This is it—the season finale!

Creating Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? has been a fizzy cocktail of vulnerability and unexpected joy, and we’re going out with a bang. 💥

In this episode, we’re talking about endings: how to know when you’ve reached one, how to stop nudging the finish line farther away, and how to choose the real thing over the shiny, impossible ideal.

I’ll also dish on why I was having a particularly shit day, my secret weapon for a crap mood, and the cringy fear hiding behind my perfectionism.

Thank you so so much for joining me for my first ever podcast! It would’ve been super boring without you, friend.

Listen here:

Want to see how the book turned out, despite all my bitching and moaning?

Hop on my mailing list, and you’ll be the first to know when The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays releases.

Episode 8 Transcript

[00:00:00] We all know that perfectionism can keep us from ever letting a thing be done. But what if hiding behind the perfectionism is a very specific fear, and that’s what’s really keeping you from the finish line?

[00:00:16] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life. 

[00:00:39] Hello friends, and welcome to the final episode of the season. We’ll start like we always do with the element of fire, which asks, what is this week’s craft problem?

[00:00:50] 

[00:00:52] Right about when I hit the 70% mark on draft six of my work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, I simultaneously hit a wall.

[00:01:00] I was revising, and revising, and revising a scene that happens right before the climax sequence, and it just wasn’t working. I considered cutting it, but the scene was too load-bearing, so I used my Tacoma notebook method that I shared in episode four. I had to work through the scene four times before I finally figured out what wasn’t working, and by that point, I’ll be honest, I was starting to get up in my feels about the book as a whole.

[00:01:26] Not only did I desperately wanna drag this draft past the finish line, I also needed to start putting together my launch, and the weekly essays that I send to my mailing list and which I batch write ahead of time, those were about to run out. When I slip into this overwhelmed space, it kinda feels like raccoons are nesting in my brain, and all I wanna do is cry.

[00:01:46] Actually, I did cry, because crying is one of my all-time favorite activities for stress relief. Funny story. Well, it wasn’t at all funny at the time, but it sure is in hindsight. My partner and I were hiking in Maine, and we took a wrong turn, which added, like, four miles onto this already long-ass hike, during which we were being attacked by biting flies the entire time.

[00:02:08] Anyway, when we realized we weren’t actually 30 minutes from the parking lot like we thought, more like three hours, I told my partner, “I don’t wanna alarm you, but I really just need to cry, maybe for a while.” And that’s what I did. We trudged down this dirt road, getting bitten by fucking flies, while I cried for, like, a solid 10 minutes, and then I felt so much better.

[00:02:30] I mean, the hike still sucked, but it no longer felt like soul death, and that’s how I learned how useful a good cry can be. Anyway, fast-forward to the night of absolute book overwhelm. I had a seriously excellent cry, and then I decided to sit down and meditate and journal 30 minutes later, I came to a shockingly obvious realization.

[00:02:52] I needed to dramatically pare down my to-do list, starting with my launch plan. I’m not even gonna tell you what I had as my original plan. There were so many things on that list, you would be like, “Aven, what is wrong with you?” And I would not have an answer to that. The good news, though, is that I chopped a bunch of things off that list.

[00:03:10] I can do them later after the book is released if I want to, but it would be madness to try and do them all this summer. I see this now. I see the error of my ways, hand on heart. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was for another idea to take the place of the weekly essays I’d normally be writing. That idea is the podcast you’re listening to right now.

[00:03:31] The idea immediately had that zingy firecracker feel that I’ve learned to pay attention to. But even so, I didn’t fully trust it, because making a podcast could easily, very easily, become a massive new project. It could become one more thing I needed to perfect, one more thing I needed to overthink, one more thing that would keep me from finishing the book, and that was not what this podcast was supposed to be.

[00:03:55] The podcast was supposed to give me a different type of container, a way to share what’s happening behind the scenes without turning every insight into a polished essay, a way to document the final stretch of the book while I’m still in it, and honestly, a way to keep myself accountable by telling you, dear listener, what I’m working on each week.

[00:04:13] So the craft issue wasn’t, should I make a podcast, exactly. The craft issue was, can I let this podcast be a focused, scrappy, seasonal container for the final stretch of this book, instead of turning it into a rabid perfectionism beast that requires me to spawn, like, an entire media arm for my business?

[00:04:33] Even though the idea felt alive, I was teetering on the fence, because what if this was just me chasing another shiny object? Never mind that in recent years I’ve actually gotten a lot better at sorting ideas into smart to work on right now versus delightful, but please report back in six months. I still have inner parts who don’t entirely trust fun.

[00:04:56] If something feels energizing, they immediately suspect it of being a distracting indulgence.

[00:05:01] P.S. For more on trusting things that feel good, check out episode six, where I talk about inviting the joy back into your writing process using ghost sex. But seriously, how do you tell the difference between a shiny object that’s pulling you away from the work versus a fairy godmother in disguise that’s genuinely trying to help you finish?

[00:05:19] 

[00:05:21] Air asks, “What tools am I bringing to help solve this week’s craft problem?” Well, it’s pretty simple, really. The tool is focus. Now, I don’t mean focus in a grind set, productivity bro kind of way, where you wake up at 4:30 AM to drink a glass of raw eggs before you deadlift your car. I mean, focus that you can feel on a cellular level.

[00:05:43] A shiny object distraction tends to multiply. You so much as glance in its direction, and suddenly it has 12 sub-projects, a branding strategy, a merch line, a five-year growth plan, and a private Facebook group you never wanted to moderate. But really, this makes sense if deep down your inner parts are presenting this idea for the specific purpose of distracting you so you don’t do something scary, like actually release your book into the world.

[00:06:10] A useful container does the opposite. It gathers your scattered energy and gives it somewhere to go, and for that reason, it often lands differently in your nervous system. Actually, let me speak from the eye. When this podcast idea floated into my meditation, it felt exciting, yes, but it also felt grounding.

[00:06:29] Instead of my energy feeling tugged in a million directions, it kept orbiting the same core, and the more it did, the calmer I felt. So when I asked, “Does this podcast make my summer more complicated, or does it help me pare things down?” And the answer was, it pares things down if I let it be what it wants to be.

[00:06:50] This podcast does not need to be a forever podcast. It does not need to become my primary new business identity. It does not need to launch with a video component and a monetization funnel. It just needs to be a container where I can speak into a microphone and document the final stretch of finishing this book.

[00:07:08] That’s it.

[00:07:08] 

[00:07:11] A few days after my pare my life down meditation, I experienced a synchronicity. I was still dragging my heels on the podcast, worrying that I’d turn it into a capital T thing that would end up consuming my entire life. Being totally new to podcasting, I’d cracked open a book I’d bought years ago but never read called Make Noise, which is all about podcasting and audio storytelling.

[00:07:34] And in this book was a diagram from one of my favorite mindset books of all time, which is Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. So here’s the diagram. Imagine a black circle with all these short, stubby little arrows radiating outward like a sun. And then imagine an identical black circle beside it, only this time, all those little arrows have been combined into one long arrow pointing in a single direction.

[00:08:03] The arrows represent the same amount of energy, but in the first scenario, you’re scattering that shit in a dozen directions, and in the other, you’re picking one goal and funneling all your energy toward that aim. The first time I read Essentialism, this was instantly my favorite diagram because it reminded me of spell casting.

[00:08:21] You can scatter your energy with a bunch of piddly little spell intentions that you don’t really care about, or you can choose a carefully crafted, laser-focused intention and put everything you’ve got behind it. Guess which type of spell works better?

[00:08:38] The day after seeing my favorite essentialism diagram pop up in a book on podcasting, I got together with my friend Vivian. And because Vivian is also a witch, the conversation turned, as it often does, to magic. In bitching about how slow the revisions were going and whining about whether or not I should start a podcast, Vivian reflected back how all of my complaints seemed to be tied to a lack of focus.

[00:09:01] Keep in mind, I hadn’t told her anything about that little essentialism diagram yet, but you better believe I whipped out that book right then and there. What I realized is that not only was I craving more focus in my writing and in my author business as a whole, I was craving more focus in my magical practice.

[00:09:19] And just like that, a super clear spellcasting intention dropped into my brain, one that made my toes curl with excitement. I’m not gonna share the wording here, sorry friends, because I’m a firm believer in keeping the specifics of active magic under wraps. But the important part is that the spellcasting intention was singular.

[00:09:38] Not a new spell every time I panic, not a fresh petition for every little subproblem, not one magical working for the book, one for the launch, another for sales, and a separate one for my nervous system. Just one overarching intention that I can return to again and again until it feels complete. The relief of this honestly surprised me.

[00:10:01] If you were my spirit guides and you presented this idea to me, I’d probably think it sounded super boring. The same old spell over and over again? No, thank you. But no, I just felt relief. Relief and joy. I’d forgotten how satisfying focus is for me. If I do an hour-long writing sprint, and in that time, I stay completely focused on the writing, even if I only get 100 words written, this is infinitely more satisfying to me than an hour spent writing, dipping in to check my email, popping over to read something on Substack, cleaning out the produce drawer in the fridge just real quick.

[00:10:37] Even if at the end of that hour, I manage to get 1,000 words written, it just doesn’t feel the same. This is something I have to remind myself of often. It’s not just about the output, it’s about the experience. And the experience I needed was, “You are totally allowed to make a scrappy little podcast that helps you finish your book.”

[00:10:57] 

[00:10:59] Water asks, what did this reveal about me personally? I initially thought my resistance to making this podcast was, duh, perfectionism strikes again. And it was about perfectionism, only with a twist. One that once I spotted it, made so many things in my life make a whole lotta sense. But to understand this, we need to back up a few years to a lazy summer afternoon when my parents sent me a 14-page letter detailing literally from my birth all the shit that’s supposedly wrong with me.

[00:11:31] I wish I was joking. This letter described how as a baby, like an actual infant, I thought I was a demigod, and as it cataloged my many faults from diaperhood to the present day, I noticed a theme. It was never just my parent who thought these things. No, it was apparently also my high school therapist, every single member in my family, teachers, neighbors, the family cat And this was a common refrain in my childhood.

