Remember last week when I told you my spirit guides gave me a podcast-making assignment that I promptly ignored?
Well.
My guides won. As usual. I actually made the podcast, and it was so ridonculously fun. Who would have thought?? Not me!!
The first episode of Will I Ever Finish This F#@king Book? is officially live. đ„ł đ đ
Weâre starting with another case of my guides bossing me around, aka the origin story of my Twin Flames romantasy series.
Being a Human Design Projector with limited energy reserves, this podcast is snappy and scrappy. Eight episodes, 20-ish minutes a piece. Over and out.
Is this podcast for you?
If either of the following apply, my answer is an enthusiastic hell yes:
Youâre a fellow writer who wants to hear me grapple with a new craft problem each week.
Youâre nosy, like I am, and want to peel back the curtain to reveal the hidden fears and many, many neuroses connected to each weekâs craft problem.
If youâve been with me for a while, you know Iâve always gotta dig through my psychic closets to figure out why Iâm struggling with whatever it is Iâm struggling with.
đ§ So a problem with revisions ends up being a problem with needing to look busy for my stickler Inner Boss, even if all that busyness gets diddly squat done.
đ§ Or a boring case of perfectionism ends up hiding an incredibly specific fear that, once I uncover it, makes SO MANY THINGS in my life make sense.
Multiply that by eight episodes, and youâve got the idea.
Episode 1 is called âWhat If the Weird Idea Is the Right One?â and I cannot get over how excited I am to share it with you.
Here…we…goooo!
Episode 1 Transcript
[00:00:00] What if that creative idea you’ve been dismissing as totally bonkers is actually the one that will change your life?
[00:00:08] 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.
[00:00:36] So here’s the situation. I’m currently revising my second novel, The Magician and the Labyrinth of Yesterdays, which is part of my Twin Flames romantasy series. Specifically, I’m in draft six out of seven, not counting copy edits, meaning I’ve officially entered the phase of the writing process where the finish line is so damn close, but every unresolved weakness on the page and in my psyche is now a flashing neon light.
[00:01:04] A pivotal scene that I swear was working in draft five is totally flaccid because, whoops, there’s no subtext. This then rouses my perfectionism beastie, who’s convinced we should ditch revisions entirely and tinker with the font size on the copyright page for three weeks instead. A subplot I thought was good to go turns out to be a moth-eaten rag full of plot holes, and this inspires my fear of being seen gremlin to try and convince me that actually, we never planned to let other people read this thing.
[00:01:35] The dream was to die surrounded by 17 slightly different versions of chapter one So the question of the season, which you probably already guessed from the name of this podcast, is whether I can drag this book out of my mind, off my hard drive, and put it into other people’s hands, maybe even yours, without losing the magic that made this story so special to me in the first place.
[00:01:59] But that question opens into something weirder, and that is the uncanny way my craft problems and the problems my characters are wrestling with on the page start mirroring things I need to face in my actual life. Maybe that’s just because those problems were already bubbling away in my psyche before I ever put them in the book.
[00:02:19] I think that’s true. But life is strange, the creative process is even stranger, and I think there’s something more going on. I think, and this is entirely anecdotal, that the unconscious sets up little creative laboratories for us, knowing that if we do our homework, that stuff will really come in handy outside the classroom The reason I think this has to do with a weird thing that happened to me in the fall of 2021.
[00:02:49] And to tell you this story, I have to admit something that might make some of you turn this podcast off. In fairness though, I did warn you. I mentioned right at the top that I’m a Jungian witch. So if you didn’t come into this expecting at least a sprinkling of strange, I don’t know what to tell you, friend.
[00:03:09] So it’s 2021, and one night before bed, I decide to meditate. Sometimes I do the type of meditation where you clear your mind, simply observing your thoughts as they float by like fluffy clouds. Those meditations are great, but to be honest, I do them pretty rarely. What I like to do instead is visit my inner sanctuary on the astral plane.
[00:03:32] Is this a real place? Is this a corner of my psyche? I don’t know, and honestly, I kinda don’t care. All I know is that when I go there, I figure out how to handle very real problems in my very real life Whenever I go to my inner sanctuary, which looks like an old farmhouse at night, it’s always night there, I go inside, I plop down on the couch, and I hang out with my spirit guides.
[00:03:57] So on this particular night in the fall of 2021, we were chilling in the astral living room when my guide said, “Hey, you should write a romance.” To give you an idea of how big of a dork I am, my astral self literally looked behind me like they’re clearly talking to someone else, which is absurd, I know.
