Episode 14 - I'M BACK! *Big Update Episode*

I’m back to posting regularly! Find out how in this episode, and also what I’ve been up to writing wise since the last episode. (Hint: a lot of writing)

Mentioned in this episode:

• ​Follow me on Instagram
• ​Subscribe to my newsletter
• ​The Shining by Stephen King
• ​The Haunting of Hill House, a series by Mike Flanagan
• ​Read my published flash fiction piece “Five is better than three is better than four?”

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Recorded on March 2nd, 2026

This podcast is recorded and edited using Descript: https://www.descript.com?lmref=V_4suQ

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Intro music credit: “Cinematic Cello Arpeggio Trailer” by Gregor Quendel, found on Free Sound https://freesound.org/s/555995/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome back to Lefty Obeys Writing Podcast. I'm so excited to be here today, to be back today finally after so long. And I'm not going to wait any longer. And right away I'm gonna jump in and tell you I'll be back to regular posting. So an episode every week, except for when my kids are home on Mondays. But other than that, there will be an episode every week coming up, and I'm so excited. So I'm gonna let you know everything about it. I'm going to do it a bit differently for this episode. So it's basically going to be just an update and just letting you know where I am. Why am I back to posting every week? This is so exciting. Also, where I am in my writing journey, what I've been doing since the last episodes, which I think was last summer. So, what have I been up to during that time? There will be no topic for this podcast. It will be like just the major update. But I'm sure it will be fun for you to catch up with me and know where I am. So the reason why I'm back to posting every single week is because something happened in my personal life that at first seemed like it was like the worst thing that could happen. Not the worst thing, but it was like a big inconvenience in my life, and I used it to turn things around and made it into an amazing thing. As you might know, I have a full-time day job. Writing is my dream, writing is one I want to do full-time, but right now it doesn't bring me any money. So as I'm building this career, I have a full-time day job in a library, which I love this job. It's allowing me to support myself while I'm building this dream. Since the pandemic, like many companies, we had the option of working from home and we had to go two days to the office. And they decided all of a sudden of bringing us back three days at the office. Now, you might say, this is not a big deal. You used to be five days at the office, but I didn't take it that way at all when the news dropped. Because mainly it meant cutting back time that I have right now for myself and putting it into commute time. That's time that I used to do my workout, that I do to write, that I do to post on social media. This is an important time for me, like this two hours a day that I get to have because I'm working for a moment, I don't have to commute to work. Although I try to make the most out of my commute time because it's in the bus, I try to read, I try to write, but most of the time the bus just makes me so tired and I don't manage to do anything other than just sleep in the bus. Most of the time, that's just what happened. So when the news dropped in, I was really, really frustrated to go back three days at the office. But with changing it, they also changed the way they were formulating things. And instead of being you have to be two days at the office, it became you have two days a week that you can work from home. What that meant is it created sort of a little loophole that we didn't have before, whereas if we were to take a day off every week, it meant that we could go at the office still only two days a week, because if we have a day off, we still have our rights to our two days working from home. The day before it was supposed to start, I was really discouraged about the change. I didn't want it. And my partner just said, why don't you work just four days? We have this option at my day job to work only four days a week. This is something we can ask for, and most of the time it's something that is accepted by our boss. We get a pay cut, of course, because we work less hours, but it's an option that we have. And I know I'm so privileged to have this option because it's not all jobs work for this. So we are privileged to have this. My partner was like, if you take this option of working only four days a week, it will allow you to still go only two days a week at the office, and also it will give you an entire day to dedicate on your writing. At first, I was like, it's impossible, like I could never make it work financially. And then he was like, then just go and look and see, which I did. And I realized that if I was to cut back the money I put on the side for travel, which is traveling is one of the most beloved things to me. So my budget is aligned with that reality of traveling being so important to me. But at the same time, so is my writing, so is my reading career, and so is my is my daily sanity. So I realized that I was in a privileged position where I could lower the amount of money I was putting on the side for travel, and that I could, in doing this, make some room to work only four days a week. So I'm gonna be honest, at first, when I decided, okay, I'm going to do this, it was really, really scary because like we're just wired to make a certain amount of money, and I think every time we think about lowering it, even though we know it's for a good reason, it's just scary. It just is. But I decided to do it. I jumped in and here I am. Once the decision was taken, like I knew it was the right thing. It is my second Monday of working for myself on Mondays instead of for someone else. And I have to say I took the absolute best decision. At first, I was reluctant again taking that decision because this option has been available for me since I started working