Jimbo Paris Show #30- A Very Important Meeting (April Dávila)

Hello, I'm Jimbo Paris, and welcome to the Jimbo Paris show. And today, we have April. Davila. Oh, how are you doing today?

Hi, I'm good. Thanks for having me. How are you?

So can you sort of begin by giving me a bit of a brief summary about yourself who you are, what you're about, and what your message is?

Sure. So I'm April Davina. I'm a fiction writer and a meditation teacher. And my first novel came out about a week before the shutdown for the pandemic happened. So it was terrible timing in terms of launching my first book, but it's actually been a wonderful year because the book got good reviews, it found an audience it's it's actually, I just found out, it won the Willa Katha award for women writing the West. So that's like brand new hot off the presses news. So it's been a good book a good year for the book. But then also because of the pandemic, I joined forces with this friend to create this online, mindful writers platform, we were both writers who would meditate a little bit before we started writing. And then we had invited friends to join us on the Zoom. And we were each doing this independently, we didn't know you're both doing it. And then we learned that we were both hosting these mindful writing groups. And so we got together and started a group called the very important meeting, where we lead hour long meetings that start with a 10 minute meditation, go into a 45 minute writing session, and then have a little bit of just writer hangout time at the end. And to start something like that in the middle of the pandemic was not only just a lifeline in terms of my writing, but also just for my social well being, you know, to be able to talk to other writers, to be able to connect with other people just in general, was just a wonderful thing to be able to do in the midst of the pandemic.

Oh, it's very interesting. And we will definitely get more into mindful writing. But at the moment, can you please sort of tell me about what sort of motivated you to write this book and where the title came from? And yeah, the story came about,

let me show it. Let me hold it up here. I have got a copy on hand. There it is. So 142 Ostriches. Yeah, the cover is lovely. The woman drawn by Dawn is her Instagram handle. She's a wonderful artist. So the book is actually it's a story about a young woman who inherits her grandmother's ostrich farm in the Mojave Desert. And when she when the family descends for the funeral, all the skeletons come out of the closet, because the kids are pissed off at being Passover for the inheritance. And there's some substance abuse issues in the family. And so the story is really much more about the family drama, the death of the matriarch how everybody is, is dealing with that. And then this young woman Talulah, her desire to actually leave the farm. She didn't want to inherit it. But I loved the ostrich farm as a setting for a story about family. Because I just feel like family is full of contradictions. I actually said the way it came about is that I was working on a travel piece about an ostrich farm in the Mojave. And I drove out there and I've been kind of thinking about the novel because I wasn't sure where I wanted to set it. It when it started. It was very loosely based on my mom's experiences growing up on a dairy farm. But I didn't want to write a dairy farm. First of all, I don't know anything about dairy farming, despite my mother having grown up on a dairy farm and dairy farming is the kind of thing that enough people do it that they're going to really know if you get it wrong. Whereas ostrich farming, there just aren't that many ostrich farmers and I did take a few little liberties with the birds for literary artistic sake. But anyway, so the story was loosely based on a dairy farm. I didn't really want to have a dairy farm. I love the desert. I was working on this travel piece. And I went out to the ostrich farm. And the minute I stepped out of my car and saw the birds I thought, well, this would be a perfect setting for a family a story about family because they're these like wonderfully graceful and beautiful birds, but they have this gnarly two toed claw that can just get you like could like they'll in one kick they can cut you like from sternum to hip bone. And just like your guts fall out, it's terrifying. They have these beautiful long eyelashes. And then this really scaly, dry, ugly skin. I just like walking contradictions. And I felt like family is kind of I guess the real life version of walking contradiction. You know, you can love someone intensely and miss them, but then they come to visit and you're like, Oh, I kind of wish they would just go now or be really angry at someone and still really miss them. There's just there's so much about family that can feel contradictory and really pushes us to be able to hold two realities at the same time. And so that's why I set it on the ostrich farm but it really is mostly a story about the family. The ostriches play a role but mostly it's it's about playing

Really, when you were writing this book, what were sort of the challenges you had to overcome? Oh, that's such a good question.

