SPEAKER_01 0:00

I feel like it's the permission to sit there and think. And that's what we often don't give ourselves enough as writers. I know that I'm tempted to jump to the keyboard and start getting word counts, start logging something that looks like progress. But I've had my biggest breakthroughs when I've been away from the keyboard and thought about a project that I had set aside. So maybe we'll talk about that's become my pattern because now I trust it.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome to the Write It Scared podcast. I'm your host, Stacey Fraser, a formerly repressed creative soul, turned fiction writer, story editor, and author accelerator certified fiction book coach. At Write It Scared, we tell the truth about why writing a novel is so hard by acknowledging that most writers grapple with two stories: the one they want to put on the page to the best of their ability, and the often subconscious internal story that prevents them from doing it. This show is designed to help you identify and rewrite the internal narrative holding you back while you discover and write the story you want to tell and learn all the tools to help you do that successfully. Join me each week for a new episode where we'll talk about writing to deepen our understanding of the craft and of ourselves as writers. Writing a novel is an inside job that we do not do alone. Welcome to Red It Scared. I'm glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hi, writer. Welcome back to the Write It Scared podcast. Today I'm joined by author, developmental editor, and book coach Andromeda Romano Locks to talk about her newest psychological thriller, What Boys Learn, which came out in January of 2026. And we also discuss the messy reality of learning to trust your creative process as a writer. We talk about the ins and outs of writing psychological thrillers, the pressure of finding your ending, trusting your creative process, and why sometimes the breakthrough actually comes when you step away from the keyboard and just let the story breathe. Andromeda shares how setting projects aside used to feel like failure, but now she sees it as part of her process. We also get into the emotional side of writing, the self-doubt, the fears about having unlikable characters, negative reviews, and the struggle to stay present in the process rather than spiraling into all the criticism and the imagined outcomes. So there's so much wisdom in this conversation about creative trust and giving yourself permission to write imperfectly and understanding that writing multiple manuscripts, not obsessing over one perfect book, is often the way forward and how we truly grow. Let me give you Andromeda's bio and then we'll jump into the interview. Andromeda Romano Locks worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into 11 languages and was chosen as the New York Times editor's choice, book sense pick, and one of Library Journal's best books of the year. Her next novels, The Detour, Behave, and Plum Rains, have covered subjects from classical art to the early years of psychology to artificial intelligence, aging, and relationships in the near future. Among her nonfiction works are a dozen travel and natural history guidebooks to the public lands of Alaska, as well as a travel narrative searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez, a makeshift expedition along Baja's desert coast, which was an Abuban editor's choice. Andromeda lives on a small island in British Columbia, having moved to Canada after living for two decades in Anchorage, Alaska, where she co-founded a nonprofit organization, the 49 Alaska Writing Center. She's also lived abroad in Taiwan and Mexico. Hi, Andromeda. Thank you so much for coming on the Write It Scared podcast. It is great to have you here, and I'm excited to talk about your new book. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Thank you for having me, Stacy. I'm feeling really good. It's been about a week since my book has come out. Book launches have been really stressful for me in the past. And this one is feeling better. And we can talk that about talking with feelings, talking about the feelings.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Yeah, talking about all the feelings. Happy publication day. What was it? It was January what day?

