Popular author, blogger, and podcaster Joanna Penn joins Grant and Brooke to discuss some of her tips and best practices for staying productive and juggling multiple projects at once. To truly succeed as an authorprenuer takes a lot of discipline, and having more than a few plates spinning at once. With a good dose of her signature good humor and humility, Joanna shares how she gets it all done.

This week’s guest wrestled with her memoir for forty years, and wrote it in two. In this generous interview, Adrienne Brodeur shares about the many variations this book took over the years, about finding her north star in Vivian Gornick’s words, “For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent,” and how, by following this advice, her mother became more nuanced and sympathetic. This is an honest and heartfelt conversation about the power of truth and the emotional complexity of coming clean on the page.

This week’s show asks writers to think about what sustains them, to consider whether they’re steady and whether they stay the course when it comes to their writing. Our guest, Meg Wolitzer, is one such steady writer, a “schleper” (which we’re defining as a very positive quality when it comes to writing) and an author who’s admirable for her steadfastness. Join us today to listen in to what she has to say about writing, staying the course, and how she thinks about her own rising star.

This week’s episode is a journey into the world of book cover design with Creative Director of She Writes Press, Julie Metz. Brooke and Grant share some of their personal experiences with covers—what’s worked and what hasn’t—and Brooke shares some common places where (in her experience) authors get in their own way. Understanding book design will help any aspiring author breeze through this endeavor more easily, and getting a glimpse into the care and hard work that goes into creating covers is a point of interest for readers as well.

Write-Minded is delving into this new decade with an exploration of fan fiction and a fun and insightful interview with the amazing and prolific Marissa Meyer. Grant and Brooke look back to some of their favorite fairy tales from childhood, and Marissa speaks about her inspiration, her stockpile of story ideas, and how she once wrote 150,000 in the month of November for NaNoWriMo—which may well be a record (for which Grant offers extra credit).

This week’s episode is a short foray into resolutions present and past. Brooke and Grant offer their best solutions for recharging, share a couple of their goals for the new decade, and look back to where they were ten years ago with as the ’10s were just coming into view. Happy New Year, Happy New Decade!

In today’s episode, Brooke and Grant tackle the side hustle—why all writers do it, how to make peace with it, and how and why now is the best time ever for writers to actually have a writerly side hustle (as opposed to a 9-to-5 job). Guest Caroline Leavitt shares how she pieces together her worklife, multitasking and creating and making ends meet, and gives both encouragement and a dose of the reality of “making it” as a modern writer/author.

At Write-Minded, our hope is that our listeners will write a book they love—and then get it published, in whatever way that might manifest. Traditional publishing is the dream of many authors, so this week’s episode is a hands-on and helpful conversation about the best way to go about finding an agent, as well as do’s and don’ts, from one of the most prolific bloggers around, agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford.

Unreliability in fiction and nonfiction has a long history, and can be something to embrace, depending on your story. This week, Brooke and Grant interview Andi Buchanan, who opens her newest book, The Beginning of Everything, with these words: “I am an unreliable narrator.” Hear the story about why this is the case, and how this ties into memory. As always, this episode is about permission—to write what you’re called to write, embracing unreliability, or imperfect or lost memory, and seeing where the story goes.