Because it was my first novel, I think the biggest hurdle was simply learning how to write a book. I had this instinct, I wanted to write a novel. I was in a master's program. And you can learn a lot in school, but it's kind of like learning to swim, right? You have to jump in and give it a go. And so I actually blogged about it, I set up the blog, when I started writing the novel. It took me eight years to finish the novel. And what I blogged about were all my missteps, all the things that I kind of got wrong along the way, or things that, you know, I wouldn't go to a seminar, webinar or conference and someone would say, just some offhand comment about like, oh, you know, they started it with a dream sequence, I can't stand that. And I don't be like, Oh, crap. And I'd run home and be like, you take out the dream sequence that I started the book with, or, I mean, that's just an example. But there's so many things that I came to understand about writing a novel. And then every time I realized something, I would write a blog post about it. So the blog really became this kind of diary of, of everything I learned about how to write a book as I was going along. And that was the biggest challenge is just really craft. And you can't really know what you need to know until you get into it. And so I've really made a practice of continuing to read books on writing, go to conferences, I love going to offer readings, I mean, of course, they're all online now used to love going in person, because you'll always learn a little something, or someone will mention a misstep that they took along the way. And you're like, Oh, yeah. And so just hearing from other authors. I think aside from just learning to write a book, the biggest challenge that I had was I set the story is interesting. When I when I opened the story, again, I mentioned that it was loosely based on my mom's story growing up on a dairy farm. And my mom's story was really about her, surrounded by all these men who were different degrees of abusive in her life. And as the story became more my story and less her story, the characters kind of one by one became women in the book. So uncle, Uncle Chris became aunt Christine and grandpa, Hank became grandma Helen. And slowly, slowly, the story that I wanted to tell that I realized was really more about the women on this farm. Because my experience growing up was the opposite of my mother's whereas I had almost no men in my life growing up, my dad was never around, didn't have any uncles like, even my friends, dads weren't a rally, there were really no men in my growing up. And so as I started to recognize that I had to let go of my mom's story and tell my own story, it became much more women centric, which I thought was a really interesting shift, and an interesting opportunity to dig into my own biases as a writer, because there are men in my story, and I had to I had to learn how to have my characters interact with them in an authentic way, which wasn't too hard. I mean, I have men and I'm married, I have a son, I There are men in my life now. But it was it became a very interesting, introspective thing. As I as I started to recognize that it was my story and not my mother's

I find it interesting. Are you actually sort of absorbed information as an author, you know, your blogs, your network? You sat around and worked with people? Do you think that's a common characteristic that a lot of authors have? Does that quality make you stand out amongst authors in the way you pursue improving yourself?

I think all authors to some degree, I should say, fiction writers, it doesn't seem to be as true for nonfiction writers, but fiction writers tend to shy away from crowds, we tend to not be terribly social creatures by nature. And so for me, one of the the ways the thing I had to do to allow myself to, to do the things you listed, like going to readings and continuing to learn, was to give myself permission to just be kind of a either a nerd or a goof, or whatever the word is that like someone might label me with. And just embrace the fact that like, I think everyone should keep learning like their whole lives. Like I hope to still be asking questions when I'm in my 60s and 70s writing novels. For me, the biggest pitfall would be to pretend that I knew at all which is kind of the instinct it's like a self defensive instinct, right to try to not look like we don't know what we're doing, in terms of whether it sets me apart, I feel like the writers I idolize have the same kind of curiosity. They are the kind of writers who you'll see not only at their own readings, but at other people's readings, or they volunteer to be the host at a reading, that they that they push through the initial discomfort that I think most people feel and being in front of a crowd to, because that's part of being a writing in a writing community, you can't really be in a community of any kind if you're not willing to put yourself out there. And I think that can be challenging for writers and creative people in general. But that if we can push through that there's so much to be gained from community, in any artists, well, probably any endeavor at all, but my experience is more in the creative realm. You know, you talk a lot about fiction writers and how they're sort of similar in the same way they like to work. In a more introverted fashion. Do you think most fiction writers operate the same? I'm trying to find a quality that makes you stand out, because obviously, you do have some unique qualities. Well, okay, so how fiction writers work, I think there are a lot of different ways that fiction writers work. There are some fiction writers who like don't have social media accounts, and go off into the mountains and write their beautiful novel and put it out into the world. And for whatever reason, there are huge hits. And that's, you know, they don't, to engage in the social side of things. On a larger scale would be a distraction, I think there's a place for distraction. For me, I write in the mornings, I get up early, I write, I host these online writing mindful writing groups in the morning, so that I have some community with me in my writing. And right around lunchtime is when my creative energy starts to fizzle. At which point, you know, I write my blog posts, I get on Twitter, I, I enjoy kind of the banter of of all of that. And I recognize that it's distraction. But I think there's a place for distraction. And I think it can be a fun way to kill a little time that where it becomes a problem is when there's too much of it. But in terms of what sets me apart as a writer, the thing that I've come to understand it as being is is the way that mindfulness has affected my writing and changed it really, I can see a direct correlation between when I started meditating regularly and when my writing career started to take off, because I was writing for years and years and years blogging about how all the things I was doing wrong. But it wasn't until I started being really honest with myself about my writing. And mindfulness was a part of that, that I was able to see what was good and what wasn't. And then I was able to kind of target in on the things that weren't working. And because I am a more social person, I have some of these resources at hand. I do have people I can ask for advice. I have shelves of books on writing, I collect them. If I had to choose one thing that makes me different from most writers, it's that mindfulness piece,

