This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner. Episode 55: Prioritizing Your Writing.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And it has been a big week for the Write Now podcast. And the best part is, it’s only Wednesday.

A while ago, Spreaker, which is a podcast host/player that some of you may use to listen to the show, asked me to do a Q&A with them for their blog about the ties between writing and podcasting. And I was like, “Oh man, I’m all over that.” So I wrote that up and sent it over and then they just published it this week. So it’s really cool. It’s out there. Check it out. It’s at spreaker.com. I don’t know the rest of that URL, but it will be in the link for the show notes of today’s episode.

Tied in with that, the Write Now podcast also was fortunate enough to show up on the front page of Spreaker, which was just an incredible honor. It was really cool to go to spreaker.com and see the Write Now podcast logo there. So it’s awesome.

If you are a new listener who is listening because of finding my show on Spreaker, thank you. I am so excited that you’re here. I also found out this week that I have been nominated for the 44th annual EmBe Tribute to Women in the category of Young Woman of Achievement, which is… I don’t know. Can you hear me blushing right now? I don’t know. Again, I’m incredibly honored and humbled that this happened. My gosh.

I’ve had some people ask me what it is, and it’s kind of like if you’ve ever seen Parks and Rec, when Leslie Knope really wants to be the Pawnee Woman of the Year, but then Ron Swanson is nominated… That’s kind of what this is.

The award ceremony is on April 13th this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. I get to dress up and drink swanky cocktails. So I think that’ll be pretty fun. Pretty excited about it.

Finally, there’s one more thing. And I just feel like this really bragging person, but I just have all this cool information and I want to share it with you. I also got the chance to appear as a guest speaker on the Spreaker Live show, which is a live podcast done by Spreaker. You can see a connection here. It’s hosted by Rob Greenlee and I was fortunate enough to be on it this afternoon.

So today is Wednesday, March 15th, the ides of March for Shakespeare fans out there. If you want to listen to it, you can. It is at spreakerliveshow.com. That’s S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R liveshow.com, episode 104. And if you want to, you can listen to the whole thing or you can skip ahead to… I think I start speaking at 43 minutes in, so please do feel free to listen. I had a great time talking with Rob about podcasting and what it takes to start a podcast. And if any of you who are listening out there today… If you’re interested in starting your own podcast, give it a listen.

You can also check out… I write a weekly column for Forbes in the tech section about podcasting. And if you’re interested in checking that out, it’s very beginner friendly. I do that on purpose. It’s at sarah werner.com/forbes. So that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R .com/forbes, F-O-R-B-E-S. I’ll add a link to that as well in the show notes for today’s episode.

Finally, this is going to pale in comparison, I think, but I updated my website. I added some new content out there, put some new pages into my information architecture. And so you can go out to sarahwerner.com, cruise around, see what I’ve added, listen to old episodes, hang out, contact me. Whatever you want to do. It’s out there on my website.

Most of all, though, I want to tell you that I am grateful for you. Maybe that’s coming out of nowhere, but it’s true. All of these wonderful, lovely things that happen and keep my life so busy are because of you tuning in and listening to this show every week-ish, when I’m able to release it. So just thank you. You are wonderful. I hope that I’m helping you along your writing journey. I hope that you feel inspired to write, even if you’re not able to write every day, I hope that you feel like you have the courage to just keep giving it a try.

So there’s a lot going on in my life right now, and more about that later in another episode, but maybe there’s a lot going on in your life right now, too. I always feel like things are busy, and I always say, “I’m going to wait until the next season. I can’t wait until this season is over. And then I can get into this season of rest.” But, and maybe this is true for you too, that season of rest never seems to come. I just go from one busy season to another busy season, to another busy season. Even as I’m wrapping up one project, it seems like one or two or three or 400 more start.

So this January, I ended my two year term as president of my church congregation. And I was like, “Okay. Yay. Now…” I mean, I enjoyed the experience. I loved it. I got to meet amazing people. And I learned a lot of lessons, but I was like, “Yay, I get several evenings of my week back.” But then something else started that takes up just as much time, so maybe this resonates with you.

Something that resonated with me was an email I received from podcast listener, Randy, who was writing in from China, which is really cool, but he asked a really good in depth question about how we make this stuff work. And I know one of the themes of my show is that work life writing balance. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about a little bit today. And I’m going to frame it in the context of Randy’s question. So I’m going to read his question and then provide an answer, question mark? Some advice, question mark? Some words that maybe will be useful-ish to you. I hope so.

