Hi #AmWriters, Jess here. I’ve been wanting to do an episode on workbooks forever - on any form of companion text that pairs with nonfiction books, really. How do you propose them, write them, format them? You know me, I like the granular details. Fortunately, Ned Johnson and Dr. William Stixrud are publishing The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child in March, and Ned was willing to come on the podcast and teach me all about the nuts and bolts of putting a workbook out into the world. 

This episode truly flattened my learning curve, and I hope it does the same for you. 

People and things we talked about in this episode:

William Stixrud

Katie Hurley and A Year of Positive Thinking for Teens

Tina Payne Bryson, The Whole-Brain Child and Bottom Line for Baby

StrengthsFinder2.0

TriMetrix

Moo.com

Can you make custom post-it notes? Yes, yes you can. 

The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson


LAST Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge

If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge.

We started January 5, but it’s JUST not too late to jump in. We’ll be walking Blueprinters through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode—and the first step is indeed on the shorter side, so you still have time to catch up if you subscribe now.

Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice.

We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts:

1. What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it
   
   
2. Introducing the winter book coach hosts
   
   
3. Overcoming Pantsing Pitfalls: How the Blueprint Method Can Save Your Story
   
   
4. The Blueprint is the Solution for Time-Strapped Writers
   
   
5. How to Use a Blueprint for Revision
   
   
6. Befriending the Blueprint
   
   

If you finish your Blueprint during the Challenge, you will be eligible to win a review from either Jennie or KJ. (If you missed the #AmWriting Success Story about the writer who won the Blueprint Sprint grand prize in 2022, give it a listen. It’s very inspiring! It’s right HERE.)

It’s going to be such a good time and we’d love to have you join us!

The Blueprint Challenge is for Supporters only—10 weeks to plan the book you want to write instead of 90K words figuring it out. You in?

Subscribe now

Essay collections—readers love them, but publishers and editors are often unconvinced. Jennie and KJ talk to Amy Wilson about getting that contract, finding the through line and writing a book about pleasing people while also remembering to please yourself. 

Links from the pod

Mary Karr The Art of Memoir

Wendi Aarons

Listen to Your Mother (Essay performances for Mother’s Day)

Amy’s first book: When Did I Get Like This?

Zibby Owens, Zibby Books

Ina Garten

What Fresh Hell (Amy’s podcast)

Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser, Amy Wilson

#AmReading

Jennie: Be Ready when the Luck Happens, Ina Garten

KJ: Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman

Reasons Not to Worry, Brigid Delaney

Amy: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, Judi Dench


Last Call: Join the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge 

If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge.

We started January 5, but it’s JUST not too late to jump in. We’ll be walking Blueprinters through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode—and the first step is indeed on the shorter side, so you still have time to catch up if you subscribe now.

Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice.

We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts:

1. What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it
   
   
2. Introducing the winter book coach hosts
   
   
3. Overcoming Pantsing Pitfalls: How the Blueprint Method Can Save Your Story
   
   
4. The Blueprint is the Solution for Time-Strapped Writers
   
   
5. How to Use a Blueprint for Revision
   
   
6. Befriending the Blueprint
   
   

If you finish your Blueprint during the Challenge, you will be eligible to win a review from either Jennie or KJ. (If you missed the #AmWriting Success Story about the writer who won the Blueprint Sprint grand prize in 2022, give it a listen. It’s very inspiring! It’s right HERE.)

It’s going to be such a good time and we’d love to have you join us!

The Blueprint Challenge is for Supporters only—10 weeks to plan the book you want to write instead of 90K words figuring it out. You in?

Subscribe now

Find Meghan at meghanpbrowne.com or check out her book The Bees of Notre-Dame

Booklab episode Redacted Kitty-Cat and Welcome to Heaven


If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge.

Starting January 5, we’ll be walking you through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode.

Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice.

We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts:

1. What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it
   
   
2. Introducing the winter book coach hosts
   
   
3. Overcoming Pantsing Pitfalls: How the Blueprint Method Can Save Your Story
   
   

If you finish your Blueprint during the Challenge, you will be eligible to win a review from either Jennie or KJ. (If you missed the #AmWriting Success Story about the writer who won the Blueprint Sprint grand prize in 2022, give it a listen. It’s very inspiring! It’s right HERE.)