[00:11:59] This parent rarely framed potentially heightened statements as, “I think this.” Instead, things were stated as being universally true. And I get it. It’s tempting to borrow authority instead of owning your opinions. I mean, I feel like 95% of social media is basically that, which is one of the many reasons I’m glad I’m not on it.

[00:12:19] But point being, I grew up on the refrain, “There’s something wrong with you, and everyone else is fully aware. Oh, goodness, did you not already know that? Because, like I said, everyone else does.” So it’s not so much that I’m afraid of putting out something imperfect. I mean, that’s a little part of the fear, but I’d say that has, I don’t know, maybe 10% of an emotional charge.

[00:12:41] The other 90% is I’m afraid to put out something imperfect, and then other people see this imperfect thing, and here’s the 90%. They think I don’t know how imperfect it is. Finishing a book, finishing any creative project involves moving through this process. I can see that this could be better, and I might even know how to make it better, but at a certain point, I’m choosing not to do that because I need to move on.

[00:13:07] Ugh, intentional imperfection, deliberate incompletion. The decision to say, “This is good enough for what it needs to be, even though I can still see the slightly fraying hem.” That is why this podcast felt so dangerous. Not because I thought it was a bad idea. It felt alive. It felt like the container for what I needed.

[00:13:28] But I have easily activated inner parts who are extremely invested in making sure I am never, ever caught in public with my drawers down. And honestly, I don’t hate those parts. They’re trying to protect me from humiliation. They’re trying to ensure no one can ever say, “Wow, how embarrassing that you didn’t know this wasn’t good enough.”

[00:13:47] But if those parts are in charge of my creative life, I will never finish anything. So the water lesson here is that perfectionism for me is not really about having impossibly high standards, or at least it’s not only that. Perfectionism is a protection spell. It says, “If you make the work perfect enough, no one can shame you.

[00:14:09] If you spot every flaw before anyone else does, no one can ambush you with your own inadequacy. If you keep polishing forever, you never have to experience the vulnerability of putting something real into the world.” The problem, though, is that this isn’t really a protection spell. It’s a family curse. But as any devoted fantasy reader knows, curses, they can be broken.

[00:14:34] 

[00:14:36] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what does this ask of me in real life?” The fix was to let this podcast be useful, not perfect. The podcast needed to help me stay connected to the book during the final stretch. It needed to let me share the behind-the-scenes process with you without requiring me to write polished essays while I’m trying to finish revisions.

[00:14:58] That’s the job it was hired for, and I must say, now that we’ve reached the season finale, I am giving this podcast a stellar performance review and a raise. It injected so much fun into what was starting to feel like revision hell. And hey, I hope it’s been fun for you, too. The ideal podcast is infinite potential.

[00:15:18] It has perfect sound quality, perfect branding, perfect pacing disguised as effortless, off-the-cuff intimacy. The real podcast is this: a focused container where I talk through what the book is teaching me while I finish the damn thing. The ideal book is also infinite. It’s the version I could keep tinkering with forever, the version where every scene is honed to a fine point, every emotional beat deepened, every metaphor polished until it gleams.

[00:15:47] The ideal book is amazing. It also doesn’t exist. The real book is the one I can actually finish. The real book is the one that you can actually read, someday soon, I hope. So that’s what this week’s Craft Insight asks of me in real life. Choose the real over the ideal. Let it be small. Let it be scrappy.

[00:16:09] Let there be typos or the neighbor’s dog barking in the background. And then, let it be done.

[00:16:15] ​

[00:16:20] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? This was the final episode of the season, and if you’ve been here for the entire ride, the bossy spirit guides, the perfectionism spirals, the ghost sex, and the almighty cat god, thank you. Truly. This journey wouldn’t have been half as much fun without you.

[00:16:42] Of course, the natural question now is, did I finish the fucking book? If you want the answer, and if you want to see how all of these craft experiments actually turned out on the page, hop on my mailing list. You’ll be the first to know when The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays releases, and you can do that over at twinflames.life/freebies.

[00:17:02] No matter which freebie you choose, and I’ve got some pretty fun stuff waiting for you there, you’ll be added to my list, which means you won’t miss the release, the behind-the-scenes extras, or whatever weird little spells I decide to cast next.

[00:17:16] Thank you, friend, for coming on this quest with me. And now, I have a fucking book to go finish. 

One of the reasons I decided to heed my spirit guides and create Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? is because I wanted to talk about a pet theory of mine:

I’m convinced the unconscious sets up sneaky little laboratories inside our creative projects.

I’ve stopped keeping count of how many times I’ve grappled with a craft issue, only to realize that the exact skills I’m developing on the page are precisely what I need to navigate some speed bump in the rest of my life.

Coincidence? Methinks not.

This week, we’re talking about the totally fake podcast I wrote inside my book, which ended up being a secret trial run for…you guessed it: my actual podcast.

Thanks, Unconscious!

Want to be the first to know when my book releases?

Join my mailing list to hop to the front of the queue. (Autocorrect for the win. I misspelled “queue” eight different ways.)

Episode 7 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if the fix to your story problems is hiding in plain sight? And what does that have to do with the almighty cat god?

[00:00:11] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.

[00:00:33] Welcome back, friends. We’re starting with our fire segment where we ask, what is our craft issue for the week?

[00:00:41] 

[00:00:43] So I’ve mentioned on this show before how I believe that the unconscious sets up little laboratories in our creative work. In my case, things that unfold in my novels. And in working through these craft issues, I realize, often quite belatedly, that they were basically a practice round for something in my real life.

[00:01:02] And I couldn’t pick a better example of this than this week’s craft problem. So, let’s get into it. My current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, follows Ev Knox, a young writer whose debut novel is being adapted to the big screen. During filming, Ev has to spend a month in the extremely haunted Harrowfell Hall with the leading man, Matt Byrne, who happens to be her very inconvenient celebrity crush.

[00:01:28] This week’s craft problem relates to the book within the book, meaning the novel Ev wrote that’s being adapted into a movie. That book is called The Chalice and the Gates of Dawn, which I’ll henceforth refer to as CATGOD to save my voice, and because that’s the best acronym ever. And no, I did not plan that.

[00:01:45] It was a very happy accident. So, as I was working through draft six, it became very clear that the story would be stronger if I found a better way to weave the story of Ev’s book into my story. There are reasons why this is important, reasons that would be a big spoiler. But suffice it to say, my task was, how do I convey what Ev’s book is about in a way that’s engaging and that ties into my plot at the most relevant moments?

[00:02:12] As in, I didn’t wanna just dump the plot line of her book in a confusing prologue or have Ev tell it to another character in one long info dumpy dialogue chunk. So what else could I do? Last week, I mentioned that I occasionally get story-related insomnia, and the solution to this problem landed on an unsuspecting Wednesday at three AM.

[00:02:34] I’d been toying that week with the idea of writing excerpts from CATGOD and using those as chapter epigraphs, and I actually gave that idea a shot. It worked okay, but it didn’t have that zingy aliveness I look for in a winning idea. It just sorta sat there on the page. And what I realized is that it was really tricky to write an excerpt from Ev’s book that conveyed the information I needed in a very short amount of space, but without feeling info dumpy.

[00:03:02] So that’s our craft issue for this week. The solution? For that, I’ll see you in the next segment.

[00:03:08] 

[00:03:10] Air asks, “What tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft issue?” In this case, I didn’t really bring shit. The unconscious basically delivered a complete solution right to my doorstep, which man, is it ever cool when that happens.

[00:03:24] But I can guess where the inspiration came from. So in my work in progress, The Magician in the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, I mentioned in the last episode that parasocial relationships play a big role. In a nutshell, Ev has to negotiate the fantasy version of Matt Byrne that she sees online, with the very sweet, very nerdy guy that she’s actually getting to know.

[00:03:45] And one of the ways I show this on the page is through Ev’s internet stalking. So she’s reading comments online, looking up the Byrne Baby Byrne fan page, reading fanfic, and all kinds of stuff. So I already had this idea for what I’m calling a visual prologue, and I was going to put that at the beginning of the book.

[00:04:03] Basically, I created a fake social media post, and originally, this post was about Matt, a sort of teaser to show how famous he is and how Ev is very much aware of his abundant hotness before she ever meets him. But that social media post morphed into something very different midway through draft six.

[00:04:20] All right, let’s set the scene. I wake up to go pee at 3:00 AM, and I’m already back cozying under the blankets when suddenly my brain bursts into flames. I rush into the other room, and I’m barely able to scribble notes fast enough. Instead of a social media post about Matt, it turned into a post about Ev’s book, Cat God, and in the comments, two fans decide they want to start a podcast about the book.

[00:04:45] This fake podcast ended up being my vehicle for conveying plot info about Cat God in a way that felt so energized, so sparkly. I sketched out the first four podcast transcripts, just snippets, mind you, because that’s all I need for these epigraphs, but I sketched them all out that night, and then I went back to bed and I slept like a dead rock.

[00:05:05] So thanks to this podcast within the book, I no longer have to come up with a short paragraph of prose that elegantly conveys the necessary plot details without sounding info dumpy. I can have these characters, my fake podcasters, talk about their favorite parts of Ev’s book in a way that’s funny and entertaining and never feels like a boring plot summary, even though that’s exactly the function it’s serving.

[00:05:28] And not only that, but it works thematically on multiple levels, including the aforementioned parasocial versus offline connection, because we have these podcasters discussing Ev’s book while you, the reader, are getting to know Ev for real, and there are other thematic tie-ins, but honestly, those would be hard for me to explain without spoilers.

[00:05:47] Point being, the podcast solution was thematic catnip for my brain, which is a sure sign of a winning idea.

[00:05:54] 

[00:05:56] Water asks, “What do these craft insights reveal about me personally?” This is a two-parter actually, so we’re gonna revisit this in the next episode. But the reveal for this week is something that my conscious mind finds excruciatingly annoying because it goes against my brain’s entire operating manual, and that is sometimes when a problem refuses to budge, the answer isn’t to try harder.

[00:06:19] Sometimes it’s only when you stop trying to make the wrong solution work that the right one has the space to emerge. Because that’s what was happening with the Cat God experts. I had the right instinct. I knew Ev’s book needed to be threaded into mine. I knew it couldn’t just hover in the background as the supposedly important text that we never actually experience.