at my current day job. Like it was always there. But what I did was lowering my hours by 30 minutes a day. Because I was like, if I have 30 minutes every single day to dedicate to my writing, like it will be more consistent and I will be able to do more. And I always thought that if I were to have an entire day, I wouldn't write much more. So I was like, I will not be capable of writing seven hours a day anyway, so it's not worth it. But what I realized this new year, when 2026 came around, I wanted to do some bold moves and really took a step forward into the direction of the life that I want, which is be a full-time writer. This is what I want to do. But I also started to have all those other ideas of how I wanted to give back to the writing community because I was like, this podcast is a way of doing it. I love this podcast, I've always loved doing it. But I wanted to do more, and I kept on thinking about a little lefty who started writing at 16 years old and then in her 20s. I've been writing for over 15 years. Like, I remember all the challenges that I went through as I was building my craft, learning what it was, this industry, writing a book. I thought back to all of this and I was like, there are people like Rachel Heron, I will never mention her enough, Jay Thorne, Joanna Penn, Zach Boenan, all those people whose podcasts I listened to, and all the books I read, writers sharing their journey, sharing the lesson they had learned along the way, sharing their tips and tricks in how they managed to get where they were, and how much that had been incredibly helpful to me. And I really felt this desire inside of me to do the same. Because while I am not like at the peak of my career or at the career I want to be at, or even like my true career hasn't even started, I can look back and see how far I've come. And I will cover this again a bit later, but I know that I have knowledge to share, that if I could go back in time and talk to my younger self, myself and my 20s, I would have so much I could give her to help her along the way and save her some time and energy, just piecing out all the pieces of the puzzle. And also, since I've been working on my mindset a lot, working, like doing so much personal development and manifesting and everything, I've really peeled back so much layer of low self-worth, self-doubt, the confidence in myself. I build it so much that right now I'm just at a point where it's so much easier to write. It's so much easier to have fun writing, to spend long time writing. Combined with this desire to share also what I've learned along the way. Suddenly the entire day to dedicate to all of this made so much sense. Because with my current schedule, while it allows me to write consistently, it doesn't give me space to do the other things that I love to do, like posting on social media, which is like genuinely something I love to do, because I'm always thinking if my post can help one writer, like it's worth doing. I had a hard time with that because also, like almost everyone, I fall into the trap of like wishing I would go viral, but again, it was about understanding what was behind that. But anyway, this is a whole other episode. But I love sharing on social media because I know that it can help other people. I wanted to do this podcast again because I know that it can help you. And I also wanted to do something else, which is create mini course, small course, low-cost course, really directed toward the topics that I feel I've mastered. I haven't mastered at all, absolutely not. But there is some aspect that I know in my 15 years of writing that I finally managed to master. And those are the things I want to create really dedicated course on those particular topics that I know I can really help other writers and that I also know will make a big difference. And so those Mondays are also about this, about creating those course. The course that I have planned that I started working on are how to write consistently. Because if you're following me on Instagram, by the way, I will put the link in the show notes. If you don't follow me on Instagram, go over there, follow me. But if you follow me on Instagram and you've seen my stories, you've seen my writing journal on a short story that we'll tell you later, you know by now that this is something that I now do easily is write consistently. And this is something that I used to struggle with so much in my 20s. Like I would be writing for a day, two days, and then I wouldn't be writing for weeks, and then I would come back, write for a week, and then I would stop for months. Like it was the biggest struggle of my twenties, to be honest, was to write consistently. I was always thinking about writing, I was always talking about writing, always saying to anyone who would hear it that I would be a writer one day, but I wasn't writing. And it was actually my partner. Sometimes we just need those people who tell us the truth straight away. It was my partner at some point who was just tired of hearing me talk about it, but not doing it. So he said, if you want to be a writer, you gotta write. That was hard to hear, but he was so right, and I'm so grateful that he said that. Because I know what it's like to have a hard time writing consistently, and because I know now that it's possible to write consistently, and I've been pregnant two times, I had newborn two times, I've been super sick, I've been changing jobs, and all that time during all those years, I always kept on writing consistently. And I'm not saying every day, I've I actually never in my life ever wrote every single day. Writing consistently is about having a routine of writing that you follow through. And let me tell you, my mental health is so much better since I have like this routine established. So this is going to be the first course I will create. And the second one will be how to finish a novel that works. Another thing that I struggled with for over 10 years, I was starting novels, I wasn't finishing the first draft. I finally finished the first draft. You can go back and listen