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

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.

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?

In this episode we dive right into progress (relatively speaking, less than a minute of chat). I edited 32 pages, two over my minimum goal, and just ten pages short of finishing this pass (my real goal). We had a discussion about the "start on second draft stretch goal" Michael added to my list in the last episode. I didn't get where I wanted because it took an entire week to revise one single scene, so if I break down my progress it was just one page in the first week, and thirty-one in the second. The upside is that resolving the problems with that scene have pointed me in the right direction for solving some other issues.

Michael joined a peer-reviewed writing battle without fully realizing that he was one of the peers. We digress into a discussion about the challenges in doing critiques, and people who are skilled in one form of writing and less good in others. Then we return to Michael's progress report. Although he didn't hit his five chapter goal, he did take another pass at seven others.

On to goals: Michael wants to finish his edit by the end of the month (six chapters). For me, finish the edit and start filling in missing scenes. We chat a bit about book series versus book serials, and how you carry characters across books.

Then we get onto this episode's topic: Staying on Track. Do we get bored with writing or need a break, and how do we deal with that. Some of this is the difference between writing as a dream and writing as a job, and how it takes real effort to get through the aspects of the work that we're less fond of or less skilled at.

Next episode: reviews, critiques, and scammers.

We start with a very brief mention of an AI tool that purports to write for you. Surprisingly it's not called "Slopomatic."

Enough of that, we go to progress reporting. I report being on page 242, 28 pages edited since our last episode and two short of my goal of 30. In "stuff other than writing", I've done work on an end-to-end publishing workflow, and set up a project manager to track it. I report that editing has been easier, and has been giving me more confidence that a lot of it is honing in on getting the right words in the right order.

We have a side conversation about writing tools and subscription services, lifetime memberships, and market forces.

Michael reports signing up for a writing challenge that was a bad fit: two three hundred word stories, a word limit he finds impossible. He hit three chapters edited, short of his five chapter goal, but reworked another four, so we'll call that seven edited.

Future goals: Michael wants to finish edits, and to dictate a short story for audiobook release. I'm shooting for another 30 pages, maybe more as I'm 50 pages or so from the end.

We talk about both of us getting over a wall of low productivity. I talk about how productivity and happiness are strongly correlated for me. I talk about cycles of productivity and then the ADD challenge of managing which projects I work on during those productive periods. We talk about to-do lists. We talk about the folly of measuring ourselves against others. We talk about how these conversations have helped us both keep on task.

Next episode: Combating Tedium

We start by trying to not talk about the weather, without success. We do manage to limit it to a mere minute and 38 seconds. If you think climate change is a myth you probably want to skip that bit.

On to progress. I report a pathetic 16 pages of editing and 880 words into a new short story. Michael read the short story I've been bugging him to read for the last three episodes. He's making progress on his editing, tightening the story up. He's starting to gain some momentum in the process and is enjoying that. He's ten chapters away from the finish line. We discuss handing the work to an editor and our trepidation over the feedback we will get. We talk about reading our reviews.

The discussion of what a good review is takes us into a side trip into story structure and plot.

Back on track, we set our goals for the next two weeks. I go for another thirty pages edited. Michael's goal is to finish the edits on his book and to launch his website.

We get onto our topic: timelines. I talk about jumping around in my novel, because the story starts with a crisis, but then I need to step back to explain how that crisis got set up. Michael talks about placing a story into a known time period and getting the context right, something I need to do with another story that's set in the late 1990's. We talk about how different authors have approached timelines, and time travel stories that change the course of future events.

Next week's topic: breakthroughs and the excitement of a breakthrough and the wall that comes before it.

As usual we start off topic for a few minutes before getting into progress reporting. I've gone through 68 pages of my most recent edit, well over my goal of 50, the first time I've truly killed a goal in the past few months. As a follow-up to our last episode, I came very close to killing one of my darlings. Fortunately I found a fix that let me keep it. Michael edited four chapters in full, and is in a second cycle through the fifth. We decided he's 4.5 chapters toward his 5 chapter goal. After Michael reports, I remember to mention that I wrote a little piece of flash fiction.

This takes us into a side discussion of the sort of feedback Michael gets in his feedback and how sometimes it doesn't make sense to him.