[00:06:40] But that material didn’t want to be crammed into polished little excerpts. It wanted to hang out with two nerds on a fake podcast spiraling over plot theories and their favorite moments of swoon. This is where I truly believe the unconscious is smarter than my conscious mind, because my conscious mind too often keeps trying to solve the problem inside the frame I already chose.

[00:07:01] It’ll say, “Well, the epigraphs aren’t working yet, so just, I don’t know, make the epigraphs better.” Yep, this is the part that feels uncomfortably personal because I can look back at so many places in my life where I’ve responded to friction by assuming I needed to become better at enduring the friction, more disciplined, more patient, more reasonable.

[00:07:24] And sometimes, sure, that’s true. Sometimes growth means developing the capacity to stay with something difficult. But sometimes difficulty is information. Sometimes the thing that feels dead feels dead because it is. A scene, a business strategy, a creative identity, a relationship. Which brings us to our final segment.

[00:07:46] 

[00:07:48] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what do these insights ask of me in real life?” Let’s do this backward and start with the second question. My answer this week is, maybe you don’t need to make yourself smaller, calmer, more productive, more palatable, more willing to white-knuckle your way through the thing.

[00:08:06] Sometimes you just need to burn it all down and create a new container. That doesn’t mean the new container will make everything easy-peasy necessarily. Those fake podcast epigraphs still have a job to do. They still have to reveal the right information at the right moment. They still have to be funny enough, brief enough, and thematically relevant enough to justify their existence.

[00:08:28] So far, the hardest part of the process hasn’t been coming up with ideas for the fake podcast. It’s figuring out the right placement for those epigraphs within the larger narrative. But even though that’s tricky, it’s a really satisfying challenge. And that’s the point. Once I found the right container, the work had energy again.

[00:08:46] That’s the difference I’m trying to spot, hopefully a little bit earlier each time. Is this hard in a way that feels dynamic and alive? Or is this hard because I’m trying to resurrect something that never had a pulse in the first place? So let’s pinky swear before we go. Ready? No Franken-stories stitched together from dead ideas that we should have buried in the backyard.

[00:09:14] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? Speaking of finishing, I’m getting so close to the finish line. So if you want to be the first to know when my book releases, head on over to twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you choose, you’ll be added to my list, and you won’t miss a thing.[00:09:35] Next week, in our season finale, we’re returning to the idea of perfectionism. We all know that perfectionism, if left to its own devices, will ravage the countryside and never let us finish a damn thing. But sometimes perfectionism is hiding an even sneakier creative roadblock, and it took receiving a nasty 14-page letter from one of my parents for me to uncover what that roadblock really is.

What if the fastest way to save your book is to do this one embarrassing thing?

In this episode, I talk about the genius of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Id List and how it can make writing fun again (for you and your readers).

I share how the fanfic-within-my-book became a roiling cauldron of lusty fun and why I spent weeks telling myself it wasn’t allowed. 🚫

I also present my incredibly well-reasoned argument for why the answer, in art and possibly in life, is sometimes (often?): just add ghost sex.

Want to see my Id List in action? 

Hop on my mailing list, and you’ll be the first to know when The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays releases, in all its Id List glory.

Episode 6 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if the fastest way to save your book is to do this one embarrassing thing?

[00:00:09] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life. 

[00:00:34] Welcome back, friends. We’re starting, as always, with our fire segment, the element that asks, what’s our craft problem of the week?

[00:00:42] 

[00:00:44] Every once in a while, I’m hit with insomnia. I wake up in the middle of the night to go pee, and usually I can coax myself back to Sleepy Town. But there’s one very special circumstance that is useless to try and fight, and that is when a story refuses to shut up, even though it’s three AM.

[00:01:02] During these nocturnal downloads, I’ll get entire scenes complete with dialogue plunked right into my brain, or the overall plot from beginning to end will unfurl like a map in my mind. And so I wrap myself in a blanket and stumble into the next room to scribble it all down before I forget. On nights when a story is feeling especially chatty, this process will repeat sometimes three or four or five times.

[00:01:28] What I’ve noticed, though, is there’s a pattern to these downloads. When I’m nearing the finish line of a book, I’ll start getting midnight transmissions for the next book in the series, which, I mean, that makes sense, right? My brain is just gearing up for the next project. But a few stories in my series arc seem to exert massive gravitational pull, book nine and book seventeen.

[00:01:52] Before we get into why, we need a brief context intermission.

[00:01:55] 

[00:01:58] How do I know how many books are in my series, much less what’s happening in book seventeen? Well, my Twin Flame series is based on the Major Arcana of the tarot. This is why the first book, The Fool and the Threads of Time, is denoted book zero, because the fool is card zero.

[00:02:16] I also spent weeks mapping out my entire series, which looked like rows of tarot cards and a million colored index cards covering our entire dining room table. I know exactly how my series is going to end, but that doesn’t mean I have complete plots for every book in between. I do have major plot points mapped out for every single book.

[00:02:36] They’re kind of like locations on a map that I know I have to visit, but how I get there exactly is still flexible. And I like this mixture of structure and freedom. It means that the series isn’t aimless, and I can plant all kinds of foreshadowing nuggets as we go along. But I’ve given my unconscious plenty of wiggle room to fill each book’s vessel with copious amounts of unexpected magic.

[00:02:59] All right, back to those nocturnal transmissions. Why are book nine and book seventeen so magnetic to my psyche? For that, we need to introduce our craft tool of the week, so I’ll meet you in the air segment.

[00:03:13] 

[00:03:15] Air asks, “What tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft problem?” Those of you who have been in my world for a while know that I rarely talk about Freud.

[00:03:25] This is because Carl Jung is my spirit animal. But for today’s craft talk, we need to define the Freudian concept of the id. The id is the instinctive, unconscious part of the psyche. It’s like the raw engine of appetite, impulse, fantasy, aggression, pleasure, and desire. It doesn’t care about morality or social acceptability.

[00:03:45] It just wants what it wants. In Freud’s model, the id operates according to the pleasure principle, meaning it seeks immediate gratification and relief from tension. In 2018, at a Romance Writers of America talk, novelist and professor Dr. Jennifer Lynn Barnes introduced the concept of the id list. Here’s Barnes from a 2023 Writer’s Digest article.

[00:04:09] Quote, “Create a giant, ever-evolving list of all your favorite things in fiction, characters, tropes, settings, tiny little details, all of it. I call mine my id list, and it is enormous, just pages and pages of things that I love in books or movies for no particular reason at all.” End quote. She goes on to list some of the items on her id list, like helicopters, paternity revelations, scenes set on rooftops, characters eating ice cream, fake dating.

[00:04:37] Here’s Barnes again. Quote, “In between projects, I go back to my id list and actively work to identify more and more things that I love. And then, when I begin writing a new project, I’m conscious about using my id list as license and a guide to put so much that I love in my books. It brings me so much joy as a writer and ends up solving a surprising number of craft problems for me as well.” End quote.

[00:05:01] What I realized is that book nine and book 17 were jam-packed with stuff from my id list, which includes, in no particular order, summer camp for adults, lush, mossy forests, people coming together, nerdy guys who are secretly good in bed, exploring lost ruins, forced proximity in remote locales, gender fluidity, ancient books with tortured histories, characters realizing they had what they needed inside them all along, having sex with a ghost, artists seeking inspiration in foreign places, creepy fairy tales, and literally anything to do with psyche and eros.

[00:05:37] All the way back in episode one, I mentioned that I’d never read a romance before I started writing one. Maybe not the ideal author pathway, but here we are. I did, however, read a romance-adjacent book in my late teens, one that I go back and reread every few years around Samhain. That book is called The Heart of a Witch by Judith Hawkes, and it is chock-full of my personal id list material.

[00:05:59] 

[00:06:01] Since I don’t wanna give you hella spoilers for later books in my series, let me share a little tidbit from my current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, that ended up being an idlist supernova. So, quick context recap in case you’re just joining us. In The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, my main character, Ev, falls for Matt Byrne, the internet’s smoking hot boyfriend who happens to be starring in the film adaptation of her debut novel.

[00:06:27] The story takes place in their month of forced proximity while filming at a haunted castle. Yes, please. Without giving away too much, one of the things I explore in the book is the nature of parasocial relationships, and a big part of Ev and Matt’s romance arc is Ev stripping away all the layers of fantasy and fame bubble wrap so she can see Matt for the very real guy that he is.

[00:06:50] Early in their relationship arc, I have Ev really grappling with the contrast between Matt the person and Matt the celebrity, and in one scene, she stumbles on a fan page that leads her to an entire universe of fanfic, some of it quite steamy. There’s one fanfic in particular called Never Answer After Dark, or NAAD for short, and it becomes so popular it spawns its own sub-universe of increasingly raunchy spinoffs.

[00:07:16] So, one night, alone in her bed with only two walls separating her room from Matt’s, Ev tumbles down the NAAD rabbit hole. For this scene, I had to actually write parts of that fanfic story, and oh, my God, was it ever fun. And I realized this was in large part because I’d given myself a free pass to pour on all of my favorite tropes, like only one bed, fever nest, cabin in the woods, until that scene was overflowing with idlist material.

[00:07:43] This realization led to another realization, that wait a minute, I could have this much fun with the rest of my writing, too, not just this fanfic within a story scene. And in fact, the only person stopping me from doing that was me.

[00:07:58] 

[00:08:00] Water asks, “What does this craft discovery reveal about me personally?”

[00:08:04] Well, it introduced me to an inner part within my psyche who wholeheartedly believes that if I find something enjoyable, there must be something wrong with it. Uh, what? Actually, this wasn’t surprising at all. Not after I thought about it for all of two seconds in the context of how I was raised, specifically with a deep, primal terror of my own inner life.

[00:08:26] My uncensored thoughts, my unfiltered feelings, my needs, my desires, all of that was bad. There was a chunk of time where this badness was specifically sinful. This was the phase when one of my parents was an evangelical Christian I remember a book, I think it was called The Bondage Breaker. I distinctly remember an illustration of this thick chain being shattered on the cover.