SPEAKER_01 4:11

6th. January 6th. Last week. And it actually, I'm going to jump in and say it actually fits the themes of my book, which I know you're going to ask me about, but just to tie in that weird date when I saw it was going to be January 6th, my book, What Boys Learn, it has elements of what boys and men are struggling with, what kind of role models are out there, whether the worst kind of behavior is being tolerated. So when I found out that it was coming out on January 6th, I thought that was, I won't say ironic because it's not ironic, it's fitting.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yeah, I can see that. I can see what you mean. So we're definitely going to talk about the book. But first, before we do that, even though I gave you a bit of a bio, why don't you share with our listeners just a bit of your writing background? How did you get into writing and what was the journey like to getting here to the point where you're writing psychological thrillers?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Sure. So I didn't study writing as uh even in college, I didn't see myself becoming a writer, certainly not a novelist. So I'm an accidental novelist. I loved nonfiction. I loved journalism, immersion journalism. That's what I read. So I was very underread when it came to fiction. But I also still didn't study writing in college because I thought the way learned writing was to learn about interesting things that then you could write about. So I studied public policy, political science, economics, biology. My first master's degree was something called marine management about fisheries and oceanography and law. Because I thought the more areas you can cover, then you could be a freelance journalist, which is what I was for many years. I was also a travel writer. So my career pivoted in a big way after 9-11. So that's 2001, seems like forever ago. I was writing a book about climate change at the time, marine climate change specifically, and the world was not really ready for those stories yet. I had not found a way to make it into a compelling, fun-to-read book. It was just depressing. And it was depressing me. And then 9-11 happened, and that felt like a time when it just, I think for a lot of people who remember, it was just so shocking. It forced a reset. You know, if the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do? What would you wish you had done? And that's how it felt those first weeks. And I wanted to write about something beautiful, something that I loved. Instead of writing about something difficult that people didn't want to read, I wanted to write about what I wanted to read. And in this case, I loved classical music. I loved the cello. I had actually at times been trying to write a memoir about what it was like to become a cellist as an adult, would have been a memoir that very few people would have read. So then I pivoted to wanting to write a nonfiction book about my favorite cellist, Pablo Casals, started that process, went to Puerto Rico just months after getting the idea, spent a month there doing research. And then very quickly realized that a novel would be the better way to tell the story, that it would be more flexible, that I could composite characters, I could change timelines, I could put other themes in there, I could have a sprawling canvas for this novel. Subsequently, I did research in Spain and in France. And so the book ended up being my debut called The Spanish Bow about a cellist, a pianist, and a violinist. And we're going to talk about the difficulties of writing. I'm going to let you know that this book, and this will frustrate some readers, this book was not hard to write and it was not hard to sell. And I think that's because I was really writing it for myself. And I never could imagine any reader. I had no worries. I didn't, I was so underread and understudied as a novelist that I picked a very simple structure, which was a very episodic structure. Here's my cellist in as a child, and then here he is as a young man apprenticing. And then he goes to Madrid and is living with the queen and all these things. And I had broken down into chunks that made it easier to write. And that's something that people can think about in their writing. There are some scaffolds that can make the writing process easier, whether it's travel writing because you're going on a trip, or say we're going to be talking about mysteries and thrillers. Mystery, the scaffolding is pretty clear. You start out, there's a mystery, there's a dead body, and that gives you some scaffolding. Romance, which I don't write. There's a bit of a we won't say a formula, but there's a scaffolding for that. So the book was fairly easy to write. It was very easy to sell. That was the easy part of my career. Everything afterwards was harder.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

So what made you jump into writing the mystery thriller suspense?

SPEAKER_01 8:38

So that happened with my sixth book. So I'd already done historical fiction, and then I even did some speculative fiction, a bit of a sci-fi element and some other stuff that was more hybrid and weird, time travel in a book. And then around 2019, I just was starting to enjoy reading thrillers. Lisa Jewell was on reading, sitting on a beach on an island. And I went to visit this island near where I was living. And I was like, I want to live on an island and I want to write a book like this that someone would sit on a beach and love to read. And I ended up moving to that island and I ended up selling my first thriller. Wow. But it was not easy. It was not easy. Also during the early pandemic, another author that spoke to me was Angie Kim. And during those first weeks of the pandemic, I just couldn't concentrate. I couldn't read anything. And then again, a mystery was the first book I was able to read, the thing that quiet my brain down. And not because it wasn't intelligent. There were in Angie Kim's work, she's bringing in ethnicity and ethical issues. I think you can pack just about anything into a mystery, but the mystery was holding my attention. So I turned to this genre because it's what I was enjoying reading. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

And so the first book that you published was The Deepest Lake, right? So now what boys learn is your second in this vein. So what do you want readers to know about this book?