[00:04:16] And then I laughed in my guides’ faces, because apparently that’s the kind of person I am. But seriously, that advice sounded totally bananas, because at that point, I’d never even read a romance, much less did I know the first thing about writing one. Someday, perhaps even in this podcast season, I’ll tell you the very first romance-adjacent book I ever read back in my teens.
[00:04:40] I still have it. I still read it every few years, and the spine falls open right to the scene in question, which is very, uh, handy.
[00:04:51] Aside from a few short stories, I hadn’t attempted fiction writing since I was a kid. This was when I was working on my magnum opus, which was titled Monkey and Me. Destined for the bestseller list, let me tell you. But I desperately wanted to be a novelist when I grew up, but somewhere along the way, that dream was hacked into little pieces and buried in the backyard because it just didn’t feel, quote-unquote, “serious enough.”
[00:05:16] So back to my astral hangout with my guides. What did I do? Well, I proceeded to ignore their advice for months. I am so glad I’m not my spirit guides because oh my God, it must be so frustrating. Their advice kept nagging at me, though, and every time I thought about writing a romance, there was like this one-two punch of excited flappy stomach butterflies and this chest-clenching gut drop of who the hell am I to write a romance?
[00:05:46] Fast forward to February 9th, 2022, in a hotel room in Oklahoma City. I tagged along while my partner was taking a week-long class, and I had the room to myself all day long. I remember it was raining, because I was super bummed that I couldn’t drive out to the Wichita Mountains to meet some prairie dogs.
[00:06:03] I did see them later that week, by the way, and oh my God, there were so many of them, and they would stand up and, like, throw their little prairie dog heads back and let out this little tiny squeak yell. Seriously, it was pretty much the cutest thing I have ever seen. But okay, back to my hotel room, where I was trapped by the rain.
[00:06:24] So leading up to this Oklahoma trip, I’d been having really bizarre dreams that felt strangely urgent. The point being, I could not stop thinking about writing a romance. So at 6:51 AM, according to my Google Docs timestamp, I created a blank document and I started to write. This is where, if we were making the movie, we’d fire up the montage of me frantically typing in my sweatpants as day turns to night turns to day, surrounded by half-drunk mugs of tea and takeout containers, so that neither of us would have to sit through the longest three years of my life, during which I wrote the longest book of my life, a book that, after over 60 drafts, became The Fool and the Threads of Time.
[00:07:11] That’s book zero of my Twin Flame series. Holy hell, I will never, and I mean never, write a book without an outline again. But that is a topic for another episode. The point is, whether my spirit guides are independent entities or parts of my psyche, or who knows, maybe both, the result is the same. An idea that seemed 100% bonkers to my conscious mind ended up changing my life.
[00:07:40] Do you wanna know what finally tipped me from heel-digging resistance to a very begrudging surrender? When my guide said, “Hey, you should write a romance,” and I laughed in their faces, their response, it was really simple. They said, “It will change your life.
[00:07:59] While playing around with ways to structure this episode, it occurred to me, why not use the organizing force of my entire romance series? And that is the Four Hallows. If you’ve ever picked up a tarot deck, you’ve already seen them hiding in plain sight. The Four Hallows correspond to the four suits: wands, swords, cups, and pentacles.
[00:08:21] The Hallows are also linked to the four classical elements: fire, air, water, and earth. In my romantasy books, the Hallows are the fundamental building blocks of creation. They’re gob-smackingly powerful magical artifacts, capable of unmaking and remaking reality according to the will of whoever possesses them.
[00:08:41] Which, hey, sounds a lot like writing a book now that I think of it. But this power is why my characters must find and protect the Four Hallows before the big baddie gets his hands on them and ruins the entire universe. In this podcast, I’ll be working on a slightly smaller scale, using the Hallows as a way to move through the creative problems I’m facing as I finish my second book.
[00:09:03] So let’s start with fire, which is embodied by the Hallow of the wand.
[00:09:09] Fire is the spark, that ineffable something that ignites a creative work. Without it, humans, being the energy-conserving creatures that we are, would never do something as time-intensive, as brain-crunching, and as generally thankless as writing a book. Fire is what spurs us to translate what’s in our hearts and our minds into something we can actually share with other people.