[00:08:50] But in the back of the book was a list of all the demonic things I needed to be scared of. And what’s hilarious is, if memory serves, most of the things on that list are now, like, my favorite stuff. Tarot cards, smutty books, witchcraft, you name it. Check, check, and check. I can laugh about it now because it genuinely is funny that the list of things that will destroy your soul turned out to be more or less my brand.

[00:09:16] But the residue of that kind of upbringing is less hilarious when it crops up in my creative process in unconscious ways. When you’ve been taught to distrust your own pleasure, your own fascination, this distrust often doesn’t announce itself in neon lights. It can feel much more sophisticated than that.

[00:09:35] It can feel like taste or discernment. It might sound like, “Well, I don’t wanna be self-indulgent,” or, “That trope is too obvious,” or, “Sure, I like that, but is it any good?” And listen, sometimes that’s a totally valid craft question. Not everything we love belongs in every story. If I tried to cram ghost sex, ancient ruins, fever nests, and adult summer camp into every book…

[00:10:00] Actually, that sounds amazing. I should totally write that book. But the point is, I think there’s a difference between making a craft choice and preemptively sanding the fingerprints off your own work because you’re afraid the thing you love is embarrassing. And that’s the part I’m really trying to pay attention to, because the it list, it isn’t just a writing exercise.

[00:10:20] It’s a permission slip. It asks, “What do you love before you start explaining yourself?” For me, this also connects to something I’ve wrestled with as a romance writer, which is that I can be weirdly picky about romance novels. I love romance as a structure. I love longing and angst and sexual tension all day long.

[00:10:41] I love the holy shit of two people finally seeing each other for who they are and loving the hot mess that stands before them. But I read way less romances than it feels like I, quote-unquote, should. And for a while, I really beat myself up about that. I mean, if I’m writing romance, shouldn’t I be reading it constantly?

[00:11:00] Shouldn’t I have encyclopedic knowledge of the market? To be clear, I do think reading in your genre is useful. I’ve encouraged myself to read more romance in particular, and more fiction in general in recent years, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. But I’ve also stopped forcing myself to finish romances that aren’t grabbing me just because I think that’s what a real romance writer would do, even if that means I put aside the majority of the books I try to read.

[00:11:27] I’ve always read more nonfiction than fiction. I will probably always read a lot of Jungian psychology and occult history and weird little books on random sociology topics. But maybe that doesn’t make me deficient as a romance writer. Maybe my particular brain flavor isn’t a liability I have to compensate for.

[00:11:47] The more I work with the id list, the more the question shifts from, “How do I make myself want the correct things?” to, “What happens if I trust the things I already want?” Because if I’m bored by my own restraint, there’s a decent chance the reader is too. And if some strange, mossy, ghost sex-loving part of me is clawing at the walls trying to get into the story, maybe my job isn’t to lock the door and call that craft.

[00:12:14] Maybe my job is to ask what it wants. And maybe sometimes the answer is throw that ghost in a cabin in the woods with only one bed.

[00:12:23] 

[00:12:25] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what does this ask of me in real life?” Well, on the book level, this fix was the bee’s knees. Once I saw the fanfic within the book scene as an id list supernova, I understood why it felt so alive, and I could just slather more of that joy jam on the rest of the book. And side note, you better believe the next book in my series is going to be front-loaded with so many id list ingredients.

[00:12:53] But the deeper question isn’t really about the book, right? The deeper question is, can I trust that what I want matters? Can I trust that my needs are valid, even if other people find them inconvenient, confusing, excessive, or even offensive sometimes? And to be clear, saying, “My needs are valid,” does not mean everyone else is duty-bound to cater to them.

[00:13:15] Other people get to have needs, too. Other people get to have boundaries. But I am allowed to need what I need. I’m allowed to want what I want. I’m allowed to make choices that are right for my life, even if those choices rock the proverbial boat. If you’ve been in my world for a while, you already know that I’m estranged by choice from my entire family, and that wasn’t some dramatic one fell swoop situation.

[00:13:41] It was a series of painful decisions made over a number of years. And every step of the way, I was deeply aware that other people did not agree with me. In some cases, they downright despise my decision. And if their words are anything to go by, some of them downright despise me as a result. There is a very particular pain in disappointing people you love.

[00:14:06] That’s part of what makes it so hard. Estrangement doesn’t necessarily mean the love disappears or that it was never there in the first place. No, the love, it’s still there. It’s just living side by side with the knowledge that love is not always enough to make a relationship livable. For a long time, I tried to make relationships work that simply did not work for me.

[00:14:31] I tried to be more accommodating, more understanding, more understandable, more endlessly available. I tried to make my needs small enough that they wouldn’t cause any trouble. But that was far more painful in the end than being disliked. It was soul-draining and corrosive, and it drilled in the lie over and over again that the price of belonging is self-abandonment.

[00:14:55] But it’s not, really. It just depends on what you’re trying to belong to. For some relationships, the cost of admission is selfhood, and that’s a price tag that’s no longer in my budget. When I think about letting myself write from the id list, I think of it as part of a much bigger practice, the practice of not betraying myself in advance, because that’s the temptation, right?

[00:15:19] To pre-reject yourself before anyone else gets the chance. To sand off the wonky edges, to make the book smoother, safer, more marketable, more whatever you think will protect you. But of course, it won’t protect you. This is where years of being disliked for my choices have unintentionally become excellent training for being an artist.

[00:15:40] Because if I make something with any real charge in it, some people are going to hate it. Actually, scratch that. If I make something, full stop, some people are going to hate it. That’s not a possibility. That’s a guarantee. I hope there will also be people who love it as deeply and obsessively as I do, but no artwork since the dawn of time has been universally loved.

[00:16:02] Two examples from Reddit, in case you don’t believe me. “Mona Lisa is an overrated piece of shit.” That’s a direct quote, by the way. To which someone added, “She’s worse than the pyramids.” So that’s Da Vinci and, you know, one of the defining monuments of human civilization knocked off their stupid little pedestals in one fell swoop.

[00:16:22] Here’s one more, just for fun. This is an Amazon review for Pride and Prejudice. “Just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses.” Brilliant.

[00:16:35] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you want to see how my ID list experiment turned out, hop on my mailing list and you’ll be the first to know when my book releases. You can do that over at twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you choose, and I’ve got some pretty fun stuff for you over there, you’ll be added to my list and you won’t miss a thing.[00:16:59] Next week, we’re gonna take a peek at a curious little writing experiment I didn’t realize my unconscious had set up for me until the changes I’d made to my book led to very real changes in my life.

What if your scenes are dragging, not because nothing is happening, but because the real action is hiding somewhere you haven’t thought to look?

In this episode of Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book?, I tackle scenes that look like they should work—goal, conflict, stakes, banter, the whole shebang—but still feel like limp little rags on the page.

I share the two books that turned my conception of storytelling upside down, a tool for resurrecting a shambling zombie scene, and how to use the magical art of bibliomancy to make your characters more compelling.

My sexual tension experiment…

Want to read the short story where I began experimenting with stretching out the rubber band of romantic and sexual tension?

Download Falling Phoenix for free.

Episode 5 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if your scenes are dragging, not because nothing is happening, but because the real action is hiding somewhere you haven’t thought to look?

[00:00:12] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.

[00:00:34] Hey friends, welcome back. We start as we always do with our fire segment, which asks what’s our craft problem of the week?

[00:00:41] 

[00:00:43] Have you ever read a story with an intriguing premise, empathetic characters, and satisfying twist and turns, yet certain scenes still feel kind of flat, and maybe you can’t put your finger on what’s missing?

[00:00:56] I’d hit a point in draft six of my current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, where certain scenes were sagging, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. In the interim between writing this, my second book, and my first book, I’d read a bunch of writing craft material on the topic of creating emotional impact.

[00:01:16] I’d learned things like how important it is to forge a connection between the reader and your character. Otherwise, even if that character is hanging by their acrylic fingernails from the windowsill of a skyscraper, the reader won’t really care if those nails snap off and the character plunges to their doom.

[00:01:32] I mean, they’ll care-care in the sense of, “Oh, no, a person is dying,” but it’ll register more as like a vague bummer than the gut-plunging shock that you’re likely intending. I’d learned that your character needs a goal for every scene, and you need to make it really, really hard for them to go after it.

[00:01:48] There also has to be stakes if they fail. All of these things can help keep your scenes from dragging, but it was only after my trip to Tacoma, the subject of last week’s episode, that I realized my scenes were lacking a vital ingredient, and it took a book on dialogue and a smutty novel to show me exactly what I was missing.

[00:02:08] 

[00:02:10] The Element of Air asks, “What tools am I bringing to solve this week’s craft problem?” So the two books that turned my writing process upside down were Robert McKee’s Dialogue and Charlotte Stein’s Control. And it was the first book in particular that unlocked, like, I don’t know, 10 new levels in the video game running inside my brain.

[00:02:30] There are so many things in that book worth reading, but I want to focus on the one technique to rule them all, and that is the third thing. McKee also calls this trialogue in contrast to dialogue, and he writes, quote, “Trialogue, as I define the term, names the triangular relationship between two characters in conflict and the third thing through which they funnel their struggle,” end quote.

[00:02:54] A simple example would be a couple arguing about a broken porch light. “The porch light’s still out.” “I’ll get to it.” “You said that last week.” “I’ve been busy.” “And I haven’t?” If this exchange took place in the context of a story, chances are that we, the readers, would know what’s up. Maybe they’re really talking about unequal labor.

[00:03:13] Why am I the only one who notices what needs doing? Or it could be about emotional neglect. Why do I have to ask for every scrap of care that gets tossed my way? It could be about trust erosion. Your promises have started to mean nothing. It could be about loneliness. We sleep in the same bed, but I’m handling life alone.

[00:03:34] The point is, we know with absolute certainty this ain’t about a light bulb. But let’s rewrite that exchange, this time with zero subtext. “The porch light’s still out.” “Yes, I am aware that the porch light remains broken, and I understand that this has symbolic significance in our ongoing conflict.” “You said you would fix it last week, so now I’m experiencing your failure to follow through as evidence that I cannot rely on you.”