It’s going to be such a good time and we’d love to have you join us! Plus, we have a sale on annual memberships until December 31, 2024 only—save 25% if you decide you’re in now.

Get 25% off for 1 year

We cover last years’ goals, and which of us feel great and which feel… less great. (And the audio is also less great, because 3 of us gathered in our local library and the acoustics/HVAC system noise were less than ideal.) 

We end up talking about the ways we feel we need to be as women (supported by some great men) in the coming year and years, the somewhat surprising bro-commentary some of us get around our work, and how we feel like sticking together is going to be the key to maintaining our sense of self in 2025. 

It got pretty deep. Writer goals, sure, we have those. But we have more. 

We also reviewed our Words of the Year, then announce this year’s. I guess I should make that a big reveal? But I just don’t have it in me, so here we go:

KJ: Inner Compass (which tells me that 2 words is FINE)

Jennie: Teflon (you’ll love the discussion around this one)

Sarah: Presence (she’s reserving the right to refine this)

Jess: Growth (and a surprising announcement about her return to student life! There, there’s your cliff-hanger-go listen.)

Links to things we discuss:

Pacemaker app

Five Year Lie audiobook

Blueprint for a Book Winter Challenge

Submit for First Pages Booklab! 

What’s your word for 2025 going to be? We love discussing and brainstorming words, so lay it on us in the comments. 



If you have big goals for 2025 that include writing, finishing or revising a book, you’ll want to join us for the Winter 2025 Blueprint Challenge. 

Starting January 5, we’ll be walking you through the 14 steps of the Blueprint over 10 weeks. Some of the steps are very short and we combined them into one episode.

Every episode speaks to fiction writers, memoir writers, and nonfiction writers. There are workbooks, and you will get a link to the digital download of the Blueprint book of your choice. 

We’ll also be hosting weekly AMAs (ask me anything), write-alongs, and Zoom meet-ups with coaches—and KJ will be writing her own Blueprint, and Jennie will be coaching her through it in weekly episodes. For more about the challenge, check out these past posts:

1. What the Blueprint is and why Jennie made it
   
   
2. Introducing the winter book coach hosts
   
   
3. Overcoming Pantsing Pitfalls: How the Blueprint Method Can Save Your Story
   
   

If you finish your Blueprint during the Challenge, you will be eligible to win a review from either Jennie or KJ. (If you missed the #AmWriting Success Story about the writer who won the Blueprint Sprint grand prize in 2022, give it a listen. It’s very inspiring! It’s right HERE.)

It’s going to be such a good time and we’d love to have you join us! Plus, we have a sale on annual memberships until December 31, 2024 only—save 25% if you decide you’re in now.

Get 25% off for 1 year

Today, I'm so excited to talk to my friend, Rosa Kwon Easton, about her debut novel, White Mulberry.

Rosa holds a very special place in my heart and my history because she was at the first ever workshop where I taught my Blueprint framework, which is a method of inquiry for getting a book out of your head and onto the page before you start to write. At that time, Rosa thought that she was writing a true story about three generations in her family. She was calling it a memoir. And now ten years later, that story is being published as a novel. In this discussion, we talk about that long development process and the profound switch from writing a true story to writing fiction and how Rosa navigated the whole thing.

Find Rosa at: rosakwoneaston.com, @rosakwoneaston on Instagram, or at one of her upcoming events.

Find out more about Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book method here.

Announcing the #AmWriting Blueprint Winter Challenge—bigger and better and more interactive than any we’ve done before.

The Blueprint method will be effective for you if:

• You have a new idea for a novel, a memoir, or a nonfiction book you want to pin to the page.
  
  
• You are stuck somewhere in the middle of a novel, a memoir, or a nonfiction book and can’t figure out how to get unstuck.
  
  
• You are planning to revise a novel, a memoir, or a nonfiction book and feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.
  
  

In the challenge you’ll get 10 podcast episodes on the Blueprint steps, five Author Accelerator certified book coaches who will be answering your questions in live sessions and in our chat for 10 weeks (+ your hosts will be joining in on that, too), write-along sessions, a workbook to guide you, free digital downloads of Jennie’s Blueprint book, and the chance to win a full Blueprint review from Jennie or KJ at the end.