to my first episode, second episode, the one where I talk about my writing journey. You will hear all about it. But I was starting books, I was writing the first draft, but I could never finish it. And when I mean finish a novel that works, it's a novel that is complete enough that at all the moving pieces that I've done everything that I can to make as good as I can so that I can then submit it to publishing professional or publish if you want to go the indie route. This took me 10 years to figure out this process of how do you finish a novel that works. Like I'm thinking step by step, really practical. All the pieces are there. And what I've realized in all those years that I've been in this writing universe, following so many different people here, listening to so many podcasts of people sharing their process. What I've realized is penser, plotters, anywhere in between the spectrum, we all do the same things. We just don't do them all in the same order, and we don't do them all with the same level of intentionality. So some people will do some steps more instinctively, subconsciously. They will not have like to sit down and write it, and other steps, other people they need to sit down and really actively think about it and write it down. But at the end of the day, we're all doing the exact same thing, just not in the same order and not in the same level of intentionality. So that's why my course, the way that I designed it, it will be applicable to any writer and it will allow you to know okay, what are the steps and which are the orders that I can put them in to then be certain when I'm done that I've covered everything I'm supposed to do to make a novel that works. So this course will work for every writer. And if you have been struggling with finishing a book, or if you have finished a book, but you are like, I feel like something's missing, but I have absolutely no idea how am I supposed to find what doesn't work and then make it work, and you just say, Oh, I'm gonna just start another one, and basically you're in the cycle of never finishing something, or you finished something, you felt like it wasn't maybe fully there, but you were like, Okay, I don't know what to do, so I will just query it, and your querying hasn't been successful. If this is any of you in the treaty situation that I've just mentioned, this course is for you and it will really help you. So, as you can see, I'm super excited about those course because I I really want to do them in a way that if I went back and gave them to myself when I was 20 years old, there is still a learning curve because like the actual craft takes time, but at least I would know the steps. I would know what I'm supposed to do, and I will feel confident in knowing what I'm supposed to do instead of piecing out and like you can find all this information online. That's how I did it in books and in podcasts and in YouTube videos, but that's what I did, and that's why it took me 15 years to get to a place where I had a working book and I could submit it to agent and then sign with my agent. But what I want to do is save you the time of having to piece it all together and just give to you the roadmap that then you can follow. And also, it's really important to me to keep it as low cost as possible whilst being valuable to you and to me. Because I know that when we're starting out with our writing, like most of the time we either don't have or don't feel like we can invest that much in our writing career. And I see those amazing courses out there, and it always saddened me when the price point is like super high and like thousands of dollars, because I'm like, it's not everyone who has the privilege and the capacity to be capable of investing that much into their writing. So that's why it's super important to me to keep it low cost. If those course seems like something you would love to be a part of, go in the show notes, subscribe to my newsletter because this is going to be the first place I will tell people about my course when they are ready. And what I have planned is for the first round of students. Uh so it will be evergreen, always available. I don't want to do this lunch thing putting pressure on people. Like, I don't want to pressure anyone to buy those. So this is really to help you. But the first round, I just want to test it out basically. So I will offer it even lower for like maybe, I don't know, a month or two months. I will see. Just so that people can get in, can try the course and tell me if there's something that's like a better reader, better student phase, just to tell me if there is things I could maybe elaborate on or some elements that aren't clear, things like that. And then I will update the course. The first people who get in will get also the updated course, and then that's when I will talk about it like on my social media and start to promote it more widely with a price a little increase. Like I said, like I will not, I don't want to price this like in hundreds of dollars. Like, this is not my goal at all. But it will be a little higher and it will be the real price that it will stay. So if you want to be in the first to get in, get it at the best price, and also be able to contribute to the course in some way, then go write in my newsletter and you will be the first one to know about those classes when they are ready. Like I have no idea when they are going to be ready, but it's in the works absolutely, and I'm really excited about them. I think you can see it. Wait, wait, wait. So that was it about why I'm back to posting regularly and what's coming up for writers, basically. But my main focus, as it has always been, and as it will always be, is toward writing. So this is my writing update. So in the past six months, I still have been on submission with my first book. It's still I've been going really great with my agent, and we we are still receiving answers. So even though it's been a year and two months since we've been on submission, like the reading times are just long. This is just what it is, but it's going actually really