[00:04:00] “That is accurate. I have been avoiding this task because I feel emotionally disengaged from the relationship and no longer prioritize your needs in the way I once did.” “Hearing you say that causes me emotional pain because I have been using the porch light as a proxy for my larger fear that I am alone in this relationship.”

[00:04:17] “That fear is valid. Perhaps we should have a direct conversation about my emotional withdrawal and the growing erosion of trust between us.” “Yes, let’s stop discussing the porch light, since the porch light is clearly not the real issue.” Okay, so I’m fairly certain we can agree that this dialogue is a pile of shit.

[00:04:33] And to be fair, it’s highly unlikely you’ll run into something that absurd in a book. But what I do see all the time is dialogue that just means what it means, and that’s that. For instance, “The porch light’s out.” “I’ll get to it.” But in this case, there’s no buried marital grievance, no symbolic cry for help.

[00:04:52] It’s just a burnt-out bulb. That dialogue probably doesn’t need to exist, unless later that night, the aliens land, and as it turns out, the only thing that keeps these particular aliens from entering a human dwelling is a working porch light. Since no one changed the damn bulb, the aliens are free to skitter up the steps and lay eggs in your face while you sleep.

[00:05:15] In this case, you get to keep your porch light dialogue Whenever I read a book, I mark interesting passages with sticky tabs. When I’m done, because I’m a total nerd, I type those passages out, both to give me a searchable document, but also to remind me of all the cool things I just learned but have likely already forgotten.

[00:05:35] So in reading over my notes from Robert McKee’s Dialogue before this episode, I came across a few passages that approach this idea of using the third thing in your dialogue from a few different angles. Here’s the first. Quote, “As you compose dialogue, I think it’s useful to imagine character design as three concentric spheres, one inside the other.

[00:05:56] The innermost sphere churns with the unsayable. The middle sphere restrains the unsaid. The outer sphere releases the said.” End quote. Here’s another passage. Quote, “To write intriguing, layered, credible dialogue, first study the difference between the two motors for human action: motivation and justification.

[00:06:17] Then see if masking your character’s subconscious drives with their conscious efforts to excuse or at least make sense out of their unexplainable behaviors adds depth to their words.” End quote. And finally, here’s a passage that really maps out those concentric spheres of character design that McKee mentioned above.

[00:06:36] Quote, “When first spoken, a line of dialogue conveys a surface meaning, the meaning the reader hopes other characters will believe and act on. This first meaning seems logical in its context. It conveys a sense of character, purpose, and tactic, and arouses curiosity as we glance across the scene to see its effect.

[00:06:55] The language itself might also delight us with tropes or wordplay. In the second moment, however, this solid speech seems to dissolve, and we sense a second deeper meaning hidden behind the words. True to character talk lets us read past conscious thoughts and sense unspoken feelings down to a character’s subconscious urges.

[00:07:14] This effect is so powerful that the fullness and depth of insight we have into fictional characters often surpasses what we glimpse in the living people around us.” End quote. So I had these Robert McKee passages bubbling in my brain, but I mentioned that I took a second book on my flight to Tacoma, and that is Control by Charlotte Stein.

[00:07:35] Control is an erotic romance centered on Maddie, the owner of a romance bookstore who meets two guys who respond to her job posting for a shop assistant. There’s buttoned-up, tweed-wearing Gabe, and tattooed, potty-mouthed Andy. I shall give as few spoilers as humanly possible, so go read the book to find out what happens.

[00:07:54] But for our purposes here, I’m gonna share a short passage from page six. The scene takes place after Gabe shows up at Maddie’s bookshop for his job interview. But her last interview ran a little bit late. Translation: she and tattooed Andy are going at it in the store, and tweedy, bespectacled Gabe walks in and catches them in the act.

[00:08:13] Gabe is out of there so fast, Maddie isn’t entirely sure he wasn’t just a figment of her imagination. Now, in the scene I’m about to share, Maddie is back at home and she is, shall we say, reflecting on what happened at the shop. “I have a secret streak of needing to be spied on, and my mind won’t stop going there, to him in his too-thick glasses and his tweediness and his hunched shoulders and Jesus, that’s a good image.

[00:08:37] Oh, that’s so good. I bet we really shocked him. I bet he couldn’t walk straight all the way home. I bet when he got home, he did just what I’m doing right now. The thought is enough to send me right over the edge so fiercely that it shocks me.”

[00:08:52] So in this passage, this is the first time Maddie admits to herself that she’s attracted to Gabe, really attracted to him, and this is such a saucy, skillful way of conveying her feelings to the readings, much more effective than Gabe walking in for his interview and Maddie thinking to herself, “Gee, what a handsome guy.”

[00:09:11] It creeps up on her, surprises her even, and the reveal is all the more fun because of it.

[00:09:16] 

[00:09:19] There are many different ways to do a close reading of a text, but my plan for Charlotte Stein’s Control was simple. I would read until I hit a passage that grabbed me, I’d copy that passage into my notebook, and I’d let it serve as a springboard for whatever thoughts wanted to come through. I treated this kind of like I do bibliomancy, which is the practice of opening a book to a random passage and treating that as the answer to your question, kind of like pulling a tarot card.

[00:09:44] So after reading that passage where Maddie realizes she has the hots for Gabe, the first thing that came to mind was this: in the previous draft of my work in progress, Ev, my main character, is fully aware that she’s attracted to Matt before they ever meet. Matt is absurdly famous, and Ev has seen some of his films, so she has copious evidence of his abundant hotness.

[00:10:06] None of this was supposed to matter, though. Matt was just an innocent celebrity crush until he gets cast as the lead in the film adaptation of her book, and she’s to live with him in a haunted castle for a month. In the previous draft, it had never occurred to me that Ev would try to hide her attraction to Matt from herself.

[00:10:23] I mean, sure, she was hell-bent on hiding it from Matt, but in draft five, I had her privately mooning over him in her thoughts. But a combination of McKee’s dialogue and that Charlotte Stine passage sparked this idea, and once it was sparked, the fire would not go out. So I rewrote a scene where Ev is on her way to Harrowfell Hall, and she’s stalking Matt online.

[00:10:46] She comes across pictures from some of his movies, and wow, oh, wow, are these pictures ever getting her flustered. But this time, I introduced the constraint of Ev refuses to admit her attraction, and I was forced to reroute her attraction into something else. I’m not going to spoil what that something else is, but I will say this.

[00:11:04] It made Ev, in my opinion at least, much more endearing and relatable, and her interiority was so much more fun to write, which translated into, I hope, being much more fun to read. And this is just one example of how the one-two combo of McKee’s dialogue and Stine’s control changed how I approached my scenes.

[00:11:23] This perspective shift felt enormous, like, genuinely enormous. It wasn’t just, “Oh, neat, here’s a cool trick I can use in dialogue.” It felt like I’d been trying to light my scenes with a Bic lighter and suddenly somebody just, like, flipped on the sun. Before, I could make scenes work, more or less. I could give characters a goal, I could make sure there was conflict, I could add banter, I could up the stakes, but sometimes the scene still felt like it was just lying there on the page, barely breathing.

[00:11:50] But when it clicked, when I felt in my gut how much energy is generated, not simply by what characters are doing, but by what they secretly want and what they won’t let themselves admit, I swear to God, it was like upgrading my writing crayon box from a measly 12 colors to the deluxe 64 with that built-in sharpener in the back.

[00:12:10] Now, I wasn’t restricted to coloring the lines with plain old anger, but anger pretending to be logic, fear pretending to be irritation, longing disguised as a joke, loneliness funneled through an argument about a porch light. And now, when a scene sagged, I wasn’t just standing over it like, “I don’t know, maybe add more banter?

[00:12:30] Maybe throw in a ghost?” I had a new question to ask: “What is this scene really about, and what are the characters using to avoid saying it?” That question changed everything. Scenes and the dialogue within them were no longer about moving character chess pieces from plot point A to plot point B. They were bubbling cauldrons of unspoken fears and hidden longings.

[00:12:53] Often, the pressure, the energy, it was already there. I just needed to find ways to bottle it up and to push it to the breaking point.

[00:13:00] 

[00:13:02] Our water segment asks, what do these craft insights reveal about me personally? When I started revising scenes with my shiny new subtext cram box, I remember journaling one night after a long day of revisions, and I asked myself, “Why wasn’t I doing this before?” With, like, three question marks. Because it’s not like I don’t love subtext.

[00:13:24] I’ve read tons of books and watched tons of movies where my favorite scenes are the ones where I, as the reader or viewer, get to sift through what’s being said and root around for what’s really being said. I love that shit. So why wasn’t I letting myself have that same fun in my own work in progress?

[00:13:41] After a lot of journaling, I came to two interrelated answers. The first is that letting tension boil and bubble is kind of uncomfortable, not just for my characters, but also for me. Go figure. So in countless little ways, I’d vent the pressure too early. I’d have a character say exactly what was on their mind, so the other characters weren’t left rudely hanging, and neither was I.

[00:14:03] Which brings me to the second answer. I didn’t want my characters to come off as unlikable. There is so much discourse online about unlikable characters that even I, a person who is not on social media, still managed to hear about it. And this seems especially loud in romance, where there are all kinds of rules about what characters can and can’t do before readers write them off as irredeemable.

[00:14:24] But what I’m realizing is that if I try to obey all of those rules, I don’t end up with more lovable characters. I end up with flatter, safer, bore-me-to-tears characters, characters who explain themselves too quickly and please and think their way through scenes, stamping out every potential spark before it has a chance to land.

[00:14:45] You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Depiction is not endorsement,” which seems more widely accepted in literary fiction, but can get kind of slippery in romance. If I write a character acting like a jackass early in their arc, I’m not saying, “Hey, reader, you should tolerate jackassy behavior in your real-life relationships.”

[00:15:03] I’m saying, “Here is a messy human at the beginning of a transformation.” After all, if I don’t let them be messy at the beginning, there’s nowhere meaningful for them to go. Do you see where this is going? Yep. As in fiction, so in life. No matter how much I outline, no matter how many craft books I read or courses I take, writing is going to make a mess.