So here’s Randy’s email. Randy writes, “Hi Sarah. I plan to self-publish my book about my first year as a foreign teacher in China, but the world of self-publishing is huge and mysterious for me, a whole new continent to explore. Likewise, my experiences with popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, is on the level of mere name recognition. Accordingly, I have downloaded and begun reading books by Fauzia Burke, Ali Luke, Jeff Goins, Steve Scott, Honoree Corder, and Guy Kawasaki among others, plus additional books on the technical details of self-publishing through KDP using LinkedIn groups, creating a blog, et cetera are stockpiled for the future, if I live that long.

I understand that I must acquire education in all of these fields, and that indeed, each of them is essential. I accept that acquiring such knowledge is going to take much time, however… And I’m getting close to asking my question… All of this reading and study is not getting the work done of editing my manuscript and preparing to publish it.

Furthermore, all this reading is also not taking the actions they recommend such as regularly adding content to my blog, personal website, Facebook pages, Twitter account, et cetera. Somehow I am supposed to do all of these things, plus make time for perusing others’ web pages, discovering and visiting related blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn groups, making contributions and building relationships.

I didn’t mention relevant podcasts, writers’ groups, reading comparable books for my genre, online classes and getting up to speed and technical skills like efficient typing, dictation software, photography, Photoshopping, editing, pricing, cover design, et cetera, or speed reading. And no, I don’t have the financial resources to pay for someone to do all of these things for me. Finally, I’m also reminded that I need to devote time each day, high priority, to writing.

I shouldn’t let the business side of publishing crowd out the author side, the foundation of the whole edifice. I feel like an overwhelmed college freshmen, trying to deal with 10 different courses by 10 different professors, all demanding maximum time, maximum effort and maximum focus, and all of them demanding it simultaneously.

I feel like I’m diluting my limited time available each day by taking minuscule bites of so many books that I will take forever to complete any of them. And as I said, reading and getting organized is not the same thing as actually working on getting my book to readers. I desperately need your suggestions about how to balance all of these activities, or how to select only essential. They all feel urgent at this point, in the very limited number of hours I have available on a typical day.

Thank you so much for your time. Hope you can ease the confusion and looking forward to your response.

The best, Randy.”

So I read Randy’s email, and the first thing I thought was, “Wow, Randy just summed up every single question/problem I’ve ever had about writing.” And then I thought, “How am I going to answer this?” But thankfully, I am also in a constant state of being busy and overwhelmed, and I’ve done some trial and error to see what works and what doesn’t work in making time to write during the day. And so hopefully some of what I’m about to share will be helpful for you.

So first and foremost, one lesson that I’ve learned is that focusing on all of the things is the same thing as focusing on none of the things. There’s this enormous myth that humans can multitask. And I’ve talked about this in previous episodes of the Write Now podcast, but we cannot multitask.

Maybe you can kind of half brainedly delete do one thing while half brainedly doing another. That is not a word, but I’m using it. Half brainedly. Half mindedly? I don’t know. But you cannot fully focus on doing more than one task at a time. At least one of those tasks will get deferred to autopilot.

It’s like, my husband kind of laughs sometimes because when I’m feeling overwhelmed, when I’m trying to focus on more than one thing, like five things or 10 things, I get really scatterbrained. And so I’ll go from room to room in the house, grabbing my keys, but forgetting to grab something else, and going to another room and forgetting that I was making coffee and then I’ll bounce back to the bathroom, and say, “Oh crap, I need to do this and this.” And then I’ll go back to where the coffee was and I’ll add a few more scoops of coffee and then I’ll buzz back to another room. And it’s just a disaster.

And then I also tend to, while I’m focused on so many things, or attempting to focus on so many things, I sort of forget to take care of myself, and I will inevitably walk into a wall or fall down some stairs while I am so preoccupied. This is not a good state of mind to be in.

And if you’ve ever been overwhelmed, if you’ve ever had 600,000 emails to answer, or a lot of different projects to work on, all of which simultaneously demand your attention, you know what I’m talking about. You end up losing a single-minded and sort of scattering your attention, scattershot, taking minuscule bites out of everything, tasting nothing, enjoying nothing, but somehow getting full. That’s a weird analogy, but I think, you know where I’m going.