I mention that I'm thinking of writing stories based on new technological developments that I see in newsletters and we discuss where we get ideas from.

We get back on track and set some goals. I go for another 30 pages of edit, Michael is aiming to get his word count down to 90K and plans to edit five chapters over the next two weeks. We talk about how editing can be such a slow process.

This episode's topic: finding our style. Michael starts by trying to identify what he means by style: style as in method of writing, style of prose, and genre as a style. Michael writes mysteries because those are the kinds of story he enjoys. He talks about having difficulty writing for a competition that wants something in a different style (genre). I talk about why I primarily write science fiction. We talk about some of our methods, how we keep track of our story ideas.

Next episode: dealing with timelines.

First up is progress reporting. We laugh about both being in a miserable space at the same time. I start, having gone through 50 pages of my latest edit, 30 pages more than the (low) goal we set last episode. I complain about how slow it's going, and I've made some progress on the developmental part of the edit.

Michael also had other things interfering with his writing time. Still he made some progress on editing. The coming week is the same with a major wine report due to come out.

We have a discussion about the different challenges we face when editing and how we keep track of the changes we make while editing.

On to goals. Michael plans to edit five chapters. I'm aiming for another 50 pages of edits done.

On to this episode's topic: Killing our Darlings. We talk about what constitutes a "darling" and whether or not darlings happen more often for a seat-of-the-pants writer vs. one who is a plotter. Then we move into how we'll feel when our editors advise us to kill a darling.

Michael seems baffled by the idea that people read a few chapters of a book in a bookstore before making a purchase.

We digress into a side discussion of implausible plots.

Next episode: finding our style.

I jump into progress reporting because I have very little progress to report. My frustration is palpable. Michael shares that he's felt the same way several times with his current work.

Michael has edited nine chapters. He's cut 470 words from his novel.

We talk about working on other projects in order to keep the flow going, reading other people's works for inspiration, how we hone our prose, and how a contest judge can either get or miss what we're doing.

This takes us into a discussion of themes on our work, themes in literature, and the varied ways a reader can react to our stories.

We cycle back to progress when editing and how a negative word count is good, and the pains in cutting prose we like to make the overall work better.

We move on to this week's topic: Character Development. I talk about how a character develops as the work progresses. We talk about writing character biographies to establish who they are and how specific we are when defining our characters, in terms of physical descriptions. Michael talks about creating characters that mirror his own.

Next episode: Killing our Darlings

This episode we managed to limit our usual weather update to 36 seconds.

I update progress, which is "not much," and talk about attending WisCon and the impact it had on my work. In terms of actual progress, I'm still putting in my last round of minor edits in and dealing with moving from theory to practice for my developmental edit. Michael has written over 1800 words in two short stories and has gotten one chapter edited.

Goals: Michael: 5 chapters edited and "write a little". Me: Get into the dev edit. Do some critiques. We discuss the wisdom of doing critique work and about the similarity in writing courses.

Self-doubt: I talk about recovering from doubt by returning to the desire to finish a story I like, how my relationship to fun is finishing something and putting it out for the world to see. Michael has fun with the creative process of writing, but finds the editing and submission aspects to be work, and not fun.

We talk about formulaic writing, writing to hit the beats in your chosen genre. which Michael finds challenging. We compare writing to software and other types of work.

Next week: character development.

A shorter than usual episode this time, but unfortunately this is due to Michael not having much to report (for real this time). I've done most of the prep for a developmental edit and am applying changes from my last read-through.

Michael asks a question about using AI to generate covers for some stories he plans to give away for free and that takes us on an AI tangent. I advance the position that it's an individual decision, both as author and reader, but that the key is full disclosure of any tools used so that readers can make an informed decision.

When we get back on track I help Michael set a specific, achievable goal in hopes of helping him get out of "ADD lockup" mode.

Then we discuss this week's hook: where we get our ideas from, set up the question for next week, dealing with self-doubt. And that's a wrap!

This episode we discuss groups and websites that helped or hindered our progress as writers.

Bonus feature, now with less fan noise!