[00:15:26] And that’s precisely where the magic is.

[00:15:29] 

[00:15:31] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what does this craft discovery ask of me in real life?” So how did it go? In one sense, amazingly, truly. Once I started waving my sparkly subtext wand over all my scenes, many of them came alive in ways they simply had not before. But, and here’s where Earth comes in, because Earth is where our beautiful ideas crash into time, energy, deadlines, and the fact that I am tragically not an immortal witch with unlimited revision hours.

[00:16:00] This breakthrough also extended my revision process, because once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Scenes that had seemed basically fine suddenly had the emotional equivalent of fluorescent lighting. I could spot every exchange where I’d vented the tension a little too early, every place where a character said the thing to bonk you on the head directly.

[00:16:22] This was simultaneously thrilling and fucking inconvenient. Thrilling because, oh my God, I finally understood why some scenes that should have been exciting on paper felt like limp little rags. Inconvenient because now I had to go back and fix them. And so draft six became a lot more involved than I’d originally planned.

[00:16:39] But in the end, I do think it was the right call. Sometimes a craft breakthrough is not a shiny distraction. Sometimes it really is the missing piece, and for this book, subtext was the missing piece, or at least one of the big missing pieces. The haunting subplot matters, the romance matters, the group dynamics matter, but without that undercurrent of things half said, misdirected, and bottled up, the whole thing just wasn’t jumping off the page like it needed to.

[00:17:06] So yes, I let this breakthrough change the book, but that does not mean every breakthrough gets to change this book. I’m saying this partly as a reminder to myself, because this is one of the most dangerous parts of leveling up your art. You learn something new, and suddenly you want to go back and retrofit everything you have ever made since your kindergarten finger paintings.

[00:17:28] But if I do that, I will never, ever publish this book. I will simply become a better writer in private while the manuscript sits there aging like a wheel of cheese. So this is what the subtext breakthrough asks of me in real life: discernment. Some insights are for the book in front of me, some are for the next book, some are for the next 10 books, and finishing is learning to make that call.

[00:17:53] Finishing a book means letting it be the artifact of who you were while you made it, not the perfect monument to everything you will ever become. Choose the breakthroughs that get to make this book better without letting every new breakthrough move the finish line.

[00:18:09] ​

[00:18:14] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you wanna read a short story where I began my little experiment in stretching out the rubber band of romantic and sexual tension, download Falling Phoenix for free at twinflames.life/freebies. Next week, we’re gonna explore how refined taste can become a very convincing disguise for sucking the joy out of your creative process and what you can do instead.[00:18:41] I’ll see you next time.

What if finishing your book isn’t about having all the right answers? What if you need this magic ingredient instead?

In this episode, I share how a trip to Tacoma, WA accidentally changed my entire revision process—and the $3 item that became my new favorite revision tool. 

I lovingly call out the part of my psyche that confuses “looking busy” with “quality work,” and I break down the most useful thing I did for my revision process (and why I’d refused to do it for years). 

What did I learn since writing my first novel?

Check out my 2025 Writing Lessons Roundup.

Episode 4 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if finishing your book isn’t about having all the right answers? What if you need this magic ingredient instead?

[00:00:12] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life. 

[00:00:33] Hello and welcome back, friends. It’s time for our fire segment where we ask, what’s this week’s craft problem?

[00:00:41] 

[00:00:43] Just like last week, our craft problem for today is all about revisions, but this time with a Tacoma twist. During the three-year process of writing my first book, The Fool and the Threads of Time, in hindsight, something that tacked on a lot of time, and I mean a lot, when it came to revisions, was that I didn’t really know how to do revisions.

[00:01:06] I mean, in a general sense, I knew that they involved reading over stuff I’d written and trying to make it suck less, but how I was supposed to do that was a mystery. So I ended up wasting a ton of time, essentially shifting commas around and nitpicking over line edits when maybe that entire scene I was working on needed to be cut.

[00:01:25] I was, to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club, “polishing the brass on the Titanic.” Now, things started to change with book two, which is my current work in progress, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, and I’ve written about this on my blog in a series of essays detailing some of my lessons learned since writing my first book.

[00:01:45] I’ll put a link to that series in the show notes. But I really noticed a change in my process when I paid a little visit to Tacoma, Washington. Given that my vacation budget is currently zero dollars, I decided to tag along and turn my partner’s work-paid-for hotel room into a DIY writer’s retreat. Fun fact, this Tacoma trip took place in February of this year, and I started writing my first book in February of 2022, also in a hotel room while tagging along on one of my partner’s work trips.

[00:02:17] So note to self, always go along on these trips, at least in the month of February. They’re remarkably productive. Anyway, the week before the trip, I had just finished draft five and another read-through of the manuscript, so it was really tempting to turn my week in Tacoma into this mad race to the finish line, seeing how many draft six revisions I could cram into five days.

[00:02:40] And me of last year would have absolutely done this, but a tiny voice within, a voice that sounded very calm and maybe even a little bit wise, suggested that perhaps, just maybe, I might want to use this time in Tacoma for a different purpose. I had an entire week away from my normal routine, so what better chance to do something that at home I’d find it really, really difficult to give myself permission to do?

[00:03:07] 

[00:03:09] So Air asks, what tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft problem? The day before our Tacoma trip, I went to the grocery store and I bought a cheap three-subject notebook. I didn’t fully know what that tiny voice wanted from me, but I had a sense that I’d need plenty of paper. I also brought two books for the plane, one of which was a sexy novel that I’d already read and loved, but I wanted to do a close reading of.

[00:03:35] So maybe my notebook was for that. I wasn’t sure. But I packed all three books in my carry-on with two fresh pens just in case. As it turns out, the first of these books, which I’ll reveal the title of next week when we do a big old deep dive, that book ended up taking up my entire flight. I read that thing cover to cover.

[00:03:54] And as a result, I was thinking a lot about what characters really want in a scene, what they want but are hiding from other characters, and what they want but are hiding even from themselves. So all of this was brewing away in my mind as we arrowed through the skies from Missouri to Washington. The next morning, I had my notebook and all my pens all arranged on the hotel desk just the way I wanted them.

[00:04:20] It was still dark out, so I had yet to learn that our room actually had a view of Mount Rainier. Nor did I know that this mountain would become an arresting touch point that I return to every time the gears of my mind ground to a halt. But for now, there was nothing but pre-dawn rain outside the windows and my notebook.

[00:04:40] The very first thing I wrote on the very first page was, and I quote, “Notes on receiving love.” This is underlined, by the way. This feels like a pretty great way to start a notebook, doesn’t it? Looking back, it’s almost prophetic. Like, whatever comes after that is destined to be juicy. And as it turns out, it was.

[00:05:02] 

[00:05:04] What this heading was getting at, my quote unquote, “Notes on receiving love,” was something I’d been mulling over in the weeks leading up to this trip. Something that I had a lot of time to think about in the airport and on the plane. Two planes. We had a connecting flight at O’Hare. And that is, I feel like a major part of reading romance, a major part of the fantasy of those stories, is not seeing the couple or throuple or whoever fall in love.

[00:05:29] I mean, yes, that’s a big part of it for sure. But I wonder if for many of us, an equally big part is getting to vicariously experience being someone who can receive that love. In real life, even though we might want love, so many things can get in the way of feeling safe enough to receive it, to let it really sink in, to relish the experience of being loved.

[00:05:52] Maybe it feels selfish, so we snap ourselves out of receiving and figure out how we can hurry up and give instead. Or maybe past wounding has created emotional scar tissue, and no matter how many times someone says or shows that they care, we just can’t feel it, or at least not as fully as we’d like. But in romance, we get to see flawed characters who initially suck at receiving love, getting their happily ever after with a cherry on top.

[00:06:21] But back to my notebook. I began to free write, musing on how my main character, Ev, struggles to receive love and what it would look like for her to break through that block. I wrote down, quote, “Specific experiences that challenge Ev’s intimacy norms,” end quote. And underneath that, I started listing things like being pursued and cherished even when she doesn’t, quote, “have it all together” and being met when she’s emotionally vulnerable.

[00:06:47] I drew an arrow from that last one and asked the question, how can I show Peyton, that’s Ev’s boyfriend, not doing that? This went on for pages, and what slowly emerged was a form of call and response, question and answer, a process that I use in my regular journaling, but for some reason had never thought to use for revisions.

[00:07:06] And I slowly began to develop a consistent format. Questions would be surrounded in these large brackets, followed by rambling answers, often bulleted lists of them, which would then lead to deeper questions. Here are some more notes pulled at random. “Over the course of the book, we should first see Ev defending against and not risking intimacy, and then we see her sometimes risking intimacy, and finally she’s initiating it.”

[00:07:30] A couple of pages later, I clarified that her biggest fear is becoming a burden, and I asked myself all kinds of questions like, “What is she afraid will happen if people see her as a burden? And how does she defend against feeling like a burden?” The latter of which I answered with a long bulleted list that included things like not asking for help and being really supportive of others, but not expecting reciprocation.

[00:07:55] Something magical was happening in this notebook. I wasn’t trying to force the book to give me actionable answers right away. I was asking better and better questions until the answers started surfacing on their own, and that, I think, was the real breakthrough. I stopped treating revision like a command, fix this scene, fix this arc, make it better, and I started treating it like a conversation with a lived-in world.

[00:08:21] Since that trip to Tacoma, this has become my absolute favorite revision tool, the ratty scribbled-in notebook. I’ve since added a fancy set of colored pens, so I can underline key points in different colors. For instance, like one color for plot mechanics, another for character arc, and another for the haunting subplot.

[00:08:40] But let’s look at what comes next. Once I’d mapped out Ev’s interior terrain over pages and pages of messy notes, I took the sections I’d underlined with my colored pens, and I figured out how to layer them into my draft six revision checklist. For instance, knowing that Ev was arcing from avoiding intimacy to initiating it, I looked over her interactions with other characters, and especially with the love interest, Matt, and I fine-tuned her progression from avoidance to initiating.