SPEAKER_01 10:06

This book. So Deepest Lake was about a mother searching to understand what happened to her daughter, who is believed to have died in Guam, to have disappeared into Lake Atilan. So I finished that book. That was a mother-daughter book. I'm a mother, I have two grown children. And that book was one of the pleasures in writing it, tapping right into my own feelings as a parent. And so then I asked myself the question: if the worst fear for a mother is that something bad will happen to her daughter, what is the worst fear for a mother of a son? And the answer that came to me is not son as victim, but son as perpetrator, which is unfortunate. But that that felt true to me. And I will sometimes say, my kids have never been arrested or interrogated or committed crimes. But nonetheless, I think we as parents can imagine that that feeling of, especially when you have a teenager, that you don't know everything they're doing, you can't get them to answer questions. In the case of what boys learn, my single mother Abby, who actually is a high school counselor, as the book opens, she finds something in her boy's bedroom that she that gives her concern. But then she puts it out of her mind. She has things that happened in her past which make her more suspicious or lean toward dark thoughts. And she recognizes that. So she puts it out of her mind. But soon after that, there are two deaths that happen in this two suspicious deaths of girls who are classmates of Benjamin, who is Abby's 16-year-old son. And so she is struggling to understand is Benjamin connected and how is he connected? That's really the first half of it. Things continue to change and twist after that. So it's people have compared this book to adolescence or defending Jacob. And I think those are good comparisons because it's taking place in this world of toxic masculinity, diffic, difficult conversations with boys. But the book continues, I hope, surprising the reader after that. It's so we learn much more about Benjamin than we expect at first.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Nice. We probably won't go any farther because we don't want to give away any spoilers. But yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Facing your worst fears about your child. Oh that's why it's, I think, aptly called. But what did one of the what did one of your reviews say? I can't remember what the but it's a mother's worst fear. It's what it boils down to.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Terrifying comes up a lot in the blur. Yeah. Something tender and terrifying, but also terrifyingly real, terrifying. Yes. And I think a lot of psychological thrillers are that way. The ones that have often gripped me are, what if you can't trust your husband? What if you can't trust yourself? What if you exactly memories? The closer it is to you, and the more it makes you question everything. So I'm definitely a psychological thriller reader and writer at heart, not a thriller, because what worries me is what's right inside our homes and inside our own minds.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Yeah, I think that that probably that's where I land with the idea of psychological thriller or is just this idea of trust. Can you trust the narrative either that you're telling yourself or that somebody else is telling you? And I think that's the question a reader holds too is who can I trust? And that builds the element of suspense. What the hell is really going on here? And that's why we're reading. So with this particular novel, what was the process of writing it like? And as it was your second one in this world, what did you learn that helped you? Because these are, as you said, these are not easy to write. In my own experience, I have to do it in layers because I can't get it. There's just no way I can see it all. I can't even see the whole story sometimes. So tell us your process.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

So, as someone who wrote liter more literary fiction, what they call literary fiction, historical fiction at first, I would have assumed that mysteries and thrillers are easier. And I found that not to be the case. And most of the people I talk about find it. But especially at the revision level, a lot more revision is my experience. So the timeline for this one was I started it in 2021. I wrote a draft of I got up to 65,000 words, and yet right around that point, I had to admit to myself that the story was boring me. And I didn't really want to continue it. I definitely had elements of the story I love. So in this iteration, completely different from the current what boys learn, there was a boy gotten into trouble while babysitting with a girlfriend. Something bad had happened to the child babysitting. And then when the really bad thing happens, the boy of that story takes off. He runs away with his girlfriend. And so that led a lot of the energy out of the novel. I didn't realize that at first because we had the mom at home and the kid, maybe he's done something bad. We don't know, but he's getting farther and farther away. And so every time I check back in with him in the story, I was bored. I just want to get to the thing that happened at the end, which I thought I knew, but it was boring. So I set it aside because I had another shiny new project. There's always some shiny new thing. And so I started working on that other thing. And then I came back to it. It was actually two years later, 2023. I was actually on a flight, a flight just to Utah for vacation. And on the airplane, I sat there and I suddenly understood everything I did wrong and what I needed to do to make it right, how I needed to start over, that I could still have a mother worrying about her son. Everything else was going to change. And I like thinking about flights and why they're so enjoyable to me. I think because you're stuck in one seat, all the better if you don't have Wi-Fi. And if you maybe just sitting with a notebook or a phone to make notes in, and there's somebody coming by to bring you occasional drinks. And I feel like it's the permission to sit there and think. And that's what we often don't give ourselves enough as writers. I know that I'm tempted to jump to the keyboard and start getting word count, start logging something that looks like progress. But I've had my biggest breakthroughs when I've been away from the keyboard and thought about a project that I had set aside. So maybe we'll talk about that's become my pattern because now I trust it. Set the book aside, work on something else, and come back whether it's a couple months later or two years later or five years later, when you have that moment of, oh, I get it now. I get what I did wrong. And that may happen because you have time to think. It may happen because you read another great book where you're like, oh, see, it reassures me this author has my sensibility, but they did something really clever. Maybe I can do something clever. And you're not going to copy it. There's no way to copy it. But it can give you that drive to go back, that new craft, realization of craft, like here's what I did wrong, or maybe an interview with an author where you say, oh, this is the important step to take first. And I didn't do that. And so now, early in my career, when I set something aside, I did see it as a failure. That's a failed book. I waste time. More and more now, I see that as my process. Work on something, work on several things at a time, set things aside, let them compost a little. And because now I'm being published more regularly than I was early in my career, that works on the production side too. You have edits that come back, or you're working on promotion, you can't do some writing, and all that is good for the book projects I love that.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