great. We've had some amazing feedback and we're still out with many incredible editors. So this is still going well when we talk about submission. So we'll see how it goes when I can tell you more. But during the last year and two months that we've been out on submission, I've been working on my new novel, which is what I recommend anyone to do when you're waiting. Don't be waiting, be writing. So I've been working on my new horror novel, and I'm so excited to say that I finished the first draft of my new novel. I finished it in December, and not only did I finish the first draft, but it's actually at the level of my third draft of my first novel. So my first novel, the one that I got my agent with, who is now out on submission, it took me five years to write this novel because I was still a lot in the learning process. But I've seen with this novel now, with my new novel, that a lot of the things I was learning, I've integrated them and I can manage to do like more instinctively, like I was saying before. So the process does really go faster, which is really, really, really exciting. The draft that I finished now is the equivalent of my third draft of my first novel. So a way much more working draft than I had. And actually, I shared it with some better readers in December and my agent because this stage for me of equivalent of the third draft is where everything, like story-wise, globally wise, that's not a word, that's okay. Uh, the world building, the characters, the theme, like everything is there. The only thing that's missing that's left to do for me is the line editing work. But before I go back and I start doing this micro work on a line level, I want to be sure that there isn't like something big that I'm not missing. I want to make sure all the scenes are there at the right spot. So that's why I like to share it just before I do the line editing work to have that feedback. So I send it to some better reader friends. Some friends have already come back to me. They have finished it, and I'm so excited. Like, I really love this book. I'm waiting on my agent. She should get back to me soon. So once I hear back from my agent, I will start addressing the thing that she mentioned and also doing the line editing work. So that's where I am with this novel. I love it so much. It took me a year to do what I had done in three years before. So it's actually exciting to see that the process is going faster. But I also had with this novel the most fun I ever had writing a novel. And that was a great feeling of just having fun with it, of just playing around with it and discovering this story, discovering those characters that's setting the world building. I love it so much. So it had been a really fun ride. So that's where I am. In the meantime, so I took some time off in December for like just all the days. And then I was back to writing in January because I just love writing. I just have to always be writing just because I love it. So what I started to work on in January is a short story for the Overlook Anthology. The deadline to submit the story was March 1st, so yesterday, as I'm recording this, so you can sadly no longer participate if you wish to. Probably my favorite book ever, all around. It's the book that made me want to be the writer that I am today. It's a book that represents the sort of horror writer that I am. I read this book so many times. I've analyzed it, I've annotated it. I have it here for those who see the videos. You can see my my beautiful copy of The Shining with all like the notes and everything. It's it's it's starting to like fall apart, but I don't care. I just I love this book so much and this universe so much. And when I saw that there was going to be an anthology of stories taking place in the Overlook prior to the arrival of the Torrens family in the novel The Shining, I was just like, I have to participate. So this is an anthology edited by Jamie Flanagan, the sibling of Mike Flanagan, my ultimate filmmaker that I admire the most and that I love what he's done. I think my favorite story ever is The Aunting of Hill House. Mike Flanagan's version of it is just like I love this series so much. Like I couldn't, I couldn't tell you how much I love it. So of course, like having just the slight possibility that Mike Flanagan might read my story, it was like I need to write it. And there's going to be also all those amazing horror writers already announced to be part of this anthology. So it's like having a story published in this anthology just puts your name on the horror scene. And I was like, up front, they were super open about saying that maybe there's going to be maybe one or maybe two stories from this open call that would end up in the ontology. So they were super open about like the chance of getting here are super slim. But I was like, I just have to try it. So at first I wasn't sure, I was like, I need an idea, and then an idea came, a beautiful idea. Talked it over it with my father. My father also loved the shining, and he got super excited. I was telling him about my idea, so he really motivated me to say, okay, I should really do this. And it was also a challenge to myself because I had the idea over the holidays, and the submission deadline was March 1st. So it meant two months to write uh 5,000 word short stories. And the last time I wrote a short story of this length, it took me years to finish. So it was a big challenge to say, okay, I'm going to finish this in two months. But because I had just finished writing my novel faster, I was like, okay, I think my craft and my skills I've developed enough that I could be really capable of writing and finishing this short story in such a short amount of time. And also I had nothing else to write. So it was like, okay, let's just try it. I documented it all on TikTok and Instagram in Reels. So if you are curious, you can go back and check. I was writing always day one of writing a short story for the Overlook Anthology. So we can follow the entire process if you're curious. But yes, I managed to do it. I absolutely