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I start with my progress. Not a lot of new words (but many words replaced). Organizing scenes into chapters and discovering places where I can optimize. Draft 2 is now maybe 10% complete (instead of the 90% I had hoped for) so I moan a little about how everything in this process takes much longer than initially expected. Michael talks about how it took him five years to get his current work to the editing phase. I talk about blowing past my target word count (80K) and guess I'll wind up in the mid 90's.

Michael started a new story, is at 12,119 words. He did a 500 word story for a competition and found that the diversion threw him off his main story, and that he's finding getting back into it more of a challenge than he expected.

My goal is simple: keep at it.

We digress into editing, wrapping up my story, confusion in dialog. Before getting back to Michael's goals: 5-10K new words in his story.

The topic for this episode is dialog vs. exposition and we talk about the role of each in our different genres.

Next Episode: Mentors and Learning.

Books we mentioned: Plot Twist by Harlan Coben and Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott

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Recorded 2026-09-21

We start talking about a heart balloon that unhelpfully is out of frame. It's the first day of fall and we talk about birthdays briefly.

I start reporting with Michael telling me why he skims my newsletter. Then I do a dump of my very productive two weeks, including a bunch of non-writing stuff. Michael has sent his manuscript to an editor, is putting finishing touches on his website, aiming to have it finished by the end of October. He woke up early the day before, sat down, and wound up writing 5,000 words of a new story. This after about a week of downtime not being sure what to do next.

Michael gives me an overview of the opening of his story and I ask him what the spark was that got him started on it.

We talk about Michael's writing pace, which is a fast start and then slower as he gets to the ending. Since we're both consuming Harlan Coben's latest book, Plot Twist, I contrast that with Coben's pace which is to start fast and pick up the rate exponentially as he approaches the end.

Michael's Goals: finish his website, continue writing his new story, hoping to get feedback from his editor by the end of this month(ish). We digress into how there are lots of authors who talk about the writing process, but not about editing. My goals carry over from the last episode, get through the second draft of my novel.

On to where we get our inspiration from. My characters, at least in my current novel, are synthetic. I might lift a characteristic from someone I know, but none of my friends would think I modelled a character on them. Michael tends to take a set of attributes from people he knows, so there is a larger set of similarities between his characters and real people. I contradict myself, because I have another novel on the back burner that's a fictionalization of real life experiences, and there the problem is to alter the characteristics of real people so that they become distinct characters in the book.

This leads into a discussion of the challenges of letting people you know read your drafts, and how you tend to not get the kind of feedback you are looking for.

For our next episode, how we manage dialog vs. exposition.

Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note.

Recorded 2026-09-08

We start talking about beverages while recording, and the cliché of the alcohol-fuelled writers labouring over their manuscript.

Then we move to updates. I feel like screaming this: I have finally finished the never-ending edit round! Michael goes over the chronology of his work on his novel. He's taking another pass at his last few chapters and is close to finishing his edit. His website is also almost ready.

There's a little digression into reviewing the endings of our stories, and then about our beginnings and how they've changed as the work evolved.

Michael has three goals: finish the edit, send it to his editor, and read Harlan Coben's book Plot Twist. My goal is to get my missing scenes done.

On to our hook: scam messages that come in. Where they come from, how to spot them, and what to do about them. We talk about how their pitches try to suck you in with glowing praise, even for books that don't exist yet. I give my number one tip for detecting a scammer: if it's from a free-mail account (Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) then it's a scam. Period. We talk about how these organizations get your information.

I rant (gently) about being controlled by our devices and then set up for next episode's hook: Where do we get inspiration for our characters?