it is your network to because I've seen this with a lot of writers, but they tend to be a lot more to themselves. And you're sort of the type of person where you like to engage and communicate with different people. Yeah, definitely that milestone as far as well. Why do you think mindfulness helps you? And what do you sort of? Do in a sense for that?

Yeah, it's a good question, because it sounds very vague when you when I say it, but when I noticed the correlation, I actually took some time to think about it, and journal about it, because that's how I think, and I found some very concrete, very teachable things that mindfulness helped me do. The first I think, most important is that it helped me to quiet my inner critic. So so many times when writers sit down to write and myself included, you write a sentence and delete it and write a sentence and you delete it. And that is whether you recognize it or not, there's a little voice in your head saying, Well, that was that was shit. You should just delete that. That was your awful Oh, you call yourself a writer like that narrative starts up as soon as we start to put words on the page, there's that little voice, it's like, no, you should delete that that was bad, or that's not good enough. And if you can't recognize that, it'll, it'll control you. And you'll never get past the first sentence because you'll keep deleting and rewriting and deleting and rewriting. And so for me, one of the biggest changes was being able to recognize that voice again, mindfulness, simply being aware of where your mind is going. No religious connotations, no anything like that, but simply awareness of your mind. And so when that little voice kicks in, just saying like, Okay, thanks for your opinion. You can go sit down now and I'm just gonna keep writing not allowed me to get words on the page. And then I'm a big believer in crappy first drafts. I mean, I don't know how anyone can, writes anything beautifully. The first time some writers claim to do it, I think they're bullshitting, I really don't think anyone can actually get it right on the first pass, you have to get it on the page. And then when you're done with that draft, then you have to reengage that critic, and you have to take everything that you've learned about craft, and let that critic just go wild. Like when I finish a draft, I put it in a drawer, and I step away from it for a while. And then when I come back, I will actively engaged my inner critic by pretending that the draft was given to me by like, somebody I don't like very much, and that they're kind of wasting my time with this. And it better be good. And I just pretend like I read my own manuscript with that mentality of like, better be good, please don't waste my time. And as I read it, and with that, like super critical brain engaged, then I can I see all kinds of stuff I missed on the first pass. And so I make notes on the paper, and I go through the whole thing, and then I make all those edits, I stick it in the drawer, and I go away for a month, and I come back, and I do it again. But I think if you can't quiet that inner critic enough to get that first draft on the page, and you just you're never gonna get anywhere, you can't, how can you have to have words on the page if you can edit a pile of poo until like a beautiful manuscript, but you can't edit a blank page. And that's actually the best writing advice I ever got was you can't edit a blank page, just get it on the page, and then go back and make it good. So that switch was one of the things that mindfulness allowed me to do it also, there's a meditation practice called mindfulness of emotion that helped me to explore you, basically, you use it to evoke an emotion. So if I'm writing a scene, or someone is angry, remembering like, just getting quiet for a moment, remembering a time when I was really pissed off, and feeling into like, well, what does it really feel like? Like, what is the experience of being pissed off in the moment? Because if I just right, oh, she was mad, that's a very boring sentence, you want to be able to explain, like her pulse is kicked up and sweating. And she not sure what she should say. And you have to get into all the details of the experience that character is having in that moment. And I mean, there's so many, I actually I've just putting together there's an online course I'm putting together right now, I'm calling it the six week mindful writer challenge, where each week is actually one of these specific lessons that integrates mindfulness and writing, to pretty extent, extensive degree, exploring the topics. And so there's, there's a lot there. I can talk more about it, if you want me to, I don't know how deep you want to go.