[00:09:11] My revision checklist divides tasks by scene, so I’d find a relevant scene, and I’d add a specific note so I knew precisely what to change during my revision process. I have to be a little vague here to avoid spoilers, but in the opening chapter, for instance, when Ev is stressing about her finances, I tied that in with her fear of being a burden and her avoidance of intimacy by not letting her talk openly about her stress.

[00:09:37] At that early stage, she’s not gonna come out and ask for help. That would feel way too vulnerable for her, and this avoidance creates all sorts of opportunities for zingy subtext and juicy conflict.

[00:09:50] 

[00:09:52] Our water segment asks the question: What does this craft lesson reveal about me personally? Well, aside from pretty much everything I wrote about my character Ev being something I’ve struggled with, aside from that, you mean? What this reveals is that it took traveling 2,453 miles to give myself permission to do something that didn’t immediately feel productive.

[00:10:15] I had this thing, or I should say I did have this thing before my Tacoma, Washington trip, where unless I’m directly working on my manuscript, as in drafting new pages or revising already existing pages, then whatever I’m doing doesn’t count in a writing sense. Before Tacoma, taking time to open a notebook and journal on, quote, “notes on receiving love” would not count, and so I didn’t let myself do it.

[00:10:42] Now, after a week of filling an entire notebook with stupendously useful insights to my story and my characters, I realize how bonkers that restriction was. My work in progress is unquestionably better after spending a week with that beat-up purple notebook. And not only did I solve problems for my current manuscript, I learned a new strategy for solving craft problems in general.

[00:11:05] But guess what? What I’ve learned here isn’t just relevant to my writing, but for that, we need to move on to the earth segment.

[00:11:12] 

[00:11:14] Earth asks, “How did the fix go? And what do these craft insights ask of me in real life?” The answer to the first question is, the fix was rad. See the rest of this episode for details. But as for the second question, well, there are two things actually that this craft discovery asks of me in real life. The first is, I’m a grown-ass adult.

[00:11:35] Doing quality work is not about looking busy. This isn’t my after-school video store job where there was often fuck all nothing to do, but my boss wasn’t paying me to just stand there, so I’d better find something. I have an inner part though that acts like my video store boss, checking to make sure I’m, quote-unquote, “being productive,” even if all that frenetic activity really just amounts to moving some commas around.

[00:11:58] But my time and energy are finite, and they are precious. I want to use them on things that actually make a difference. If that means taking a week away from revisions to ask myself a million questions in a notebook, then damn it, that’s what I’m gonna do. The second thing is, I have to find what works for me.

[00:12:16] This journaling technique is like chocolate cake to my brain, but it might be a heap of Brussels sprouts to yours. Actually, I love Brussels sprouts, so that’s maybe not the best analogy. But the point is, you have to find what works for you, and it might not be a thing you’ll ever see in a writing craft book.

[00:12:32] Those character questionnaires where you fill out worksheet after worksheet with what’s your character’s favorite color, what’s in their fridge, what are their hobbies, ugh, those are to my brain like a heap of Brussels sprouts that a troll just shat out. I hate them so much. But asking myself questions that poke into all the nooks and crannies of my unique story, sign me up.

[00:12:56] Side note, I don’t just use this journaling technique on budget writer’s retreats, by the way. I now use it for any revision problem that I can’t immediately solve sitting at my computer. I’ll just pop into the living room to simulate flying to Tacoma, and I ask questions about the problem and answer them until I’ve figured it out.

[00:13:14] For my brain, this time is infinitely more productive than staring at my screen or writing out 10 false attempts without a clear idea of what I’m aiming for. Also, can we just take a moment to appreciate how satisfying it will be to look back, I don’t know, maybe 10 years from now, on all of these color-coded notebooks?

[00:13:32] They’re basically like a spiral-bound time capsule of my creative life. And maybe that’s part of what finishing a book requires, not just the finished pages, but a record of all the strange little questions that helped you find your way there

[00:13:47] ​

[00:13:55] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you enjoyed hearing me break down my revision process in exquisite detail, be sure to head over to my mailing list, because every year, I do a series of essays exploring all the writing craft shit I learned since my last book. And if you’ve made it this far, something tells me you’ll love those roundups.[00:14:13] So head on over to twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you sign up for, that’ll get you on my list, and you won’t miss a single essay. Next week, I’ll share how doing a close reading of a smutty novel triggered the biggest craft breakthrough I’ve had in three years. See you next time.

Episode 3 of Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? is live!

This week, in addition to renovating my haunted-house subplot that wasn’t nearly as haunted as I’d hoped, we’re meeting one of my inner parts whom I’ve affectionately nicknamed Fuck It, Let’s Quit.

This part likes to pop in and “help” whenever a writing and/or life problem feels unwieldy (meaning: all problems that can’t be addressed in 5 seconds or less).

We’ll also explore how a busted-up stove from my childhood became the key to figuring out seemingly unfigureoutable problems.

Listen here:

What did I learn since writing my first book?

Check out my 2025 Writing Lessons Roundup.

Episode 3 Transcript

[00:00:00] What if that feeling of revision overwhelm is hiding your personal creativity kryptonite, and staring it straight in the face is what finally makes you invincible? Or at least slightly less likely to delete your entire manuscript and take up goat herding.

[00:00:20] If you’ve ever devoted yourself to a creative project that ended up consuming your entire fucking life, this one’s for you. I’m Aven Winslow, romance writer and Jungian witch. Join me in the final stretch of writing my second romantasy novel. Craft breakthroughs, perfectionism spirals, and all the eerie little ways that fiction can start bleeding into real life.

[00:00:43] Welcome back, friends. We start, as always, with our fire segment, the element that asks, what’s our craft issue for the week?

[00:00:51] 

[00:00:53] The craft issue for this week is pretty simple. Well, not simple to fix, just simple enough to tell you about. After doing a full read-through of my second book, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, prior to starting draft six, I realized that my haunting subplot wasn’t very haunted.

[00:01:12] But the deeper problem wasn’t just that the creepy scenes needed to be creepier. It was that the haunting was staying contained nicely, politely, inside the scenes where haunting stuff was obviously happening. But that’s not how dread works. Like, that shit leaks. It seeps behind the wallpaper and erupts into this black mold infestation that you can never fully root out.

[00:01:35] So the question I was really grappling with was, how do I make the haunting feel like this claustrophobic atmosphere, not an isolated event? I have a feeling that figuring out how to talk about this problem without giving you any spoilers for my book is going to be almost as tricky as fixing that subplot, but we’ll get through this together.

[00:01:57] So what did I do to dial up the creepiness? Let’s find out.

[00:02:01] 

[00:02:03] Air asks, “What tools did I bring to help solve this week’s craft issue?” So, in my work in progress, there are multiple ghosts. Technically, they’re not all ghost ghosts, but explaining more would be spoiler central, and it’s not really necessary to get into the craft angle. So, when I did my read-through and realized the haunting subplot was falling a bit flat, I had just so happened to listen to a podcast.

[00:02:29] It’s called On The Road with Penguin Classics, because I’ve been on this classics reading kick for the last six months or so. And there was an episode on The Haunting of Hill House. I couldn’t remember if I’d read that book in high school or if all of my memories were from the film adaptations, but I decided to give it another read, and specifically, to take notes on how Shirley Jackson built a sense of menace and foreboding.

[00:02:54] I actually have my journal right here with my notes, and I remember I was at my monthly Shut Up and Write meeting, which is held at the library, so it was really handy. I just ran upstairs, I grabbed the book, and I spent that writing hour reading and taking notes. So I’m not gonna read you pages and pages from my journal, but there are a few themes that jump out at me.

[00:03:15] For starters, I really loved how Jackson built up Hill House as an entity with malicious intent, not just your run-of-the-mill haunted house. There was something about the house itself having motive and agency being even creepier to me than there just being ghosts in the house. Part of it was the feeling of entering this entity, of being entirely contained within this malevolency.

[00:03:39] And while not all of that was relevant for my book’s plot, in draft six, as a result of these notes, I did try to elevate that sense of Ev, my main character, encountering Harrowfell Hall, which is the haunted castle where her book’s film adaptation is being shot. I tried to elevate her spidey sense of Harrowfell watching her, of the castle having certain rules regarding how she behaved, and conveying this uneasy pressure if she broke those rules.

[00:04:07] I also did things like playing with how sound traveled within the castle, using it to make Ev feel much more isolated. For instance, she might be right down the hall from the rest of the film crew, but it’s totally silent. And I like the idea of Harrowfell doing that on purpose, the castle being able to muffle sound or otherwise control her surroundings because, like, she’s inside it.

[00:04:30] She’s trapped in its domain. She’s not at the top of the food chain in this place. The other big takeaway from The Haunting of Hill House was the page time Jackson devoted to Eleanor, her main character, and her journey to Hill House. We don’t start the book with Eleanor walking up to the front door. We tag along on her drive, and we get a strong sense of the frankly miserable life that she’s left behind, the recent death of her mother, whom she took care of, and her fraught relationship with her controlling sister.

[00:05:02] And we see her fantasies about how this stay at Hill House could change her life Before she sees the house for the first time, we even get a fantasy about, ooh, maybe there are secret tunnels on the grounds, and she’ll meet this handsome smuggler. And then this fantasy is rudely shattered the instant she lays eyes on the house, and her first reaction is, and I quote, “The house was vile.”

[00:05:27] Ugh, it’s so good. That’s so good. So in thinking about these elements in the context of my story, this led to revamping my character Ev’s journey from her ordinary world to Harrowfell Hall. In the previous draft, I didn’t just have her sitting in the car twiddling her thumbs, but after reading Hill House, I had specific ideas on how I could make that drive work a lot harder.

[00:05:51] And specifically, I revamped it so that not only are we getting teasers about the romance that will blossom over the course of the story, but relative to my haunting subplot, the drive serves much more effectively as a descent into the underworld. Interestingly, I had started reading a paranormal romance at the time.

[00:06:11] Actually, I don’t remember the name, but it just so happened that the main character of that book was also traveling to a haunted house, and I remember being so bored. The book had opened with this prologue that was actually pretty creepy, though it did come right out and show the ghost at the end of the prologue, which I felt wasn’t the most effective tactic.