#AmWriting paid subscribers have the chance to sign up for all this NOW—and to help you out, we’re offering a December sale on membership. The offer will end 12/31/24—so give 2025 you a gift and sign up now!

Get 25% off for 1 year

Hey listeners: This week, everyone gets a taste of what paid supporters get more regularly—a special Booklab: First Pages episode. Each month (and sometimes more often), we’ll choose two “first pages” to review. A first page, for our purposes, is the first 350 words of your book—fiction, non-fiction or memoir. We will read the page aloud on the podcast and discuss with a single thought in mind: Would we keep reading?

First pages are incredibly important in every genre. If you can’t grab a reader on that first page, you might lose your chance of grabbing them at all. On the podcast, we’ll read the page aloud and then each cast our “vote”—would we keep going? Then—and this is the most important bit— we’ll discuss why or why not. Were we dying to know what would happen next, or turned off by an info dump? Ready to learn what you have to teach us or ready to see what’s on YouTube? Totally on board with a character or uncertain why we were there in the first place?

In this episode, we discuss our first non-fiction first page submission, and then tackle a novel with an intriguing title and a great first line: Holding a pair of tweezers in one hand and a can of Scotchgard in the other, Stella Singh sprays the top of a golden brioche bun until it shimmers like a Las Vegas showgirl.

The opportunity to have your first page reviewed is available to our Sticker and Sparkly Star Sticker supporters only. (That’s anyone with a monthly or annual subscription via Substack). Always, there’s one central question: Would we turn the page? We tell you why or why not, and help these generous, brave writers to make their first pages irresistible—and their examples will help you make your first page sing.

This episode is for everyone! But Booklabs (like the one we released earlier this week, discussing a novel with another great first line: Every expensive hotel has its own scent and a memoir of parenting an adult child with addiction) are usually for paid supporters only. 

So if you haven’t—yet—decided to support the podcast we know you love, now’s the perfect time. In January, we’ll be launching a fresh new Blueprint for a Book with five Author Accelerator certified book coaches who will be answering your questions in live sessions and in our chat for 10 weeks (+ your hosts will be joining in on that, too), write-along sessions, a workbook to guide you, free digital downloads of my Blueprint book, and the chance to win a full Blueprint review from Jennie or KJ at the end—plus, KJ doing her own Blueprint right along with the rest of the crew. The Winter 2025 Blueprint challenge will be for paid supporters only. 

Paid supporters also get Booklab episodes, the ability to submit first pages for consideration for a future episode of Booklabs and weekly AMA’s with your hosts (starting up again in January). 

In honor of all that, we’re offering a December sale on membership. The offer will end 12/31/24—so give 2025 you a gift and sign up now!

Get 25% off for 1 year

Want to submit a first page? Paid subscribers click HERE for details. 

Regular listeners will recognize the Blueprint for a Book—a method of inquiry Jennie Nash developed to lay a strong foundation for books in any genre that’s not about the craft of writing or building an author platform or any of the steps that come later in the writing life. It’s about understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it so that you can have clarity and confidence. 

Writer Allison Hammer is a Blueprint stan—she’s used it for years, again and again, often more than once on any given book (KJ seconds that one). We talk about why she adores the method, how she tweaks it (and why Jennie made it so strict in the first place. 

You can, like Allison, work through the Blueprint steps on your own—but with the Blueprint for a Book Winter Challenge coming up, you don’t have to! 

We’re going to be sharing more details about the Blueprint Winter Challenge in the coming days, but here’s a little on what it looks like: we have 10 podcast episodes on the Blueprint steps, five Author Accelerator certified book coaches who will be answering your questions in live sessions and in our chat for 10 weeks (+ your hosts will be joining in on that, too), write-along sessions, a workbook to guide you, free digital downloads of my Blueprint book, and the chance to win a full Blueprint review from Jennie or KJ at the end. 

#AmWriting paid subscribers will have the chance to sign up for all this later this month—and to help you out, we’re offering a December sale on membership. The offer will end 12/31/24—so give 2025 you a gift and sign up now!