If you have a website, we could share it right now.

Yeah, so it's just my name, aprildavila.com. And actually, there's a tab at the top for mindful writing. I don't have the class listed there yet, because it's not actually up, but it will be soon. So if folks are interested, they can shoot me an email through my contact form or whatever get on the on the list for when it's when it's available. So let's say we talked about the inner critic, when to engage it, when to tell it to sit down the mindfulness of emotion thing to build the characters. There's a method of walking meditation, where, again, just trying to be aware of the present moment, what is actually in front of you and walking through space, and what do you really see. So to go to a space, say, I'm writing a scene in a mall, to actually go to the mall, not as a shopper. I don't know about you, I hate Mall. So when I'm there, I'm like, laser focus, like, get there, get out, not battling in the mall. But if I need to write a scene in the mall, I can go and just walk slowly. And notice what do you hear? What do you smell? What do you not just what you see, but all of your senses engaged in that process. And, and it allows you to write a scene that that is much more full in its descriptions of its setting. And then once you've written that scene, and this is part of the of the bringing the critic back in, but let's say I'm writing a kitchen, right, and I say, the daughter walked into the kitchen. And what I picture as kitchen what's coming up in my mind is almost guaranteed different than what's in your mind right now when you sit when I say kitchen. And so if I write if she walked into the kitchen, it may be that it's not important what the kitchen looks like. But if this is a place where my characters are going to spend some time, you got to start dropping some details and so your readers can no you know, the kitchen of a new mother looks completely different from the kitchen of a retired men or widower right who maybe he doesn't really even eat at home like his kitchen just isn't even used but it's shiny and clean. Versus the new mother who there's like baby bottles and toys everywhere and it's a mess because she hasn't had time to run the dishwasher and even the description of the environment itself like what is it Tyler linen, linen Oh, Liam, is it woodblock countertop? Is there an island is that a is there a tile backsplash on the sink. And again, knowing the balance of how much to include is also important because you can very quickly overwhelm the reader if you spend three pages describing a kitchen, but I do you feel like, you need to let your readers know where they are in the story, what this space is like, I think it adds a lot to a story. And the reason I read and I assume that's true for a lot of people is that I like to fall into other people's lives, I want to know, where they're going, what they're doing, what they're feeling, who they're talking to. It's this voyeuristic experience of, of being in another life when you're reading. So when I'm writing, I try to be aware of that, and give my readers enough detail to experience the space that they're in.

Another thing you sort of mentioned the mall and sort of getting your inspiration there. But you're also in different areas like Ecuador as well. Oh, yeah. Didn't that add to the story of how were those experiences a little bit different? You were in the Caribbean too.

I was, yeah,

Caribbean. So that's

what part of the Caribbean,

Trinidad

Oh, cool, I have always wanted to get there never made it.

Is that sort of motivate you or add to what you did?

That's funny, most of my stories to date are set in California. But the experiences I've had in different parts of the world. definitely influenced me as a writer, I think the thing that travel gives you is the experience to see things through other people's eyes, which is a wonderful experience for a writer to be able to have because when you write more than one character, you want them to feel like individuals. And so if you can have a character who's from a different part of the world, or a different culture, or even a different city, if you can imbue them with their own points of view, their own biases, their own take on the world, and then you have characters who can play off of each other in a more interesting way. I don't know I would love to write. So the book I'm finishing up right now actually has a lot more different located starts and ends in California, but it travels quite a bit more. And it's been both fun and daunting. I have a 60 page section that sat in the south of Spain. And that was really fun to write. But I haven't been able to go to Spain, we haven't been on a plane in a long time now. And I don't know that we could have swung it even if it wasn't for COVID. Like that's a big trip. But I feel like to a certain extent people are people, and you can write from your own experience. But having traveled to other places, I think I have more experiences of different kinds of people. We all want to be loved and cared for and safe and fed. Like we have our same basic needs. And then everything else is culture. It's how we're raised. And those are the things you can play with when you're writing different characters.

