Ted 0:01:
(voiceover) Today's episode is brought you by yard work--what my neighbors probably wish I was doing right now instead of recording this podcast. (end voiceover)

Ted 0:11:
Welcome to Working Drafts. I'm your host, Ted Fox. And if you found this show, it's a podcast dedicated to the craft, the process of writing. We focus on what my guests are currently working on and what they're navigating on the page to bring those stories to life. Except in the case when I'm my own guest, which is the case today. This is another solo pod today. I think this is the third one that I've done since I started the show. I don't think I'm ruining any illusions here if I tell you all this is still a pretty small show, a pretty small podcast. So there are times when it is difficult for me to find someone to be a guest in a given month. And I bring that up to say if you are a writer listening to this, and particularly if you're someone who's always wanted to talk to someone else on a podcast about your work, and you've never had that opportunity, feel free to contact me through my website, thetedfox.com, just through the contact form on there. I can't promise you that we will 100% absolutely do an episode if you do that, but I can promise you I will return your email. So yeah, if you're listening to this and think it might be fun to be a guest on here, feel free to do that.

I thought I would talk a little bit today about something that I kind of touched on towards the end of the last time I did a solo pod back in January on the four Ps of writing, where I was talking about patience. And related to where I'm in right now, like if you looked at the title of this episode you saw I referred to it as the in-between time or the between time. I haven't decided which name I'm gonna go with on there yet but something along those lines. And what I'm referring to there is the period between when I was talking in that January episode, I had just handed in the final-final version of my next novel, Date Week. It was just, I think it was it was a couple days before I recorded that episode. And from that time until now, looking forward still another couple of months, the book still hasn't come out yet. The book doesn't come out until June 25. And you kind of go through this push of writing it and then this push of editing it and responding to notes from your editors and your proofreader and everyone else. And you get it done. And then you just kind of find yourself sitting around, or you can find yourself sitting around in that in-between time--in this case, almost six months of waiting for it to come out.

And I mean, I'll be perfectly honest with you. It's a difficult time at times, not always, but I certainly struggle with feeling in between things like that. Um, I mentioned in that January episode, I talked about, you know, if I don't have a lot to occupy me, my mind can go to some nonproductive, nonhelpful places at time. I don't know if I've ever shared it explicitly on this podcast, but if you read the acknowledgments to my books, you'll see that I mention struggling with anxiety and with depression. And it's a very real part of my life. Kind of fluctuates up and down how much I'm dealing with it at any given time. Um, I can tell you pretty much every day, there's at least one thing every day that--maybe freaks me out is too strong of a word, but, uh, definitely gets my attention and makes me scared. Frankly, I oftentimes find the world to be kind of a scary place. And I'm saying that to you as a heterosexual, white male, gender-conforming white male, knowing that this world was built by people like me to the benefit of people like me. And if I can still find it scary or terrifying, I know I'm not alone in that respect.

So these in-between times when I don't have the natural next step of working on the book or getting these edits turned in or whatever it may be to occupy me, can get pretty easy to feel either restless at times of feeling like, am I doing enough to promote the next book? What can I do realistically to promote the next book? You know, I don't have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. So it's not like I'm just going to go tell all these people, Hey, go buy my book. And you can feel restless, like maybe an opportunity to promote this and set it up for success is slipping through your hands a little bit. So that can be difficult. 

At other times, you know, you just get down or restless or whatever it might be, like feeling like, okay, you know, just what's the next step? How do I, how do I keep moving forward? How do I keep pursuing this thing that I love, um, that is draining, that takes a lot of my time, but where do I, where do I go from here? And as I mentioned in that January episode, I am better when I do have a project to work on, mentally and emotionally, that I have kind of this bucket to pour all this mental energy into that otherwise might be going into, you know, feeling scared or unsure, uncertain about the world. Being back in a story is one way--you know, I think all of us, when I'm talking about this in-between time, like one thing that we, I think a lot of us want is, we want control. We want to be able to control our careers. We want to be able to control what's going on in our lives, and writing, as a true metaphor for life, especially if you're trying to publish and see your works out in the world, there's so much, so much that is beyond our control. And that can be incredibly frustrating. And I think that contributes to that feeling in the in-between time of someone reads an early copy of the book, and you don't get a flattering Goodreads review. And there's nothing you can do about that. And it's especially hard because there aren't a lot of reviews of the book yet. Or you can't, you know, you can't control how the book will be received. You can't control if you'll be contracted to write another book beyond that. These are all things that you can't control.

And I've found that the one thing I can control is my ability to put words down on a page. And that's one area in my life where I can exert some of that control that I think we all naturally want over our creative work. And so much of it is beyond our control. But the work itself is the one thing that we can turn to work on. Again, I don't know how much I've talked about Taylor Swift on this podcast. I'm a big fan. My wife is a huge, huge, huge fan. And I have a Taylor Swift lyric in Jenny's handwriting tattooed on the inside of my left arm. So it's probably not a surprise that on my whiteboard in my office, I have a Taylor Swift quote from her Time Magazine Person of the interview, interview--it was funny how I said that--last December, where she said that, I have to look over to make sure I get this right. "My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art." And I'm in one of those situations right now where nothing really good or bad has happened in the intervening months here. But my response is to keep making things. And that's what kind of sees me through to connect one end of the dots to the other.