Get 25% off for 1 year

Links from the episode:

Episode 409: From Women’s Fiction to Romance in 30 Days with Ali Brady

Find Alison at: www.alisonhammer.com, @thishammer on Instagram, or check out her cowritten works as Ali Brady on IG @alibradybooks

Find out more about Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book method here.

Jess here, hosting my entire extended family for the holiday weekend and sending love to you and yours. Enjoy this #WriterGift flashback!

It’s the gifts episode! Here are the links you’re looking for:

KJ:
Redbubble ❄️ Stamp blocks ❄️ Stamp blanks and stencils ❄️ Frixion Pens ❄️ Leuchterm planner

Jess:
Sarina’s Socks ❄️ Half Broke by Ginger Gaffney (for KJ, but Jess loved it, too!) ❄️ Fillion planner cover by Little Mountain Bindery ❄️ Jess’s favorite sticky tabs ❄️ Pens by Schneider ❄️ Sarina’s stamp with the kinda-sorta True North Series three pine tree logo ❄️ The “Begin” mug Jess wants a case of.

Sarina:
Hedgehog Pencil Holder ❄️ Post-its that fit over planner months ❄️ Corkicle (it doesn’t come with the sticker, sorry…)





#AmReading

Jess: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

KJ: The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow

Sarina: The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes by Xio Axelrod

Zowie! Thanks for listening. If you want to check out our last gift episodes (and guides), click the years: 2019 2018 2017.

If you’ve got other ideas we should know about, share them in the #AmWriting Facebook group.

And if you’d like to subscribe to the shownotes email or support the podcast, click the button.

Subscribe now

To give a subscription as a gift, click THIS button!

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Big news, #AmWriters: our guided Blueprint for a Book Challenge was such a hit this past summer that we're going to run it again in January! Plus, we're adding even more interactive elements so you can connect with other writers.

It’s a great way to start or refine a book idea, get some professional guidance from our Author Accelerator coaches, and stay motivated to do the hard work of thinking before you write.

Whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction or memoir - this challenge could be just the thing you need. We will be launching in early January, so stay tuned to these podcasts for all the details, check the show notes, and make sure that you are a supporter of the #AmWriting Podcast, so that when it comes to January, you'll be ready to go.

It is of course the inimitable, the unconquerable, the inexhaustible Jo Piazza, all of whose adjectives require me to use spell check. I am a long time fan of Jo, and she’s been on the pod before—see also Episode 393, I Want to Sell Books, But I’m Also Writing What I Want to Write. She is the author of, most recently, The Sicilian Inheritance and coming soon, Everyone Is Lying to You, which started out as a serial in her weekly email/Substack, Over the Influence. She’s also the host of a great podcast, Under the Influence.

As far as I know she’s the first person to pull off this feat. She probably isn’t, but we’re going to roll with it as a working theory. This is a great convo, and you will undoubtedly leave inspired, as I was, to write your own serial. (I probably won’t but I WAS inspired.)

Join Jo’s Substack and vote on the cover HERE.

#AmReading

Jo:

The Displacements, Bruce Holsinger (author of The Gifted School)

Nightwatching, Tracy Sierra

Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty

KJ:

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol

The Wedding People, Alison Espach

Jo’s email/Substack Over the Influence



Big news, #AmWriters: our guided Blueprint for a Book Challenge was such a hit this past summer that we're going to run it again in January! Plus, we're adding even more interactive elements so you can connect with other writers.

It’s a great way to start or refine a book idea, get some professional guidance from our Author Accelerator coaches, and stay motivated to do the hard work of thinking before you write.

Whether you're writing fiction, nonfiction or memoir - this challenge could be just the thing you need. We will be launching in early January, so stay tuned to these podcasts for all the details, check the show notes, and make sure that you are a supporter of the #AmWriting Podcast, so that when it comes to January, you'll be ready to go.

#AmWriting is made possible by our “stickers” - readers who financially support the Podcast. As a thank you, Stickers get access to bonus content - like our Blueprint for a Book Challenge. To receive these posts and support the Podcast, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

The Anxiety is Real

You can’t swing a Blackwing pencil without hearing another creator worrying about generative A.I. And we get it—the ubiquity of generative A.I. tools has soared over the last two years. In this episode we aim to take a deep breath and discuss the topic from a candid but calm position: why authors are worried, why we should be worried and what to do about it (besides anxious posts on social media.)