In this episode we cut back on the catch-up potion of our chat and move right into progress reporting. Michael starts with his "nothing" report which turns out to be a fair bit. I report record progress, including a first draft that I'm calling substantially complete (Michael calls it a holey draft) and the beginning of a developmental edit, wherein I will be filling in the holes.

Along the way we digress into writing, focus, distractions and deadlines.

Michael's goal: get back to editing. Continue with the train story. Do some prompts.

Mine: continue with a developmental edit, and a recap of how I got to an actual ending I like.

We slide into talking about groups and sites we've encountered: good, bad, and ugly. Everything we mention is listed below. We also talk a bit about where we find helpful information and feedback. We talk about how our podcast helps as well.

Michael forces me to tell a joke. Then he tells his. We discuss how the essence of a joke is the delivery.

We open as usual with weather, this time in Italy, then a discussion of all the travel he'll be doing visiting wineries in Italy (he's a wine writer, so that's actually work for him.) By next episode he'll be back in Canada (we hope) so we discuss whether or not he'll be able to catch a flight or be returning by cargo ship.

Progress reporting: I have a negative word count, but I have figured out how to write the ending of my novel. Hurrah! I describe how I got there after an embarrassing long period of time. We segue into writing with or without paper.

On Michael's end, his short story placed first in the first round of a NYC Midnight writing contest, so buoyed by that, in addition to writing a story for the second round, he entered another contest, requiring another 2,500 word story. This means editing his novel is on hold but before he shelved it, he cut 425 words. He is also in the write-a-thon run by Pocket MFA. We agree that he's insane. Including the counts for his short stories, he's at 42% of the way to his 50K goal for April. I noted that he's 2/3 through the month and 42% is less than 66%. He also joined another contest in May. His summary: "beware the rush that comes from placing first!" He hopes to return to editing next month.

On other writerly stuff I mention "On Being, (and becoming again) a Writer" by Ron Collins and recommend it (see my review on Storygraph), and the virtual Can*Con conference that was held last week. Michael talks about adding the fifth book ever to his DNF list. We talk about books we don't like even though they're by writers we love.

Goals: Michael corners me into writing three days a week over the next two weeks. I express how I can't fathom participating in these writing contests he's so keen on. He says it helps push him into the writing habit. His goals: the 500 word contest in May and trying to hit the 50K in April. He figures it's going to be a struggle.

This episode's hook: we talk about non-writing programs (and tools) that we use in our process. Next episode it will be writing-related groups that have helped or hindered our progress as authors.

I think when we started these conversations, we figured they would run about 30 minutes. We were wrong. 45 minutes seems like a more typical length, and this time we went way over, just about four minutes short of an hour. I don't think either of us are quite sure how this happens, although my digressions into Substack, marketing, and open source as a defence against enshittification certainly contributed.

As is typical, we open with weather, specifically a comparison of spring in Italy vs. Canada. We talk about the differences in Easter holidays between the two countries. Before we get to our actual topic, Michael asserts that haircuts in Italy are different (as in better) in Italy. I remain skeptical.

Progress reporting: Alan really struggled to make progress, Michael has too much going on, editing his previous story and setting a target of 50K for his April write-a-thon. He's Editing is coming along, tightening the story up. He's also having trouble writing at his desk but has found a place that works.

Goals: Michael keep writing new story. Keep editing, get edits done by end of April. Has a lot on his plate. figures edits will get pushed into May. He dislikes editing and we talk about that for a while.

My goals: finish the damn novel. We talk about giving up on a story, and how some stories seem to want to be told.

I discuss my decision to stop posting on Substack, which leads into a discussion of marketing.

Then this episode's topic: Programs we use for writing: novelWriter vs Scrivener. Michael's uses Dabble and we talk about limitations. We discuss open source vs. proprietary software.

This episode starts with us laughing about saying "on the air" with our tiny number of viewers (hi there, viewers, we appreciate you). We also had a little hiccup getting started because Michael was misled about when we start thanks to an AI assistant. He claims that he's talking more with his hands thanks to being in Italy and has found a book that describes what each of the gestures means.

My progress report: my read-through/edit is complete, I talk about being blocked by my neurodivergence and distracting myself with other things. This leads into a long discussion of coping with ADD, ADHD, and Autism, and that takes us into how we manage our to-do lists.