Speaking of taking minuscule bites out of different projects… So say I’m working on five projects. For whatever reason, I’ve committed to doing five projects within a timeline. And so I’m working on them all at once, and I’m getting a little bit done on each of them, but I never actually finish any of them because I’m spreading the time out among five projects instead of working on the first one, finishing it, working on the second one, finishing it, working on the third one, finishing it, et cetera. So instead of finishing them sequentially, I’m trying to have them all end at the same time, which is with five projects, likely to be three years down the road.

This is incredibly frustrating, because you end up working all the time, and working hard all the time, but never getting the sense of accomplishment, never finishing anything. And that’s a terrible feeling. So here’s my advice. And it’s a word that I know a lot of creatives hate, and I myself hate. And it’s more of a phrase than a word, but it’s ‘time management’.

I know. I hate it too. And I’m bad at it. I’m naturally terrible at time management, because I’m a writer and I like to daydream, and I like to read and I like to get lost in things, and I like to sleep. And all of those things are hard to plan, but fortunately, I came up with a method of doing this for people who hate time management.

So we’re going to walk through it just real quick. If you want, you can follow along. Otherwise you can bookmark this episode, listen to it later and do it then, but here’s the steps. Okay, first, I want you to make a list of everything. All of those priorities. Researching social media, reading about self-publishing, working on your book. All of that stuff.

I actually have my own list in front of me, which I’m going to share with you. So here’s my list. Going to my 40 hour a week job, which is no small time commitment, spending quality time with my family, writing five Forbes articles a month, writing for myself, including working on my novel, reading, which includes fiction for fun to stay sharp on my craft every night before bed, creating new Write Now podcast episodes, which includes planning, recording, editing, writing the show notes, all of that good stuff, marketing, which includes tweeting, building a Facebook audience, sharing episodes via social media, teasing about my book, connecting with other writers and authors, et cetera, staying healthy, which includes going to the gym, and education, which includes webinars, how to’s, articles, nonfiction books, et cetera. That is a of stuff. And maybe you have a similar list.

So you can hear that I kind of grouped a few things together, first of all. So going to my 40 hour a week job is one big chunk. It’s one big commitment. But then I also grouped together some of those smaller overwhelming tasks into one big task. So like for marketing, which included tweeting, building a Facebook audience, sharing episodes via social media, connecting with other writers and authors, going to conferences, that kind of stuff. That all falls under marketing. And so I left a big chunk for marketing and made that its own bullet point. Put all of those other ones under it.

Another one that I did that for was I had a lot of little tasks like going to the gym four times a week, making healthy meals for my family, meditating and journaling. And I lumped all those under staying healthy.

Similarly, all of those webinars that I sign up for all of those Udemy classes that I buy, all of those articles that I have bookmarked and saved in pocket. All of those I lumped under education.

So take a minute, go through your list of tasks. Picking up the dry cleaning, mowing the lawn, all of that stuff, and organize it under categories. So once you’re done, you should have several categories of tasks. I have nine, you might have 23. You might have four. You might just have one. This will vary depending on who’s doing it.

What I want you to do is spend a few minutes thinking about yourself, thinking about what you value, what’s really important to you. If you listened to episode 46 of the Write Now podcast, I talk about crafting your mission statement. If you did that, go back, look at your mission statement and see what’s really important to you. Some of these priorities are going to be obligations.

So as much as I love doing some of these things, there are some categories that I am committed to doing, like going to my 40 hour a week job, which is a priority, even though it’s not from this list. My absolute number one, most favorite thing is a high priority so that we can keep food on the table.

So go through, just get an understanding of how you would rank these categories. You don’t have to number them if you don’t want to, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to agonize over it for hours. Just get a good understanding of what is meaningful to you. Not what other people think you should be doing, but what you find important.

Okay, at this point you might be looking at your list and saying, “Sarah, I have eight categories. Sarah, I have 20 categories, and I’m freaking out even more now because I’m finally realizing all of this stuff I have to get done and it’s even worse.”

But you know what? It’s not worse, because we’re going to work through this together. The key thing to realize here is maybe these are all things you have to do, but you don’t have to do them all today. You don’t have to do them all every day. If you do, you will end up resentful and burned out. And believe me, I have been there.

So I want you to think about time spans, because while you maybe can’t do all of these things in one day, maybe you can do all of these things in the span of one week, or maybe you can do all of these things in the span of one month, or one quarter, or one year. So my point is you can do all of the things if it’s scaled properly.