Can you elaborate on what those specific experiences are from different people culturally?

Oh, yeah. So like, trying to think of like characters I could pull from. So my father in law is from Ecuador. My husband actually was born in Ecuador, but he came here when he was a baby. But my father in law's had this experience of really straddling two cultures. He is somebody who, and he says, His English is better than mine, but he still has like that tiny touch of an accent. And he has this, I think it's such a charming and I actually wrote this into my first book, I wrote a character basically based on him. I made the character from Mexico instead of Ecuador, because it fit the story better, but the accent I borrowed his accent for it. And I think I describe it as any word that starts with S, he kind of puts an E in front of it. So it's s. So there's a character named Steve and this character refers to him as a Steve, there's always this little in front of the s words. So little things like that whenever I meet somebody from from somewhere else, or if I'm traveling, I'll be taking notes of like little those little details of characters that you can you can weave into a story that I just I find them again, it's something I find charming in stories that I read. And so I like to do it in the stories that I'm writing. Trying to think if there's another, just little details for characters, so I have a character in the first book who needs cereal out of the box by the handful, like and my husband does it and I actually think it's quite charming that like he never pours it in a bowl like does it put it in a bowl, and he doesn't do that he just like eats it right out of the box. So I like gave that to one of my characters or you can have them They give each other nicknames that only they call them that, like, nobody calls me ape. Nobody, except for one friend I made in grad school that from the day we met, he called me ape. And I couldn't break it from break him of it. Like I given up, he calls me ape, and he, he's the only person who gets away with it. So like, if I was writing a character named April and a character named Eric, I would give Eric so like, he gets to be the only person who gets away with with calling me eight. versus everyone else. I'm on answer. My name is April. So details I think good writing is in the details.

Did you get any characters from the Caribbean? Yeah. Are you still working on that?

No, I have not. You know, I had a story idea that I wanted that I thought was going to take off and then it just fizzled. I was going to set it in the Dr. But it just fell apart on me. And recently, I've been thinking about writing something in the South Pacific because I live with my dad on an army base on this tiny island on a it's called Kwajalein. And it's actually part of a military base. And it's where the US I don't know if they still do it. But they used to shoot missiles into the center of this giant atoll to like for missile testing. And they were unarmed, of course, but this was like part of my childhood Summers is that like dad would wake us up in the middle of the night to ride our bikes out to the lagoon to watch these like, streaks of light through the air as the missiles touchdown in the middle of the lagoon just like it was though. I didn't realize that was a weird thing until I became an adult. And I was like, well, that's kind of unusual. Maybe I need to put a story there somehow. But I'm also I have a terrible memory for details. So I am very reluctant to write memoir, all these things that I would like they have to go into fiction somehow. Because I just I'm totally daunted by memoir, I just do not have a great memory. Let's sort of get into university history as well. So speaking of lagoons and oceans, are you trying to study marine biology while back I was I got my undergraduate degree at Scripps College, studying marine ecology. I loved it. But the thing I realized that I loved most about it was fieldwork, I loved being out on the water. And there's a weird thing about clients where I mean, you have your grad students, your undergraduate students who are out in the water, and they do go out with the researchers. But then there's like, if you want to carry on whether there's like a seven year period where you have to like be you have to get your Masters and then your PhD and then and then if you're lucky, you might get to go out into the field once in a while to do some research. And just as I started, after I graduated, I took a few research jobs, and the pay was really bad because it's for college students. The reason one of the reasons I mean, I love science, I'll always love science. I'm a big science nerd. But one of the reasons I chose science is because my mom was an artist. And growing up, we struggled a bit and I thought, like, I'm going to choose science, and that'll be like a good reliable career. And so when I found myself with a science degree struggling to pay the bills, I was like, Well, damn, I might as well write, do the thing I love to do if I'm not getting paid anyway, which is an oversimplification. But that was kind of where I found myself in 2001 ish. That's when I met my husband. He was a filmmaker, and he was doing creative work professionally. And so I joined forces with him for a while. We, we made a film together called Harrison Montgomery. And then he, we reached a point where we realized that we were good partners, and that we could either be like a good married couple or good business partners, but probably not both happily. And so we kind of severed the business part of our partnership and decided we wanted to get married and have that kind of partnership, which was the right choice. I'm glad we made that choice. But he's so he still works in film. And I decided to do more writing. We were in San Francisco, when we met, we ended up moving back down to Los Angeles for his work, I went to USC for a master's in creative writing. And we've been here ever since.