So I have started a new project, would be my third novel. I have written-- this is the starting over again piece of the podcast title, by the way. (laughs) So it would be my third novel. I just finished the first draft of chapter two yesterday. I've been working on it for a couple of weeks. I had a writing weekend a couple of weeks ago, which is something great that Jenny helps me do every now and then just to get kind of a hotel in a town a couple of hours away from where we live so I can just get away and have kind of a weekend to focus on what I'm trying to write, what I'm trying to work on. It can be a little intimidating at times when you feel like, okay, now I have this big clear patch of time when I can work on my book, and wow, I really feel like I need to get a lot done. So that can be its own kind of thing to manage. But what I can tell you about this book at this point, which is kind of fun, because this is a work in progress for me. I feel like I've, whenever I brought up my own work on the show, it's kind of been at the the very end of where I was working on with Date Week or going through the edits. So this really is at the beginning. Can't say a whole lot about it at this point, but what I can say it is set on a college campus where two people who went to school are now back there both working in various capacities. So they're both back at their alma mater. They didn't know each other as students very well, but definitely at least one way knew of each other.

And I'm trying something that I'm kind of puzzling through right now with a--it's not quite, I would say, a dual timeline, but I am jumping back and forth between my protagonist in the present tense, what's going on in his life, what has brought him to his alma mater, and what's going on there now that he's working there and reconnecting or connecting for the first time with this person that he had that awareness of when he was in school. And then flashing back to full scenes in his past that got him there. And initially, it's kind of starting, you could follow a little bit of a chronological path of going back and forth between what's going on in his present and then a parallel chronology in the flashbacks. I don't think I'm going to keep the flashbacks strictly chronological. I think they're going to start to jump around a little bit. But kind of my inspiration for wanting to do this--and if you, if you listened to my episode with Lauren Wilkinson last month, when we were talking about being inspired by other writers, it was the approach that Ann Patchett took in her most recent novel, Tom Lake. Which if you haven't read, I absolutely adored it. So if you're looking for something to read, it's a great novel. But she did kind of these dual timelines where it was going chronologically in the past and also chronologically in the present. And kind of, I found as a reader used really effectively at times flashing in and out of the past into the present and vice versa that it really caught my attention in a way, you know, not setting it up like, And then this one time 20 years ago, this thing happened. Just the execution of the writing on the page and how she used the line breaks and things like that. I mean, this is on a very, you know, very logistical level, just how she's managing her paragraphs. It really caught my attention and really immersed me in the story even more. So I wanted to try my hand at something like that. Again, it's not quite the same thing, but inspired by the way she was breaking up the narrative and kind of moving us back and forth in time as a way to, in her case, it's she's telling a story to her daughters. In my case here, I'm really just trying to give you insight into how this character ended up where he did and how it's affecting his present relationships and how he thinks about the world and so on and so forth. And I'm really excited about it. Like I said, I've written two chapters of it at this point. I'm excited without knowing 100% if it's working. I feel pretty good (laughs) that it is working. I'm not entirely sure if it will keep working for the length of an entire book. So that part is--it's a little shaky right now (laughs), but I'm enjoying trying to figure it out. And it is having that desired effect to a large degree that I wanted in this kind of in-between time that I find myself in right now. Because I could spend a lot of my time agonizing about what's the reception of this new book going to be when it comes out? Will people like it? Will they hate it? Even worse, will they not notice it? That's, you know, something as a writer, you, you know, you are in some ways the center of your own universe when you're working on these things and putting them together. And you think every decision you make about every word on every page, you know, is this momentous thing and how are people going to react to this? How are people going to react to that? Um (laughs), quite often, uh, there's just not going to react. And that's, uh, that's a hard thing to wrap your mind around too.

So I do find it really productive for myself to be engaged in and starting this new project so that I'm not spending all my time thinking about what's going to happen next with the book that I already finished. And I certainly have high hopes that this next one will be something that will be published and that you'll all be reading at some point. But there's value no matter what happens with it to be starting now and to be working on it now and just kind of getting into the psyche, trying to get into the psyche, the motivations of these new characters. Which is hard when you-- I've talked about this with a few of my guests, like, you know, you write a couple of books and you think, Oh, it's, I should be good at this now. It should be easy. Now when I go to start, I'll know exactly where to start. I'll know exactly what is, what they're going to talk about, who they're going to interact with, how this is going to take shape. And it's just not the case. You're starting from a blank figurative sheet of paper all over again. And knowing where to start isn't as simple as just sitting down at your computer and saying, OK, this is where it starts, and I know that because I've done this before. Each book is its own thing. And trying to understand where to start it, how to get into it, what's going to be compelling to readers, what's going to work for me as a writer, what's going to resonate with me as a writer, what's going to resonate with you as a reader--it's a difficult thing. And just because you've done it once or twice or five times or whatever it is doesn't make it easy to start over again, especially when you feel like, oh, I did all this work to get this thing done. And now I'm going all the way back to zero and trying to build all the way back up again.

But I find so much value and so much comfort in that and what it gives me in my life and just the way it's able to engage my brain, frankly. There's an art piece to it, which I love making it, and there's a good-for-me piece in which I love letting my brain engage with it.

So I realize this probably, I don't know how much this was a point A to B to C conversation. I feel like I kinda maybe went in circles at different points, but I hope if you are listening to this and you have felt any of these, you know, kind of emotions or even just, you know, the experience of being a person in the world where, um, there are things that scare you in the world. I hope you find something in here that resonates with you. Cause maybe for you, it's not writing. Maybe it's another thing that you do in your life that is a passion that you have or that you just find engages your mind in the way other things don't. So I hope you're all doing well out there and thank you for listening and I will talk to you soon.

Ted 16:19:
(voiceover) Thanks for listening. New episodes of Working Drafts come out on the 15h of the month. For more, visit my website, thetedfox.com.