So what ended up working best for me was the scale of one week. I realized that all nine things I have on my list of priorities, I could probably do within the span of one week. So realize your priorities, realize your time span, and then realize that time is a real and limiting factor.

I’ve talked about this in previous episodes as well, but for some reason, I always think that I can get more done in a day than I can. I’m like, “Everybody but me has these 24 hour days, but me. I have a 900 hour day. And so I’ve scheduled myself for 20 meetings, and I’m going to work on my novel, and I’m going to record eight episodes of my podcast, and I’m going to do this and this.” And it just does not happen because time is real and time is limiting. So our key, going forward, is going to be, think realistically. Unless you have a time machine, in which case I totally want to borrow it.

So order for me to think realistically, because again, I’m a fiction writer who loves sci-fi, fantasy horror, all of this stuff, I don’t do so well with the concrete. I have to use a tool. And my tool in this case is my Gmail calendar. For you it might be a physical calendar. It might be a day planner. It might be a chart that you put up on the wall. I have no idea. It can be whatever you want. I use the calendar because, because it’s easy and it’s free. And it allows me to see time realistically.

So I open up my Gmail calendar and I begin blocking off time for the priorities at the very top of my list. So I start with my 40 hour a week job. So every day, Monday through Friday, from eight to five, I block off that time. That is time when I must focus on my job because I like my job and I want to do it well.

But if you look at a 40 hour a week job, it’s actually more than 40 hours that you end up devoting to it. 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM is actually a nine hour span, because I have a lunch hour in there. It also takes me time to commute to work. And so I block that time off on either side. I also know that I will probably be taking a shower and getting dressed in the morning before work, probably, hopefully. So I allocate time there as well.

Again, we’re being realistic, which is again, hard for me because I’m an optimist. And I always hope that I can get more done in a day that I can, but I have learned that I can. So block off your calendar.

At this point, you might be like, “Sarah, I get up at 6:30. It takes me a while to get dressed, to get to work, to come home from work. So that’s a 12 hour span that I end up dedicating to my job.” But that’s okay. Keep it blocked off on your calendar.

Okay, next I schedule time with my family, which is my second priority. That sounds terrible. They’re my first priority in my heart. Wow. That sounds bad. But they’re there just the second thing I pencil in. I’m not making this better. Okay, so I schedule in time for dinner with my family, hanging out in the evenings, hanging out on the weekends, going to church, all of that stuff. I add that into my calendar.

All right, next I pencil in time for my Forbes writing. So I estimate how many hours do I need to write during the week to produce my weekly article? And I do a little bit of adjusting. So maybe I’ll move my wake up time a little bit earlier so that I can fit in two hours of writing a couple of times a week, in the mornings, before I have to go to work.

It’s also important to me that I write creatively for myself, that I keep working on my novel, which will get done eventually. So I also schedule in time for that. And I know that my peak creative time is 8:00 PM. And so I have every weekday on my calendar blocked off from 8:00 to 10:30 PM. That is my writing time, for me.

Reading was also something that was important on my list, but it’s also something that I tend to do automatically. So when I go to bed at night, I usually read until I fall asleep. And so that’s kind of penciled in there already. And so I don’t schedule that in.

Next up for me is my podcast. I usually record on Wednesday nights because my husband is out of the house and… He’s out teaching. And so I have a quiet house to myself, which is opportune time. I can think, I can speak, I can make my notes, all that good stuff. And so I block off a chunk of time on Wednesday nights before 8:00, which is my writing time for my podcast.

Okay, those were all of what I marked to be my must do’s on my priority list. And so far it’s quite doable. I have everything that I want. I have free time in the evenings and on weekends with my family. I have time between when I finish up eating dinner and when I start writing at 8:00. I have my lunch hour.

Now the question becomes, “How do I want to spend my leftover time?” And from Randy’s email, these were some of the other things that I think were overwhelming and frustrating him. So we’re going to deal with these as well.

So marketing is another thing that I’ve really tried to minimize, and especially social media. Oh my gosh. I love social media. I do it for work. I am kind of addicted to it because it offers quick and easy validation, but wow, can it turn into a black hole for valuable time? I know I hop onto Instagram and I start liking pictures. And then I look at the clock and 40 minutes has gone by, and then I think, “Oh my gosh, how much writing could I have gotten done in 40 minutes?”