So much gained wisdom in what you just shared. A flights are like showers.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

I think Einstein called it was like the bed, the bus, and the bathroom.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Oh, I yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:37

I like that. Contemporary time we'd say it's more, yeah, driving and doing the dishes and something else.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

Yeah, absolutely. What it equates to is mental space, giving yourself mental space to dream, to wonder, to explore a little bit. And I think in where we are, if timestamp wise, culturally, that's harder and harder to do. So that's a great point. You mentioned that you thought you knew the end, and I would just love for you to expand on that as to what you meant with that older version.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

I think I thought I knew, but it wasn't deeper layered enough. It felt like it. Now, let's see, with the current version, I knew some of it, not all of it. You're probably gonna ask if I'm a if I'm a pantser or a plotter. No, pantzer, what what is it? What do we call it? Panzer or Panzer, plotter, plancer, discovery. I don't know. Most of your guests, I'm a mix of all these things. I think where I've changed is realizing that I can do it multiple ways. So actually, for the second version, the current iteration of what boys learn. So I had that failed, or it wasn't a failed, but that set aside first draft and then sitting, letting it sit for two years. And then when I came back to it early in the process, I did outline the second time. And it was because I'd set myself a new goal of I wanted to sell a book on outline. I thought that would be an interesting challenge. And so I stayed up late one night and I just guessed I did the outline. Now, of course, I didn't follow all of the outline, but that was an interesting experiment just to show myself I could do it. And then other things got added again in the revision process. I think it's a deeper process with mysteries sometimes. Twists got added, other characters got added, other crimes got added. But I think trying to outline is a fun process in just give it a try. I think and different books are gonna need different things.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

I couldn't agree more. And I think sometimes you gotta have a base to be able to create a structure. And however you make that base, then fine, but but every book's different. Every book's different. The suspense that I'm revising at the moment, it started from a place of an outline, and then I drafted it, and then the draft wasn't working, just like you said, like about that 60% mark. And so it was like I had to go, I had to go think about it for a while and then come back and then realize, oh, I need to alive a person and create a whole new backstory and a whole nother point of view in this story. But it took a long time for that to come to me, come to fruition, and come to the page. And then the next thing I'm working on is just I'm totally there's I didn't start from anything. It was just a spark. And I decided that's my treat. I'm gonna write that on the side while I'm doing this heavy revision work. And it I think every book is just different. Every book is just different.

SPEAKER_01 20:28

I have other things I'm writing now where I have almost not let myself try to figure out the second thing. I'm like, let me just leave that. Let me just get to that when I get to it. But you have that famous YL Doctoro quote about driving headlights, cars or headlights. That's fun too. Both ways are fun. So I think we just need to accept that probably we can do it more than one way. And then we have a bigger toolbox for the next ideas.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

Yeah, I do think it's helpful to know where you're going. For example, it's a mystery, you better solve it, or you're not gonna have a happy reader. It's a romance, lesson be in love at the end. But other than that, maybe we don't have to knuckle down so hard.