Michael reports on his editing process, he's submitted a story to a contest, and then he discovers that the "writerpalooza" we talked about last episode is really a "write-a-thon," which now sounds more like a NaNoWriMo sort of thing. He has the beginning of a story ready for the event. This sort of writing to a target takes into talking about group writing sprints. I find them unrewarding, Michael complains that they all happen in the evening, but he's a morning writer. He talks about how he's most creative in the morning, when he has more free flowing ideas. It's interesting that we both like writing when it's dark. Me late at night, him early in the morning.

I cycle the conversation back to neurodivergence as I ask Michael if he ever gets into a hyper-focus mode. He talks about how long he can focus on writing and how he leaves a note at the end of a session so he can pick up the thread in the next session. I relate I can hyper-focus on software development and wish I could do the same with writing. This leads into the work I put into my manuscript analysis tool to measure "clumpiness."

Moving on to our goals for the next two weeks, I give a long answer that amounts to "write the frigging ending," while Michael talks about editing his book, how many passes he's made through it, and his progress in getting the word count down. We discuss word count expectations in his genre. He has two goals: finish edits by end of April, getting it ready to re-pitch or self-publish, then to get a first draft of another story during April.

Then we talk about last week's hook: the things we can't we live without while writing.

Much like the previous episode, this episode arrives a tad late, as Michael had a scheduling issue on Monday, our usual recording day, and I took a little longer to get the edit done as well.

In this episode we run a little long again, largely because I accidentally restart the opening banter part of our conversation just after we thought we wrapped it up. Skip five minutes in for a banter bypass.

Much of Michael's progress update becomes a discussion of his use of the story analysis produced by Pro Writing Aid. I have completed my first round of edits and am mid-way though a read-through. This becomes a discussion on ending stories, with some focus on my work-in-progress. Then we set our goals for the next two weeks, Michael mentions that he's signed up for "Writerpalooza" despite having no idea what that entails. We wonder if it's yet another attempt to fill the gap left by the collapse of NaNoWriMo.

Then we get to this week's question: pens and other writing implements before coming up with next week's question and wrapping it up.

This episode arrives a tad late, as Michael had a scheduling issue on Monday, our usual recording day, and I took a little longer to get the edit done as well. We've also reversed our trend of ever-longer conversations, with this one clocking in at a svelte 30 minutes.

Other work has been a factor for both of us since our last update. Michael is currently in Northern Italy, tasting and writing about wine (which is a lot less glamorous than it sounds), so he gets to tease me about the differences in our weather. Regular work for me was complicated by the Great Spice Reorganization of 2026.

Then we get to progress. I continue to make progress on editing at the same frustratingly slow pace as the last update. Michael complicates his writing life by starting another story. Uncharacteristically, we pretty much stay on track with this, moving to setting goals for the next two weeks.

We move on to last week's hook: what we do when writing while travelling. Michael relates an interesting superstition. My mini-rant of the week is on pens, and this gives us the question for next week: What do we like to write with and why.

This podcast started as a simple way to be more accountable to our writing goals, but while our goals play a central role, our chats have expanded to a dive into our writing processes. In this episode, much of the discussion centres around editing. Also Michael has some major news to relate.

We always seem to open up talking about something that has little to do with writing, and this episode is no different. This time it's the big snowstorm that went through a wide swath of the continent over the weekend. Then we momentarily get on track as I report on how I'm doing with my round of editing. This leads us to what happens to the stuff we cut out of a story, and that leads to a discussion of note-taking applications, and some recent changes to GMail that are causing trouble for many.

Then we get back to updating each other on our progress (spoiler, I actually hit my target) before delving into AI and the creative arts.

Personally, I'm really tired of hearing about AI and I don't think we have a new take on it, but that doesn't mean we (okay, mostly I) don't have a lot to say on the topic. Hopefully it comes off as a fairly well reasoned, balance view of the subject, but that's for you to judge. Let me know how I did!

Michael and I have known each other for something like 18 years. During that period we've met over coffee a few times, but aside from that, all of our interactions—and the formation of our friendship—have been online. For reasons known only to him and his partner, they decided to take their winter break up here in Campbellford. As a result, last week we actually got together for a meal. That's the topic as we open this episode.

