Hey, So there's a brilliant moment in the spoof UK chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge where the self-obsessed host says to one of his guests, "Well, that's enough about me; let's talk about you. What did you think of my book?" What I'm trying to say it, this email is all about you. Go you! (But it's really about me wanting to get stuff from you.) Before we get to that, I started a historical novel on Monday and despite being nowhere near finished with research and needing to do several hours of that every day, I'm still hitting 1,500-2,000 words a day on it, while catching up on various bits of admin. I'll take that pace for now. I realise from talking with lots of my author friends that this pandemic has driven some people to crazy (and possibly unhealthy) work levels but others to be completely blocked. I've certainly veered from one extreme to the other over the last six months. For those struggling right now, check out this podcast where Joanna Penn interviews Mark McGuinness – who is a poet and non-fiction author, but also a practicing psychotherapist and creative coach – on How To Stay Creative In Difficult Times. For me personally, the formula is quite straight-forward: - Get up before anyone else.
- Don't check email.
- Don't open Facebook or Twitter.
- For the love of all things holy, don't read the news.
- Write before doing anything else.
All those things clamoring for your attention, all those things your brain is telling you are urgent or will "only take a second" are traps that can suck out all the emotional energy you need to write. I won't presume to know your personal circumstances, but if you can get your words down before other things encroach on your time and headspace, then it doesn't really matter what happens for the rest of the day as you have your words banked and have already achieved the very most important thing for your author business. Writing is rarely urgent in the strictest terms, but always the most important thing, and this contradiction means it can fall between the cracks of everything else unless you force yourself to label it as urgent. I have a To Do list on a document stand beside my computer with 10-20 things on it at any given point, and for the last five months I have had writing as the very first thing on it. Every day. Anyway, while I was working on an email for my historical readers, I realized I've been running this newsletter for almost three years and I realized I have never once surveyed you guys – not properly. Now feels like the perfect time. I'm no surveyologist, so apologies for any shortcomings in the design. Answer as best you can, and that will help guide the future content of this newsletter – and also my other "channels" like YouTube and my blog/website, Facebook, and so on. The newsletter is the "VIP Area" in my mind, and gets first dibs on everything, but those other channels are very important for me too for different reasons. Before we get to that survey, let me just blast through a whole a bunch of newsy bits that have been piling up and resulting in questions from you:
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