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Now let's complicate because hearing it come back to me, I was gonna say, here's one tip. You're gonna ask about different tips. I do believe that understanding the crime before you get to the end is actually important because I do think we often start with I another one of your guests talked about this. Samantha Sam's Paul, she's brilliant. Because I agreed with her that we often think about who the crime is happening to. So we've got that beginning of the story, the victims, and all the other people in the community. And sometimes we don't think about it enough from the villain's perspective or what the crime really was. We think what was the motivation? And that's the good character work. And even logistically, we can get hung up in all the things that people are wrong about because they're going to be wrong about a lot of things before they're right. I don't think you have to know that in the very beginning, but as you get, I don't know, toward the middle, at some point you should ask yourself, okay, now do I fully understand? What all my characters are going to understand by the end. Yeah. So that would be something just to save you from a few drafts.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. One of the things that I've definitely learned is to think about the villain's perspective, the antagonistic perspective in the story, and understand that it's built off of the momentum of that person driving for what they want in the story as much as it is the protagonist going through the story trying to achieve a goal. It's the pressure between those two forces that continues to drive the tension up.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

And also what the reader thinks is happening versus what's really happening. Sometimes we spend so much time trying to come up with the red hearings that we don't have the real thing, solid, but all those things together.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Yeah. Sam likes to call it the plot under the plot. And I love that. And that's where I struggle.

SPEAKER_01 22:47

That's where I that's where I struggle. The reminders help is that check in with yourself. Do I understand this? Let me think about this some more.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

I know. A lot of, yeah, a lot of thinking. Okay. So one of the big arms of this podcast is talking about why writing is hard, just on the technical aspect, but the emotional and the internal, the psychological aspect. For example, uh, I was drafting this morning. And I'm drafting, right? And my brain is going, This is boring. These characters suck. This is base. Oh my goodness. You're not interesting enough to come up with interesting people. And none of those things are predictions. They're not true and they're not predictions, but I still have it in my head. So a big part of the podcast is just talking about that, exposing it so that people realize uh I'm not the only person who thinks that. And I think if we normalize those kind of doubts, then we can create some compassion for ourselves, some empathy, and it will keep us in the game, right? Because that's the point. We want to be in this game because we like it. So, with that said, can you think about a time where the writing was hard, where you faced an internal struggle? And what helped you work through it?

SPEAKER_01 24:02

As far as the writing, I find myself worrying about the fact that people have sometimes told me my characters are unlikable, the unlikable character. And I think it's not so much on the craft level, it's not always about likability. Sometimes do we understand the character? Do we understand their motivations? Now that's craft, but the negative self-doubt in my brain is I just don't know how to write a truly likable character. So far, of all the characters I've written, the one that people like best was a robot. There was an AI in a book I wrote called Plum Reigns. People love that guy. It can do no wrong, which actually relates to issues we have today. Why are people falling in love with chatbots? It's a good listener, it's empathetic. The character's name Hero, Ch I R O. People love that character. But what about my people? What about my women, especially? People tell me I write difficult women and they want to disagree with them. So there's different ways to deal with that, which is saying, okay, that's not everybody. That's a small percentage of people who say that, but it can start contaminating when we have thoughts like this even about our characters. I think we can start thinking that about ourselves. Oh, maybe I don't know what a likable person is. Maybe I'm not a likable person.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

I don't know. I disagree. I've met you for all of five minutes, and I can tell you are a very likable person. Okay. I'm likable. Enthusiastic.

SPEAKER_01 25:22

I want to agree with them. What is the problem? What my my my character, especially my female characters, they definitely come with darker pasts. They come with more angst. They make mistakes. My gosh, don't we want characters to make mistakes? But so you can still hear me arguing with potential critics. So it's me thinking about who's gonna criticize the boy, which is something we shouldn't be doing, especially early in the process. Yeah. I've been very fortunate, including with what boys learn, 100% positive, I would say, trade reviews, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. And that tends to be the truth for my books. But when you have books come out, then you're gonna get good reads. You're gonna get those one and two stars or the meh three stars. I should not look at those reviews, Stacey. If we're gonna get at what am I learning at this stage in my career with my seventh book, I should not be reading the negative reviews. I let myself do that this morning because I was putting together a little social media post. I thought this will be funny. My book's been out a week. I'm gonna put a couple of five-star reviews. For fun, I should pull out a couple one-star reviews or two-star reviews. And I made the little slides and then I just stopped and I thought, what am I doing? I'm spending time thinking about negativity, even though the vast majority of people who have talked to me about this book have loved it. And so I think a new thing that I'm really focusing on this year, and I'm not inventing this, actually, it comes from Camille Pagan, who has a podcast called the Career Novelist Podcast, and she's a very successful author. And she talks about the negativity bias that we all have anyway, that we are looking for threats in the environment. And so we need to actively offset that by looking for the positivity. So not toxic positive, not false positivity, but the real positivity. Like, I don't know how you feel when somebody says something good about your writing. If you actually listen to it and hear it and absorb it, do you, Stacy? Do you really absorb it?