Things to freak out about: a Two Part List

In service to our measured discussion, we lay a bit of background. Sarina tells us why The Authors Guild is suing OpenAI, and why you should join the Authors Guild. 

Then we mine two different veins of anxiety: 

• Column I: Billion dollar AI tools stole our intellectual property to train their models, and…
• Column II: AI might take my job.
  
  

We delve into both these concerns, discussing ongoing litigation, the potential for licensing content to AI companies, and more. We also discuss how AI tools are affecting other parts of the publishing industry (such as audio book narration) and the pervasiveness of generative AI in our everyday lives. 


#AmReading

KJ: The Paradise Problem, Christina Lauren

Jess: The Widow on Dwyer Court, Lisa Kusel

Sarina: Nora Goes Off Script, Annabel Monaghan

The Love Hypothesis, Ali Hazelwood 



Hey readers—KJ here. This episode of #AmWriting is brought to you by my latest, Playing the Witch Card. I wrote this at a moment when I needed more magic in my life—but it turned out to be a book about how until we know who we are and what makes us happy, even magic doesn’t help. My main character, Flair, is a total control freak who fears the chaos created by her family deck of Tarot cards and the cookies it inspires her to make until she decides that she can harness their power to control the world and people around her—but that’s not what the cards are for at all. I was inspired by what I see as the real magic of Tarot cards—and tea leaves and palm reading and every form of oracle: they help us to see and understand our own stories. As someone for whom stories are pretty much everything, I love that. You can buy Playing the Witch Card on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org and my local indie—and I hope you’ll love it too.

Today we’re talking about the need for a writer to be resilient over the long haul of a career and my guest is A.S. King

A.S. King has been called “One of the best Y.A. writers working today” by The New York Times Book Review and is one of YA fiction's most decorated. She is the only two-time winner of the American Library Association's Michael L. Printz Award (2020 for Dig and 2024 for The Collectors) and has won the LA Times Book Prize for Ask the Passengers. In 2022, King received the ALA's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement to YA literature and 2023, she accepted the ALAN Award for "artistry, courage and outstanding contributions to YA literature."

Amy – which is her real name – has taught for years in MFA programs and is working on her PhD in creative literature

I wanted to talk to Amy because I heard from a mutual friend – Caroline Leavitt – that Amy’s publisher had made a change to her promotional team just weeks before the launch of her newest book, Pick the Lock, which one reviewer described as "a punk opera, a primal scream, and a portrait of a family buried in lies."

Many of our listeners are trying to get their foot in the door with their first book, or to get a career off the ground with their second or third and here is someone who has written 15 books, who is at the top of her game, and who still has things like this happen – which is to say things that go wrong, things that don’t go her way.

I thought a conversation about what it feels like at this stage in a career would be illuminating – and was I sure right. Let’s get to it.

Find A.S. King at AS-King.com

Heads up!

Join me—KJ—for Novelmber, which is very hard to pronounce but is my word for reclaiming my writing space in November. Think NaNoWriMo, our version—daily challenges and stretch goals, formatted by you, for you.

There will be write-alongs, posts, a massive Google spreadsheet for sharing goals and updating progress, thoughts on how hard this is, and more than you want to know about why I need this regroup so badly. All writers, every genre, welcome.

This is sign-up only—I don’t plan to spam the whole #AmWriting community with my wails of writerly distress daily for an entire month—but it’s also for everyone who wants in. I hope you’ll join me—I don’t want to go this alone.

Don’t worry, signing up is simple! Here’s how:

Click here to go to your #AmWriting account, and when you see this screen, toggle “Novelmber” from “off” (grey) to “on” (green).



THAT’S IT!

Once you set that up, you’ll get all future Novelmber emails. Any audio or video will show up in those, along with write-along schedules.

You’ll also want to add yourself to the Google Sheet where we’ll all record our overall goal, day’s goals, daily progress and what we’re feeling. I’ve started it off.

Join me, help me, let’s make Novelmber WORK!