When we look at this, are you self published? Or do you work with a publisher?

I do work with a publisher. So my first book was published by Kensington books, there's not a ton of money in fiction. I mean, that's what I should qualify that. literary fiction, which is what I like to write is is rarely the kind of money making gig that allows you to not do anything else. There are genres of fiction, like if you're a romance writer, and you love writing romance, and you you can turn out two books a year, like you can actually make a pretty good living as a as a romance writer, because romance readers are voracious, they like tear through books and need more. So there's actually a fair amount of money in some branches of publishing. So romance, murder mystery. nonfiction books tend to you know, those can be The kind of books that you make a living off of, but literary fiction is definitely a niche. Most people read one, maybe two literary fiction books a year. It's more of a passion than a sole source of income. So I do other things. I do freelance writing, I do coaching, we the very important meeting that we're doing is, you know, again, none of these are huge moneymakers in and of themselves, we kind of compile it all together. And it's enough, it's enough. And I'm lucky to have a very supportive partner who has a regular income. Well, actually, we both have irregular incomes, because we're both artistic types, but his tends to be a little more reliable than mine.

And you're also on Writer's Digest as well. Can you talk about how that all came about?

So in 2017, Writer's Digest listed. My website is one of the best websites for writers they have. Every summer they do 101 best websites for writers. And they listed my website, which was an honor, because I have been reading that magazine since I first got the inkling that I wanted to write. Part of the way that they bring people into the community is that if you are listed on their list of websites, they invite you to teach it. They're one of their conferences. So they have a New York Conference, they have an LA conference. And so they invited me to teach a session at the novel writing conference. So I did that. And I guess that was also 2017. And then I kind of lost track of them for a little bit. And I've reconnected with them. I'm actually going to be teaching a session at their conference this October, assuming everything's in person. If not, it'll be online. But I am slated to do a session there about Scrivener, which Scrivener is one of those things that it's a writing software. I have just I love it. I do all of my writing in Scrivener. And, again, part of my documenting my own learning process, every time I figured out some new thing that Scrivener did, I would write a blog post about it. So I have a whole collection of those blog posts on my website as well. And I've kind of gained a reputation for rightfully for being a Scrivener nerd. So I'm going to do a session at the Writer's Digest conference about Scrivener, how to get started with it, how to use all the tips and tricks. And it's kind of a fun little side thing that I do. I was officially I was an affiliate for a little while I was like an a brand ambassador. But that was that was fairly short lived because they just don't go to enough events for that to really be a worthwhile business arrangement. So mostly I just sing their praises, because I love them.

I'm asking you that. Could you please pick up your website? Definitely want to see.

Yeah,

because if it's on Writer's Digest, it's probably something we should show. Right?

I well, I, I like it I'm, I work really hard on keeping this really useful for other people here. I've got it here.

Okay, yeah, that looks Yeah. Looks like run through everything here.

