/01/2025 Duración: 48minEssay collections—readers love them, but publishers and editors are often unconvinced. Jennie and KJ talk to Amy Wilson about getting that contract, finding the through line and writing a book about pleasing people while also remembering to please yourself. Links from the pod Mary Karr The Art of Memoir Wendi Aarons Listen to Your Mother (Essay performances for Mother’s Day) Amy’s first book: When Did I Get Like This? Zibby Owens, Zibby Books Ina Garten What Fresh Hell (Amy’s podcast) Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser, Amy Wilson #AmReading Jennie: Be Ready when the Luck Happens, Ina Garten KJ: Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman Reasons Not to Worry, Brigid Delaney Amy: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge. We started January 5, but it’s JUST not too late to jump
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429: Using the Blueprint for Revision
03/01/2025 Duración: 31minFind Meghan at meghanpbrowne.com or check out her book The Bees of Notre-Dame Booklab episode Redacted Kitty-Cat and Welcome to Heaven If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge. Starting January 5, we’ll be walking you through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode. Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice. We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts: What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it Introducing the winter book coach hosts Overcoming Pantsing Pit
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428: What's your word for 2025? We review 2024 goals and set up 2025 in Episode 428
27/12/2024 Duración: 51minWe cover last years’ goals, and which of us feel great and which feel… less great. (And the audio is also less great, because 3 of us gathered in our local library and the acoustics/HVAC system noise were less than ideal.) We end up talking about the ways we feel we need to be as women (supported by some great men) in the coming year and years, the somewhat surprising bro-commentary some of us get around our work, and how we feel like sticking together is going to be the key to maintaining our sense of self in 2025. It got pretty deep. Writer goals, sure, we have those. But we have more. We also reviewed our Words of the Year, then announce this year’s. I guess I should make that a big reveal? But I just don’t have it in me, so here we go: KJ: Inner Compass (which tells me that 2 words is FINE) Jennie: Teflon (you’ll love the discussion around this one) Sarah: Presence (she’s reserving the right to refine this) Jess: Growth (and a surprising announcement about her return to student life! There, ther
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427: From #FamilyStory to Fiction
20/12/2024 Duración: 47minToday, I'm so excited to talk to my friend, Rosa Kwon Easton, about her debut novel, White Mulberry. Rosa holds a very special place in my heart and my history because she was at the first ever workshop where I taught my Blueprint framework, which is a method of inquiry for getting a book out of your head and onto the page before you start to write. At that time, Rosa thought that she was writing a true story about three generations in her family. She was calling it a memoir. And now ten years later, that story is being published as a novel. In this discussion, we talk about that long development process and the profound switch from writing a true story to writing fiction and how Rosa navigated the whole thing. Find Rosa at: rosakwoneaston.com, @rosakwoneaston on Instagram, or at one of her upcoming events. Find out more about Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book method here. Announcing the #AmWriting Blueprint Winter Challenge—bigger and better and more interactive than any we’ve done before. The Blueprin
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425: Booklab: First Pages-- a work of nonfiction (Hippodrome) and a novel (Mermaid Diner) are put to the test
13/12/2024 Duración: 32minHey listeners: This week, everyone gets a taste of what paid supporters get more regularly—a special Booklab: First Pages episode. Each month (and sometimes more often), we’ll choose two “first pages” to review. A first page, for our purposes, is the first 350 words of your book—fiction, non-fiction or memoir. We will read the page aloud on the podcast and discuss with a single thought in mind: Would we keep reading? First pages are incredibly important in every genre. If you can’t grab a reader on that first page, you might lose your chance of grabbing them at all. On the podcast, we’ll read the page aloud and then each cast our “vote”—would we keep going? Then—and this is the most important bit— we’ll discuss why or why not. Were we dying to know what would happen next, or turned off by an info dump? Ready to learn what you have to teach us or ready to see what’s on YouTube? Totally on board with a character or uncertain why we were there in the first place? In this episode, we discuss our first non-ficti
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424: Ep 424: How a Blueprint Can Keep Your Book on Course
06/12/2024 Duración: 25minRegular listeners will recognize the Blueprint for a Book—a method of inquiry Jennie Nash developed to lay a strong foundation for books in any genre that’s not about the craft of writing or building an author platform or any of the steps that come later in the writing life. It’s about understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it so that you can have clarity and confidence. Writer Allison Hammer is a Blueprint stan—she’s used it for years, again and again, often more than once on any given book (KJ seconds that one). We talk about why she adores the method, how she tweaks it (and why Jennie made it so strict in the first place. You can, like Allison, work through the Blueprint steps on your own—but with the Blueprint for a Book Winter Challenge coming up, you don’t have to! We’re going to be sharing more details about the Blueprint Winter Challenge in the coming days, but here’s a little on what it looks like: we have 10 podcast episodes on the Blueprint steps, five Author Accelerator certi
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#Writer Gift Extravaganza
29/11/2024 Duración: 42minJess here, hosting my entire extended family for the holiday weekend and sending love to you and yours. Enjoy this #WriterGift flashback! 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: Sarina’s Socks ❄️ Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney (for KJ, but Jess loved it, too!) ❄️ Fillion planner cover by Little Mountain Bindery ❄️ Jess’s favorite sticky tabs ❄️ Pens by Schneider ❄️ Sarina’s stamp with the kinda-sorta True North Series three pine tree logo ❄️ The “Begin” mug Jess wants a case of. Sarina: Hedgehog Pencil Holder ❄️ Post-its that fit over planner months ❄️ Corkicle (it doesn’t come with the sticker, sorry…) #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 chec
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423: From Substack Serial to Trad Novel with...
22/11/2024 Duración: 41minIt is of course the inimitable, the unconquerable, the inexhaustible Jo Piazza, all of whose adjectives require me to use spell check. I am a long time fan of Jo, and she’s been on the pod before—see also Episode 393, I Want to Sell Books, But I’m Also Writing What I Want to Write. She is the author of, most recently, The Sicilian Inheritance and coming soon, Everyone Is Lying to You, which started out as a serial in her weekly email/Substack, Over the Influence. She’s also the host of a great podcast, Under the Influence. As far as I know she’s the first person to pull off this feat. She probably isn’t, but we’re going to roll with it as a working theory. This is a great convo, and you will undoubtedly leave inspired, as I was, to write your own serial. (I probably won’t but I WAS inspired.) Join Jo’s Substack and vote on the cover HERE. #AmReading Jo: The Displacements, Bruce Holsinger (author of The Gifted School) Nightwatching, Tracy Sierra Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty KJ: I’m Mostly Here to E
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422: #AnxietyInducing. A Candid Discussion on A.I.
15/11/2024 Duración: 43minThe Anxiety is Real You can’t swing a Blackwing pencil without hearing another creator worrying about generative A.I. And we get it—the ubiquity of generative A.I. tools has soared over the last two years. In this episode we aim to take a deep breath and discuss the topic from a candid but calm position: why authors are worried, why we should be worried and what to do about it (besides anxious posts on social media.) Things to freak out about: a Two Part List In service to our measured discussion, we lay a bit of background. Sarina tells us why The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI, and why you should join the Authors Guild. Then we mine two different veins of anxiety: Column I: Billion dollar AI tools stole our intellectual property to train their models, and… Column II: AI might take my job. We delve into both these concerns, discussing ongoing litigation, the potential for licensing content to AI companies, and more. We also discuss how AI tools are affecting other parts of the publishing ind