love the story. I'm really proud of it. Uh, my friends helped me to make it even stronger, and I'm just so excited. This is a story that could not exist outside of the overlook lore. So if it's not accepted, I won't be able to publish it anywhere, but that's okay. I'm just really proud, really happy, really excited that I was capable of doing it, and that now it's out to the editors and the readers. And so excited. So we'll see about that. But I had fun doing it, which is like the most important thing, and also it proved me that I can write faster now and produce a story of value because that was always like my fear was that if I write something faster, it will be of less quality. But I just proved to myself that no, like I can still put in place everything that I need to in even a shorter amount of time. So that's about what I had been doing. And now, since I'm still waiting to go back to my novel, and since you know me, I still want to be writing. So there is a short story. I've been shopping around for some time, still shopping it around. I still have faith that I will find a place for this story in a market, but it is it's in English, of course. And I also speak French and write French, and I also would love to be a translator too, a French-English translator. So I was like, this could be a great opportunity for me to dabble into translation and also maybe to uh give this story a shot to reach more people. So there is a French contest for speculative fiction, a speculative magazine that runs this contest every year. So I've decided I will translate my own story and submit it to this contest, and we'll see what happens. But it's another challenge for me, another way to start something new, and we'll see. So I will be a bit working on this, and also in the meantime, there is a short story that I worked on while I was querying. So eight months of querying, eight months of working on that short story, around 5,000 words, too. Like just like the Overlook story. I worked on it for eight months, and I have a first draft done and the plan of the second draft. So, what I want to do is go back, see what I have, because I still love the story. I still know that this story has something to say that I want to say, so I will go back and edit the draft that I have and maybe rewrite it. I don't know, but I think I will also work on this. It will give me another story to submit. And while I'm talking about submission, I also published a story. I almost forgot about it. So it's a flash fiction story. I decided, I think it was back in the summer, I was like, if I want to get more yes, I have to get more no's. So I started submitting heavily with the short story that I had available to Marquettes. I actually did something I was super proud of, which is I submitted to 56 markets in 2025, and it was more than all the submissions I had made in a three previous years. So that was a big goal of mine. I did get lots of no. I did receive lots of rejection, but also more personal rejection that I've ever had. Like I received so often the I love the story, but I just didn't have a place for it. I love the story, but it's just not exactly right for us. So like I know that my writing is on point, it's where it's at. It's not about quality or craft or skills anymore. It's really about finding the right markets for it and maybe making a name for myself in this industry. So at some point I was like no longer capable of enduring any more rejection. So I said, okay, let me take this really small piece of flash fiction, let me find magazines that respond quickly, that are free to submit, and that don't pay, and that have high acceptance rate. And let's just give myself a little bit, basically. So that's what I did. And three days later, I had an acceptance for this story. So I will put a link also in the show notes if you're curious. It's not horror, it's more of a personal taste than what I usually write. But I had fun with it, and I also shared it in a little Facebook group in my town, and I've got some lovely message of people who read it, and that made me feel good because I was really feeling like at this point in my career, what's missing is sharing my writing with readers, actual readers, not just my friends who accept to read me. And this story getting published accomplished that, and for that I'm super grateful. And also, out of that, an amazing opportunity arrived. I cannot talk about it for now, but it's a writing opportunity, it's in French, and at some point I will tell you all about it. But sometimes, like, you don't know what just a little thing can lead to. So stay tuned for that. But exciting things are on the works, also on the French writing side of things. So I published this thing, and uh I want to keep on submitting. I'm submitting to markets that pay less and less, and even like for this story, the one that I want to translate. Now I'm at the market that pay like token, it's just like $25, $10. I'm trying that, and if they all reject it, I will go to free markets too. I just want to share it because I love it. So I keep on submitting, and at some point I will be able to share it with you because I know it's a good story and I want to share it. That's it for me. That's all the update letting you know where I am, where things are going. So I won't be back next week because the kids have a day off next Monday, so I won't be able to record, but I will be back in two weeks with a topic episode, I don't know which one, and some update in those two weeks, like what I have been up to. So if you like following me, if you like hearing me talk about my writing, and if you want to learn from the lessons I've learned along the way and the lawn inch I've gained along the way, follow this podcast, subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to to know when a new episode comes up. And you can also, like I said, subscribe to my newsletter if you want to be the first to know everything that comes out in my writing journey and the resource I will have for writers. So thank you so much for being here and see you next time.