SPEAKER_00 27:18

Shaking my head. Yeah, I'm shaking my head. It is hard. It is a hard internal battle for me to absorb compliments in general.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

I just skim. And I think that's because we're in the early humans in an environment. We're not looking for where the berry is nice, but the lion is the thing we really need to focus on. Sure. That makes complete sense. And so what I've done more recently when I get an email like that, I ask my husband to read it aloud to me because then I'm gonna slow down, I'm gonna hear some of it. If I were even smarter, I'd print it out and have it in a nice file next to my desk. I'm not that smart, but at least I'm having someone read the positive things, whether it's from a reader, a reviewer, an editor. And then the other thing I need to do is stop looking for the negativity and dwelling. But I think that's just a lifelong struggle and realizing this is something about our brains. It's nothing about us, it's nothing about our writing, it's just the human brain, how it works.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

Yeah, and I love what you said. We we have a choice of where we get to put our energy. It's not always that easy, but having reminders around us to come back into awareness of like, okay, what choice am I making with this? And then the other thing that I was really drawn to that you said was where when we're worrying about the critic, we're and worrying about the judgment, our brain is way out in the lead, right? So we're thinking about end-all outcomes and and that's not where the process is. The process is right in front of us, and we don't get anywhere unless we stay right here in the process. So that's writing a is it.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

I'm sorry, I'm interrupting because I'm so excited. That really good feeling when you're writing is when you are so in the character's head, it's more like method acting. All you're asking yourself is what is she gonna do next? Right. And so that's so close to you. And I think in writing classes, when we were younger in high school, probably they talked about think about your audience, because that's like rhetorical speech and rhetorical writing. Think about your audience. But it's much better as a fiction writer to be in your character's head and just saying, What is she gonna say? What is she gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 29:31

Yeah, you're your first audience, right? So let it exist before you judge it. Too hard. And I and clearly that's a struggle. It was a struggle for me this morning. So it's just, I don't know. It's this is just not easy. Creative doesn't get easier. I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for how much energy uh creative endeavors require of us and how much of a mental load it takes, and how much of an emotional load it can take. And just being in community with fun people who are likable, like you. You are likable. I just want to remind you. I am likable. You are likable.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

I am likable.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

I used to do mirror work. I was so uncomfortable. Oh, yeah, so uncomfortable. No, you know that there's a scene in that movie where the guy's standing in front of the mirror telling himself he loves himself.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

I what is charter? That's Al that's Al Franken, right? And he's always I'm something and people like me. I'm not I can't remember what he says. I really should be able to remember that. And darn it, I darn it, people like me.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

I can't remember either, but I yeah. So that was a challenge my therapist gave to me. Anyway, it was fun. Moving on. So you have seven books, right? This is this is number seven. That's a hell of a lot of books. So, how do you make the time to write?

SPEAKER_01 30:45

So I track my hours, which is a new habit I started maybe four years ago, and I very much recommend it. I use it called toggle. My writing takes up 40 to 60 percent of my work hours. I'm really happy when it's more like 60%. I like to think that I spend more time writing. And then the other half of my life is I'm a book coach and development editor. I do some alumni work, I do a little bit of freelancing. And the truth is, I love that too. I used to think years ago, oh, if I were just independently wealthier, if my books made more than I could, I wouldn't have to do anything on the side. But then I found I was getting too isolated. And honestly, what makes my day so often is working as a book coach and observing someone else have a discovery, revise their book so that it's so much better. I see that. And I see the power of revision and the power of learning on the page. And then that actually really does increase my trust in my own process. So I absolutely love that. And even if I had endless bestsellers, I would still be a book coach.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I love that. I love that. And there's just this piece of the it's like selfish altaristic that makes sense. It's like I absolutely love it, and it lights me up as part of my work as a book coach, too.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

It's just exciting to have other people's books where you can't wait for them to get out in the world. I have favorites in my mind. There's just so many of them, and I cannot wait for that to happen.