[00:09:33] During the creative process, fire also alerts us to the presence of problems we might otherwise miss. So think of a Matchbox car that, for magical reasons, can drive around on its own. So it’s zipping along this dollhouse-sized track at top speed, and you, feeling like a capricious deity today, reach down and pinch the car between your god fingers.
[00:09:55] The wheels are still whirring away, but the car can’t go anywhere, and all that pent-up energy generates heat. This is what I feel when something in my book is backing up the energy flow. It carries a particular heat signature. So in the context of these episodes, the element of fire illuminates the creative problem of the week, the part of the manuscript or the creative process that we’ll be sliding under the microscope This brings us to our next element, air, which is the hallow of the sword.
[00:10:29] Air is the realm of the mind. It takes that initial spark, that flicker of inspiration, and breathes it into a fully fledged fire, using the intellect to conjure a rich network of connections that becomes the project’s scaffolding. Without air, an idea might be super sparkly, but it’s stuck in the realm of pure potential, capable only of being admired from afar.
[00:10:51] The element of air helps us coax that ineffable spark, ineffable meaning something that’s incapable of being described or uttered into something decidedly effable. It captures it on a stack of index cards, spreads them over the entire dining room table, and becomes highly argumentative when someone suggests clearing a spot for breakfast.
[00:11:12] Air is structure, language, analysis, mind maps, outlines. So this segment of the show is where I bring in whatever tools I’m using to understand the problem at hand. Usually, tools of writing craft and patterns I’ve noticed in other stories that I’m reading.
[00:11:28] Next up is the element of water and the hallow of the cup.
[00:11:35] Water is the realm of emotions, dreams, the unconscious, all the unpredictable currents that infuse art with juiciness and depth. If we’re thinking in Jungian magic terms, air is ego, AKA the conscious mind, and water is the unconscious. We can’t function, much less make soul-stirring art, without these two functions working in concert.
[00:11:57] Air without water is a dry, intellectual exercise incapable of moving anyone. But water without air might sweep us away on a tide of emotion, only to leave us on the shore asking, “But what does it mean? What was the point?” For our purposes, water is the segment where the craft issue gets personal. It starts with a surface problem floating on the pond, like, “Why is this emotional transition between scenes so clunky?”
[00:12:25] But the closer I look, the more I see things flitting below the surface. Through my own reflection, I notice that, hmm, my characters often veer wildly from grief to humor, something that I might perhaps, I don’t know, maybe have a slight tendency to do in my own life. So if air asks, “How do I fix this on the page?” Water asks, “What is this revealing about me?”
[00:12:51] Finally, we have the element of earth, which is embodied by the hallow of the pentacle.
[00:12:58] Earth is a manifestation, the act of dragging something intangible into physical reality, maybe a finished draft or a beautiful book with sprayed edges. Earth is the culmination of the creative process, a necessary end before another spark of fire lands in our laps and we’re off chasing the next shiny thing.
[00:13:17] But earth is also where the creative vision has to survive contact with matter. In the imagination, my book is positively luminous. It contains the most perfect prose ever committed to language and every unfettered plot possibility in existence. In earth, it has a trim size. It has margins. It has printing costs and launch dates and typos that somehow evade 14 separate read-throughs.
[00:13:43] In our context, earth brings us back to the overarching aim of the show. Will I ever finish this fucking book? Based on our explorations in fire, air, and water, earth is a chance to check in. Did these insights get me closer to finishing? Where are we in the actual process of making this book real? But earth also asks a deeper question: What has to change in the real world because of what I’ve learned through this artistic grappling?
[00:14:12] In other words, what does this ask of me in real life?
[00:14:19] Fire, air, water, earth. The four elements, the four hallows, and the four gates we’ll pass through each and every episode as I try to finish this fucking book. Next time, we’ll actually step through them, and appropriately enough, we’re starting with one of the most annoying pitfalls in the entire creative process.
[00:14:42] How do you begin something when the beginning depends on the ending, and the ending depends on the beginning? In other words, the Ouroboros problem.
[00:14:54] Thanks for listening to Will I Ever Finish This Fucking Book? If today’s episode left you wondering which of the four hallows is your secret superpower, guess what? I totally made you a quiz. You can find it at twinflames.life/freebies. Take the quiz, hop on my mailing list, and I’ll send you occasional notes about magic and creativity and the swoony little world I’m building inside my books.[00:15:20] See you next week
Which of the Four Hallows is your creative superpower?