[00:06:31] Sort of like a horror movie revealing the monster in the opening credits, and it’s just the neighbor in a handmade Bigfoot costume. But anyway, after that eerie prologue, we’re dumped into a car with a guy on his phone just trying to ignore the chatty Uber driver, and that’s basically it. And I knew that I didn’t wanna do that in my book.

[00:06:50] I wanted the drive to Harrowfell to build both romantic suspense and elevate the haunted vibe. So everything I’ve just talked about is one strategy that I used. I read Hill House, I took notes, and I used that material to help brainstorm ways to improve my own story. But let’s get into how I actually carried out these revisions.

[00:07:11] 

[00:07:14] So I am passionately in love with checklists, and if you’re not that way, everything I’m about to say might sound like your personal hell, and I apologize. But I love using either pen and paper or Google Docs, specifically with the checkbox style of list, so I have the intense satisfaction of checking things off it.

[00:07:33] I love it. So okay, what went on my list? I tackled this from two fronts, the haunting scenes themselves and the scenes in between the hauntings. So first, I listed out all of the haunting scenes, so I knew exactly what I was working with. This led to the realization that I actually needed to map out the progression of the villain.

[00:07:56] I’m using villain as a sort of placeholder here, because as I mentioned earlier, the haunting is more complicated than, “Oh, there’s this big, bad ghost, and they have to defeat the ghost to win the day.” There’s, there’s more going on. But to avoid spoilers, let’s just call the haunting elements altogether the villain.

[00:08:12] So I knew I needed to map a progression of the villain so that its presence was felt from the start, but there was a definite sense of that presence ramping up and reaching a climax. Once I had this progression mapped out, I could then go over my haunting scenes and figure out how to layer that progression in.

[00:08:32] As a side note, I’ve since read a book called Action by Robert McKee, and I’m so excited to take those principles to help me build an even better villain in my next book. But that will be a topic, who knows, maybe for the next season of this podcast. Okay, so that takes care of one of the two angles. The other angle was tackling the scenes in between the haunting events, and this is where in the previous draft I’d really let the haunting tension fall away, and this was a real missed opportunity to keep that string taut so the reader is wondering when it will be plucked again.

[00:09:06] I treated these haunting and in-between scenes as mini arcs. First, there’s building dread, the dread comes to a climax in the haunting, and then these mini arcs keep spilling over into the next one until the actual climax of the book. So this whole process has taken me, what? Like, four minutes to describe to you?

[00:09:24] Suffice it to say, it did not take me four minutes to carry it out, and this brings us to our next segment, where we paddle into the backwaters of my psyche and see what happens in my head when I’m faced with a messy pile of revisions.

[00:09:38] 

[00:09:40] So Water asks, “What do these craft insights reveal about me personally?”

[00:09:45] When I was preparing for this episode and I asked myself that question, something jumped out immediately. Like, in 1/10 of a second, the answer was fully formed. So you might say that my unconscious has some thoughts on the matter. When it comes to revisions, unless you’re dealing with typos or fairly simple line edits, the process is often a bit of a mess, but even still, there is a mess spectrum, if you will.

[00:10:11] Some messes might be contained within a single scene. Others, like my haunting subplot, reach their slimy little tentacles throughout your entire story, and it’s these types of revisions that can really get my inner parts twisted up in knots. And I’m using inner parts in internal family system sense, meaning parts of my psyche that behave a lot like independent characters in a story, with their own hopes and dreams and their own very strong opinions on how I should be living my life.

[00:10:39] So what happens in my inner system when faced with high-mess revisions is a feeling of overwhelm, which makes sense, but for a long time, I didn’t realize there was something hiding behind the overwhelm, something that was tripping me up in writing and in life It wasn’t just that the problem felt unwieldy or that I imagined it would take a lot of time and effort to fix.

[00:11:02] I mean, those were factors to be sure, but they were factors that felt figure-out-able. I could whip up one of my beloved checklists, develop a schedule, and just get to work. But it was the thing hiding behind the overwhelm that made all of my usual tools and strategies evaporate, and that was the more messy a problem was, the more it confronted me with the reality that this thing I’m creating will never, ever be perfect.

[00:11:29] When I’m just humming along, checking off my to-do list, I don’t often realize it, but this sort of everything according to plan level of awareness lulls one of my inner parts into thinking that it really is possible to s- do things perfectly. See? Everything’s unfolding to plan. It’s only when I’m staring down a hairy tangle of revisions that I’m reminded of how silly that is, that nothing can ever be perfect.

[00:11:53] Now, that realization in and of itself is not that life-shattering, but I have another inner part. Seriously, there’s like a whole city in my head with suburbs and new subdivisions under construction every week. But this other part, when faced with the knowledge that this thing can never be perfect, tries to convince me to just give up.

[00:12:13] Maybe it kicks up this urge to procrastinate, or it tries to send me down side trails where, instead of finishing my book, I’m picking out a new template for my website, even though the current one is just fine. In working with this part, a memory surfaced from childhood, or really a series of memories that are emblematic of a familiar dynamic for me growing up.

[00:12:35] So the stove in my grandparents’ house had a burner that stopped working when I was a kid, and for whatever reason, it was never fixed, and at some point later, a second burner went out. The oven door also wouldn’t stay shut, so there was this really thick wad of aluminum foil that we’d wedge into the door so it wouldn’t just, like, hinge open while you’re trying to bake cookies.

[00:12:58] And then a third burner went out, leaving only one working burner on the stove. This was a common occurrence growing up, a relatively simple problem, whether it was a stove burner or a conversation that needed to be had, was ignored until suddenly you have no way to cook your dinner. I have an inner part that thinks the safest thing I can do is survive on granola bars instead of fixing the stove, and you better believe that this part has no idea how to tackle messy revisions.

[00:13:28] So if I’m letting that part take charge, it makes more sense to just walk away from a project I’ve devoted a year of my life to, and not only that, but a project that fills me with toe-curling joy that I cannot wait to share with you. But this part would be just fine hitting delete on the whole damn thing.

[00:13:48] Just saying that out loud right now when I’m not merged with my fuck it, let’s quit part feels like a sword jab to the heart. Oh my God, I cannot imagine giving up on this book. This is why it’s very, very useful to start learning your own tells so you can spot, well before you do anything drastic like deleting your entire manuscript, when inner parts are getting activated and trying to wrestle away the steering wheel.

[00:14:14] When my fuck it, let’s quit part is waking up, I start feeling this… It’s like a buzzing in my chest. I might be looking over my revision notes, and the buzzing gets louder until it feels like I have ants crawling under my skin. If I stay merged with that part, my impulse is to sit there and try to figure everything out while I’m in that ants crawling phase, which works about as well as you’d expect, and I get more and more frustrated until, guess what?

[00:14:45] I wanna give up. On the other hand, if I notice the buzzing and I step away from my computer and give myself time to just calm and center myself, I can just come back to my revision notes and start developing a plan. Sometimes I need to sleep on it, and other times, I just need a 10-minute reset. When I’m not blended with my fuck it part, I start to see messy revisions as an intriguing challenge, a fun and, yes, sometimes annoying puzzle that I, I get to solve, and I know that in solving it, I’ll learn so much about writing and about myself.

[00:15:23] I don’t wanna treat my books like a busted up stove. I want to treat them like an exciting puzzle that is guaranteed to reveal amazing things if I just slow down, pour myself a nice cup of tea, and settle in to put it together one piece at a time.

[00:15:40] 

[00:15:42] So Earth asks, how did the fix go? And what do these insights ask of me in real life? Honestly, I think it worked. I mean, not in a, “I have now solved fiction forever” kind of way, but as I read through my manuscript, the story now feels way more like the book I set out to write. The haunting no longer feels like a handful of random spooky incidents someone accidentally dropped on the floor.

[00:16:07] I can see more of a progression from Ev journeying to Harrowfaul Hall, to her first encounter with the castle, and to a building sense of pressure as we approach the book’s c- climax. So here in our Practical Earth segment of the show, this is where ideas either become real or they don’t, and when it comes to revisions, if you set out with a foggy umbrella task like, “Make the haunting better,” this is frankly not a great task.

[00:16:34] What actually are you going to do the next time you sit down to write? This umbrella task is only a vague notion of many, many things that you could do, but to actually get them done, you have to choose your next concrete step. In my case, that looked like listing the haunting scenes, mapping the progression for the villain, layering that onto the haunting scenes, looking at the scenes in between the hauntings, and figuring out ways to keep the dread alive.

[00:17:02] That’s when the problem stopped being a big old mess and became an actual path. Still a long path, still a very annoying path in places, but a path, and that, I think, is what this asks of me in real life. Because my busted stove part wants to treat problems as if looking at them too directly will make them worse.

[00:17:21] Don’t touch it. Don’t name it. Just keep working around that broken thing until your whole life is an obstacle course of avoidance. But actually revising, actually living asks for the opposite. It asks me to look at that broken burner and say, “Okay, that one, that’s the thing we’re fixing today.” Not the whole kitchen, not my entire childhood, not the fate of my writing career, just this burner, this scene, this one place where the dread goes slack, and weirdly, that’s where the joy comes back.

[00:17:54] Because when I’m merged with my fuck it, let’s quit part, the mess feels like proof that I’ve failed, but when I slow down enough to make the problem concrete, the mess becomes evidence that the book is alive. It’s pushing back. It’s asking for things. It’s saying, “Not here. Not like this. Try again.” Don’t let the mess stay foggy.

[00:18:14] Foggy problems become monsters under the bed. Specific problems become tasks, and tasks can be handled one scene, one tiny repair at a time. That’s how the haunting subplot got stronger, and unfortunately for my fuck it, let’s quit part, that’s also how books get finished.

[00:18:34] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If you enjoyed hearing me break down my revision process in exquisite detail, be sure to head over to my mailing list, because every year, I send out a series of essays exploring all the writing craft shit I learned since my last book. And if you’ve made it this far, something tells me you’ll love those roundups.[00:18:54] So head over to twinflames.life/freebies. No matter which freebie you sign up for, that’ll get you on my list, and you won’t miss a single lessons learned essay. Next week, I’ll share how a little old trip to Tacoma, Washington, ended up fixing my book. See you then.