SPEAKER_00 32:06

Yeah, yeah. I just love helping the facilitating the journey of somebody else becoming is just, I don't know, that's my catnip, man. Yeah, and I just have a deep-seated belief that stories change lives. They they absolutely have the power to shape and change lives.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

This is important because I'm often willing to accept that my book could be entertaining or could teach somebody about history, about Spain, about music, about the about psychopathy. Those kind of moderate comments that I'll make about my work. It's entertaining. But when I think of the books of people that I'm coaching, I feel like, oh, this book could change lives. It's easier to see that in someone else's books. That means ours, our books could change lives too, but we can't see it because we just think I made up this little universe. I made up this thing. How could it have an effect in the real world?

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Do you rely on an outside perspective to help you make it through a draft or a revision as far as tell me about that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 33:06

So yes, I do have a writer's group earlier a couple of years ago. I had two writers' groups. Right now I have one writer's group at meets online. My daughter is an early reader, very important early reader for me, my husband as well, although he's too positive. So I need a little bit more of that balance. Again, I think this is in some ways genre specific with mysteries and thrillers. I feel like the rules are you've gotta be, you've gotta be engaged with the character early on. You've got to care about the character a lot, or you're not gonna care about the perils that character is facing. Whereas in some of my literary fiction, there could be more opaque, difficult characters. That's where you get the unlikely, but that can work in literary fiction in a way it doesn't always work in mystery or thrillers. And so I have relied on writers' groups to save me, save me some time. Let me get the feedback earlier in the process, how this character is coming across. Not because I'm letting it be written by committee, but because sometimes I have those blind spots where I don't realize how a character is coming across, or that something is overly confusing, puzzling that seems clear to me. And so I'm actually bringing that feedback in earlier than I used to.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

Yeah. I need it for plot development often. I'll get stuck and I'll be like, hey, so I will reach out for some questions. Do you say what should happen next? Or what do you think? Yeah. So for example, Sam Spell, I'm in her community and she functions as a book coach for me. And so I will come to the community and be like, okay, this is what I've got. This is where I am, this is where I think I might be going, but I am stuck and I can't see the forest for the trees around this part. And so she might just be it's a matter of digging into what's motivating your antagonist right now. Where's your antagonist? And a lot of times it's brainstorming, it's coming up with things, and 90% of the time, any ideas that are thrown my way, I'm like, no, no, yeah, but it clears the clutter enough for me to go later have the moment where I'm flying over Utah going, oh shit, that's it. Yeah, so to speak. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:10

I think there's power of a really good question. And so I found that's when it's cracked open for me, not when somebody tells me something, but when somebody asks a question, like a really good editor saying, What is the special ability that your character has that she's gonna figure this out in a way that the other characters couldn't figure it out? And I think about her past and I think, oh, this is why she would be ahead of the others in figuring this out. And I also like what you said about knowing immediately the advice you don't want to take, because that is very helpful and getting pushback sometimes from readers or even editors where you're like, nope, that's what I meant to do. That's great. You just so you need a little bit, you need to come up against something to start feeling the shape of your story and the shape of your own opinions and what a resistance I think could be helpful.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Okay, so we're gonna wrap up here with a few final questions. So when you think back about your writing process and just what you've learned about yourself as a writer, what sticks out to you? What's your big takeaway from all of this? That's over seven years. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 36:14

Or seven books and many years. Many years. My takeaway lately, and this is for myself and clients and peers and friends, is how much we limit ourselves with these sort of myths that are out there, and we really don't need to. So whether the myth is it's too late for you, it's too late to start, when in fact, this is the thing of looking for evidence for the thing, the positive thing, not the negative thing. So let's say you're an or you're a writer and you don't have your first book out yet. It's like you should become the expert in the writers your age and older who have succeeded. You should be the one at the party who can say, well, actually, I love these three writers, make them recent, not 100 years ago. And these three writers have books that people love. And so in my case, I don't have the I got started not super early, but not too late either. But my self-limiting thought is often the industry doesn't want you to be a multi-lane author because I love writing in different areas: mystery and thriller, historical fiction, weird stuff with some magical realism. I want to continue to do those various different things. And I know it is easier to sell books if your reader knows exactly what you're delivering. That's true. But it is not true that there are not really successful multi-lane authors. So I'm thinking recently of a Percival Everett who wrote James and wrote many books that are different from James. Margaret Atwood is huge, so she goes back for decades. Ian McEwen, I have lots of other favorites, but I'm all I'm always looking for new favorite writers who are surprising their readership and who are allowed to grow and allowed to flourish in different lanes. So that's my takeaway that we have to look at what is the thing holding us back, and then really question it logically and then actively seek the evidence you need to say, no, I can do this thing. And I'm gonna be the expert in why it is I know I can do this thing.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