The progress part of our conversation takes on a relatively minor role as we focus more on process. I surprise Michael by producing a printed copy of my unfinished manuscript, something he would never consider doing! Last week's question was about when you kill a character off, and our answers also reflect on the huge differences between our approaches to writing.

The question for our next episode is on the use of AI in writing, and in creative pursuits in general. (Reluctantly, in my case. I'm just waiting for the hype bubble to burst so we can talk about something else instead.)

We talk about yesterday's ice storm, missing our progress targets (so much for complete first drafts by year end 🙁), and what makes a book series good, bad, or ugly.

Next week we'll explore how to decide when to kill a character.

This conversation starts with Canadian stuff. A little reminiscing about SCTV and a discussion of snow clearing, eh?

I deliver most of my progress report but we digress into books for a minute before I come back and wrap up with stats on a decent two weeks work.

A spam call throws us back into Canuck mode as we bitch about phone providers.

Then ⁨ Michael reports his barnstorming results from the last two weeks.

We get into naming characters and I explain that I added a character synopsis feature to NovelWriterExtract, and that leads into my process vs. his, and which genres need more work than others.

Then we get to the question from the last episode: can you fall so in love with a scene/chapter that you won't cut it, even when it needs to be cut?

This leads into editing after the first draft, where it might come as a surprise that we're both going to take the same approach.

Then we set our new writing goals for our next episode, and I rant about Amazon's new gen-AI driven "Ask this Book" feature. As we wrap up, we decide that next time we'll be talking about writing books in series or not.

At three minutes, Michael reports on his progress over the past two weeks. His word count: 5,455. then we digress into how many characters we have and how we track them.

At 5:20 we get to my update, a resounding (for me) 1,888 words, a new record! [yet still well below where I need to be.]

At six minutes that segues into the glitch I had to deal with, discovering I'd used a single character for two distinct, incompatible purposes. By 6:50, this has morphed into a discussion of killing off characters, and by 8:40 we're off to how people get killed off, particularly in movies and TV.

Around 11 minutes, I'm on about how I spent three days updating my NovelWriterExtract tool to pull characters and locations into my generated spreadsheets so I could keep track and not have one person doing two things at the same time. This leads into the genesis of adding scene metadata to novelWriter: story structure methods like The Story Grid (and many others). We compare my software/spreadsheet approach with his half-pad of paper with regular re-writes.

At 16:10 we momentarily get back on track and do some more reporting on our writing progress. Imagine that! Then we're off on the difficulty of naming our characters.

By 22:00 we're working on setting goals for our next two weeks, and how Michael's attempt to get 80K words done in a shadow-of-the-former-NaNoWriMo November, and how he got to the point where he needed 7,500+ words per day to hit that target. The upshot of that is we now both have a goal of hitting a complete first draft, in the range of 80K words each, by the end of the year. There's nothing like being in sync! This means I also have to seriously pick up my pace, right as we come into the holiday social season. This makes my goal—well, let's call it ambitious.

At 29 minutes we talk about how we each select (or build) the tools we use to support our work, and then a discussion of what a first draft means for each of us, which is vastly different.

Just before we sign off, Michael poses a question for me to ponder for our next session.

There's no real topic in this episode aside from keeping each other up to date on progress, although we do mention a webinar offered by Author's Publish (a great resource for authors).

Michael has a 500 word story rejected because it's two words over, but this comes as a surprise. It turns out that the word count in the program he uses differs from the word count in Microsoft Word [MS Word counts an ellipsis character as a word!]. I mention giving a talk on self-publishing to a local writer's group, and Michael talks about progress on his author website.

Every two weeks, author Michael Pinkus and I get together to check in with each other's writing progress and to set goals for the next two weeks. We're in different genres; he's writing mysteries, I'm writing science fiction. We also have differing styles (he's a pantser, I'm a plotter) and use different tools (he hates to type, you can pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands). We thought we'd try posting our update meetings. Maybe showing some of our different processes might be interesting. We're not sure what to call this yet. So far the latest working title is "you'd think two writers could come up with a decent hook."