So you can monitor your social media time in several ways. And this is time spent acting on it and not time spent learning about it and researching it, which we’ll get to in a little bit. So for me, I use a tool called Hootsuite and it’s a free program that lets you essentially load up social media messages into a calendar. So you can just get everything in there in one batch and then it will kind of slowly release them on whatever schedule you set.

So for those of you who follow me on Twitter and you’re like, “How does she tweet 24 hours a day? It’s 3:15 AM. Why is she awake, tweeting about writing?” I’m actually just… It’s an automatic tweet. I hope this doesn’t make you want to unfollow me. Please don’t unfollow me. Hopefully it’s still good, relevant, interesting information for you.

I just know that I have listeners in different time zones and in different countries and I want to engage with them as well. So Hootsuite is free. Buffer is another one that’s free. There’s also paid options, if you’re looking for something a little bit more robust. There’s a program called MeetEdgar that is really good. It lets you schedule and then reuse some of what you’ve scheduled. So there are tools out there that can help you manage your social media.

So what I do is once a month, I sit down, load up all the tweets and Facebook posts that I want to go out for the month. And I hit go. And while this doesn’t replace the time that I spend on social media, because I still think it’s important to be out there tweeting at people, liking, being on social media in real time. It does minimize what can turn into a black hole for me.

Okay, the other side of this that we talked about briefly was learning. And it sounds like Randy had purchased a ton of great books, and some of those books I’ve read and I can attest that they are very good, but something you have to think about when it comes to education is that you can literally, and you will literally, never stop learning. There is an infinite amount of knowledge out there, and I’m not saying this to intimidate you or to make you say, “Oh, why bother?”

I’m saying it because you need to be realistic with how you look at it. I am an advocate of continual learning. I’m an advocate of learning everything I can. I want to be one of those people that when I’m 90 years old and I’m retired, I’m going to college classes and auditing them. I want to be that person. I love learning and it makes my life so much more rich.

But I want to make a distinction that while I am a fan of learning constantly, this doesn’t mean you have to do it exclusively or even necessarily every day, or even every week. So for me, I sign up for a lot of webinars and classes on Udemy, and I save links to all those articles, but I do two things with that.

Number one, I set aside a specific chunk of time for learning and education about twice a month for maybe one to three hours at a time. And if I don’t make it to that time, or if something else happens, I forgive myself, and give myself some grace if I’m not able to complete it, because it is not one of my top, most high priorities.

The second caveat is that at some point, and this is so crucial, you have to stop learning and just plunge forward. I experienced this with my podcast. I got the idea for this podcast, I think in 2013. And I was like, “Well, okay. I want to be really prepared. I want to know how to podcast because I want to do it well. So I’m going to research podcasting.”

So I took courses and I read articles and I listened to podcasts about podcasting and I experimented and I started building my website. And eventually what I realized I was doing was procrastinating. And it was procrastinating for a good reason, because, Oh, learning is always good. You can always read another article about how to build a great character arc, or world building.

But at some point you just have to say, “All right, I’m done learning for right now. I’m just going to jump in and try it.” So don’t use learning as a procrastination tool. This is actually one of the reasons that I keep the podcast inspirational instead of strictly educational. So this is why I like to talk about things like time management and having a mission statement. And, “Hey, you’re a writer and you can do this because you were born to write.” Because I hope that what I’m saying here encourages you to keep writing instead of making you second guess like, “Oh, am I doing this character arc, right?” Or, “Did I name my chapters incorrectly?” I don’t want to make you do that. I just want to inspire you to keep moving forward.

Okay, last but not least. And I’m going to probably get some grief for this. Staying healthy and going to the gym. It’s a priority, but it’s not my highest priority, or even my second, third, fourth, or fifth highest priority. And that’s the hard lesson here, is that not everything can be your number one priority. You can only have one priority. I even think that’s the root word of priority. There is supposed to be only one, like the Highlander.

So I schedule in time to go to the gym four times a week or what have you, but if I don’t go every time I make my peace with it. I give myself some grace and I say, “You know what? I’ll go next time.” And I do, because I do care about my health. It’s just not my number one priority. So that’s how I handle my time management each week.

You may have noticed, I didn’t talk about socializing or going out for drinks with friends, but that’s something I’ve said no to a lot more lately because I’ve prioritized other things. And again, you don’t have to have those be your priorities forever. They can be your priorities for a season. They can be your priorities for a year. They can change, because life changes all the time.