I love that. And it might roll right into the next question, which I ask every guest, is just what wish would you like to impart to your fellow writers? And that might be it, that you need to examine your limitations and find a way to think about them differently.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

Yes, I will also wish them that they could simply write more because I think getting to the end of novel manuscripts is how we teach ourselves how to write. So I have an MFA, I've taught in an MFA program, but you don't need that. You can do that if you want to do that. What you need to do is write full manuscripts and get to the end, the end and then come back and revise. And if you all the better if you can just write multiple manuscripts, don't think this is if you get caught in the this one novel is going to define me and define my career. That yeah, those kind of stakes are not helpful stakes.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Not enough.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

If you think the more I write, the more ideas I'm gonna have. Because that's what I've when I was in my early 20s and wanted to be a writer, I sat there with all the time and looking out at a beautiful view and I had no ideas. And now I'm in my I'm 54 and I've actually started, it almost feels like a problem the last couple of years. I have so many ideas now that it's actually getting harder to choose between them. And I'm actually publishing books closer together. But the thing to trust is that those ideas will keep happening. The more you write, the easier it will get, the more ideas you'll have. And don't slow down and don't put it all your hopes on just one project.

SPEAKER_00 39:25

Yeah. Writing begets writing. And the quote from Liz Gilbert that I was thinking of was argue for your limitations and you get to keep them. That was in her big magic book that I absolutely loved.

SPEAKER_01 39:36

That is good and painful. Whereas we tell ourselves the stories we're telling others. Is that the story you want to be true? I just did an exercise. I mentioned, sorry, I'm gonna mention Camille Pagan twice, but she had this fun exercise of write your author's bio three or five years in the future. Like a fantasy bio. And I just it was such a treat. I had days go by and I wasn't letting myself have the treat. And then I finally had the treat of writing this ridiculously wonderful bio five years from now. All the books I was gonna write, some were gonna get awards, some were gonna be bestsellers, some are gonna be option for Netflix. It's a pretty silly long bio, but it was so fun.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

I love that. Will you say her name and her podcast name again so I can include it in the show notes?

SPEAKER_01 40:21

Sure. Camille Pagan's last name is P-A-G-A-N, and it's the Career Novelist Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Okay. I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes for listeners, and I'm definitely gonna go listen to it. So thank you for bringing it up. It would you like to share anything that you're currently working on? And then please let listeners know where they can find you, your services as a developmental editor and a book coach, as well as your novel.

SPEAKER_01 40:43

Yes, my website is romano lax.com, and I do have a page there about book coaching and developmental editing. My next novel is actually an alternate history about Sylvia Plath, the poet, had she not killed herself. So had she gone on to live in this book opens, and she's in her 60s, and her life has been very different. And so that's what I meant about I'm gonna keep writing the mysteries and thrillers, but I also like historical fiction with a twist. And this one that twit is the twist of what would her life have been like, and I think that's a fun thing to think about. Just had I'm in love with this book, and I had so much fun writing. Amazing and as far as where to find me, I have a substack which is Romano Lax, R-O-M-A-N-O-L-A-X. Substack.com. And that's my author's substack. Um, I live on a small island off the west coast of Canada, and so it's called From My Island to Yours. And then I also have a collaborative substack called Present Tense. And it's it's about suspense fiction, and we invite in guest posts. We have a lot of collaboration on that, and we do invite guest posts to that substack.

SPEAKER_00 41:49

Right on, I will include links to all of that in the show notes. And John, but I thank you so much for your time, for just your refreshing and open conversation. It has been a delight. And you are absolutely just one more time, gonna remind you, totally likable. And darn it, people like me. That was awesome. I'm so keeping that in here. Thank you for listening to the Ride It Scared podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please make sure to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. And please leave a review. Reviews help other writers like you find the voices and messages they need to hear to continue to write their stories. Let's lift each other up. Remember, you can be scared and still be unstoppable. I'll see you next week.