But what I want you to do is look at your calendar. Look at that time, you’ve blocked off and dedicate yourself to focusing on just that, while you’re in that time. If you’re at work, you’re at work. No, nix that. If you have creative writing time blocked off between 8:00 PM and 10:30 PM, and it’s one of your highest priorities, then hold yourself to that. Don’t schedule other stuff over it. Concentrate while you’re doing it. Stay off of social media while you’re doing it, give your full focus to it and be present in it. And I think that you’ll find not only will you feel less overwhelmed, but your writing will be better.

I’m going to share a screenshot of my calendar in the show notes for today’s episode. As with anything else, I think there’s a few caveats. First and foremost, there’s a little bit of a… I don’t know if I want to say tension or a delicate balance between adhering to your schedule and remaining flexible to what life throws at you.

I think most of us can identify with the experience where you have your whole day planned out, and it’s maybe a whole bunch of meetings that are just very tightly wedged in one after the other. And then you get a phone call that your kid is throwing up at school and it all goes out the window, but you have your priorities. And so you throw the schedule to the wind just for that day, not forever. And you pick up your sick kid and you take care of them. Or maybe you don’t, maybe your priority is work and you ignore your vomiting child. I don’t judge, I guess. But my point is no schedule is perfect. Just like no writer is perfect and it’s okay.

It’s okay if you decide you need a self-care day to binge Netflix, instead of doing your 8:00 to 10:00 PM writing, if you haven’t listened to it in a while, go back and listen to the episode I recorded called ‘Give yourself some grace’. It’s episode number 38 if you want to look it up, but it might help.

Speaking of help, I hope this episode was helpful for you. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I hope that this gives you a starting point to begin to deal with managing your time as a writer, as a college student, as a professional, as a parent, as a grandparent. Whatever season you’re in right now, be patient with yourself.

Know that that huge list of stuff you have to do, you don’t have to do it all in one day. You don’t have to do it all at the same time. Understand the timeframe that you have to work within and plan accordingly.

I would love to hear how you make it work. I would love to hear how you prioritize your writing time, your work time, your family time, whatever else is on your agenda. I would absolutely love to hear how other writers out there are doing this, because my way is not the only right way, or maybe it’s not even a right way at all. Maybe it’s just right for me, who knows, but I would love to hear what you do.

And so you can do this in a couple of ways. You can go out to my website, sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R, navigate to the show notes for this episode, episode number 55, and scroll down to the bottom of the episode where there’s room for comments. So you can leave me a comment there.

You can also navigate to my contact page and either fill out the form there, which goes directly to my email, or you can simply email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. I would love to hear from you.

And while you’re out on my website, if you want to, you can subscribe to my email newsletter. If that’s something you want. It comes weekly-ish, when I have a new podcast episode out or new things to talk about. So yeah, sign up for that.

I know I’ve already said thank you once this episode, in the very beginning, but I want to thank you again for listening. It’s so important to me that you’re here. It’s so important to me that you are writing, that you are making this dream of yours work.

I also want to thank my Patreon supporters who help make what I do here at the Write Now podcast possible. My Patreon supporters are people who have pledged a certain amount of money per episode, to pay for hosting costs and other costs associated with podcasting. If you’re not sure what Patreon is, it is a secure third party donation platform for people who appreciate the arts.

Think of it a little bit as a PBS pledge drive, complete with prizes. If you go out to patreon.com, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N, .com/sarahrheawerner. I think that’s what it is. You can also go to sarahwerner.com/patreon, and it should redirect you to my Patreon page. You can sign up, you can pledge a $1 per episode, $2 per episode, whatever. I usually say something like a million dollars an episode. I wasn’t going to do it this time, but look, I just did it.

So you are welcome and encouraged to do that. And I am very grateful. Every time I get an email that says, “So-and-so has pledged a dollar per episode, I do a happy dance. So it is greatly appreciated.

Special thanks this week go out to official cool cats, Sean Locke and Rebecca Werner, official bookworm, Matthew Paulson, official rad dudes, Andrew Coons, and the Sioux Empire Podcast, and caffeine enablers, Colleen Cotolessa, and Warwriter. You are all wonderful and deeply appreciated. Thank you.

As I’m wrapping up recording this podcast episode, coincidentally, it is near 8:00 PM, which as you know, I have set aside as my dedicated writing time. So this has been episode number 55 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day.

I’m your host, Sarah Werner. And I’m going to go do some writing.