Sure. So you land on my blog page. So it's always the most recent blog posts. This is actually a guest post that was written about finding a historical fiction editor, which is definitely relevant because I'm working on a historical fiction piece. But if you see at the top of the menu, there are 142 Ostriches, you can learn more about the book. There's a short summary, there's reviews, things like that. If you click on mindful writing, you get a few of the links to the different things I'm doing on that front. Until we can, yeah, so this talks a little bit like I was saying of how I started to notice a correlation between mindfulness practice and my writing improving. And then actually, if you click on Close the subscription popup there at the bottom, right. And if you scroll down a little bit there, I got my little ostriches everywhere they're fun. So a little bit more, you've got the things I write about, or things I blog about, oh, no second pop up. My, my web guy has been doing some some work on the back end. So that's probably a result of that. So the California if you you don't have to click on all these, but I'll kind of run through what they are just so people know what they can find on the site. If you click on California, you get a list of it's basically, as I've research projects, for my different stories, I come across all these cool trivia facts that really don't make it into fiction, but I wanted to share them with everyone. So I did a whole series of blog posts about like fun, California trivia. For a while I did a whole series on grammar, kind of because I just got I got a lot of requests from people about basic writing classes and at the time, I was teaching a writing class to an engineering and company, they were having some challenges, they had so many super smart people on their team. Some of them, like English wasn't even their first language. And they were having trouble getting their bids accepted by cities, because the just the bids that they were putting together, they weren't very compelling. And so I was teaching a really basic level how to write super clear, you know, you don't have to get fancy to get your idea across, you just have to be clear. So I ended up taking a lot of that content and writing a series on like basic grammar, how to write clearly and concisely. Miscellaneous is just random stuff Scrivener I mentioned, I have, I think, 42 different posts on Scrivener at this point of different things I've learned about the writing software. And then writing is every it's most of my posts are about writing things I've learned about writing projects, I'm working on all of that. Yeah. So So that's mostly what you find on the website.

What do you think is the main thing that draws in your audience? I could see from it. Your website definitely has a lot of user appeal. Are you mainly more of a inbound marketer? You sort of depend a lot on people coming to the content, you're trying to attract people, or are you more aggressive? Because I could tell from a lot of blogs, you're more of a person that likes to draw people in?

Yeah, I, I decided about nine years ago that I wanted the blog to be useful. So I started off with that idea of writing about my writing and the challenges that I was facing. But when I first started, it was really more of a diary. And what an almost kind of whiny, like, this isn't working. And I decided, within a year of starting to make the shift, to try to be as useful as I could be. So I would have some kind of challenge I was facing when I was writing, but instead of just writing about how Writing is hard, I would say, Okay, I'm struggling with this. And I would go find an answer to it, and then write about the answer that I found. Now, sometimes that I went deeper than others, or sometimes I even, you know, I got it wrong. But I always tried to be useful with the blog, and that, that has been kind of the underlying theme of what I have put up on my website. And then in terms of marketing, it's there's been an interesting shift in the last, I would say two years, for awhile. So after I got my degree in writing, I worked for a marketing company, it was marketing, PR, but they worked with local governments. So I did a lot of of social media work, I did a lot of writing newsletters, writing updates from the city manager, that kind of thing. So that was, that was kind of my area of expertise. It was what I was comfortable with. And so when I got to about was about six, seven years into writing the blog, I definitely got more aggressive, because that was just what I was doing all day at work. So when I turned to my own material, I kind of brought that same mentality I, I built up a newsletter, I got really aggressive about social media. I was, I got the scheduler, so you can schedule tweets to go out at different times and just link back to blog posts content by blog post content. I was on Facebook all the time. And then I actually ended up getting really frustrated with Facebook because I had to pay to boost my content. And then like nobody would even see it. I don't know, I'm I'm actually not on Facebook anymore. Because I just hit a point where I was like, I can't I can't handle Facebook anymore. So I decided just to focus on Twitter. And then I do have an Instagram account. But that tends to be much more personal. I mean, I'm still friends with whoever wants to be friends on it. But I tend to post less about my blog posts or whatever that tends to be like, pictures of me at the soccer field with the kids, that kind of thing. So Instagram is the more personal side, Twitter's definitely more focused on being useful and bringing people to the blog for the content that I have there. And they weren't really gung ho, especially on Twitter for a couple of years. And it really hit a climax when I was when my book came out. I scheduled all these tweets about like, Oh, you gotta get the book and promotion. And I mean, it was great. It was good to have that ability to do it. But then, as after the book had been out for a few months, I started to kind of wean off how much I was posting. And what I noticed is that my traffic just keeps going up. And so just as an experiment, I just dropped my posting way down. I still post like to Twitter maybe once a day, maybe twice a day. And it's it definitely I've reached I've reached a point where I feel like I've been useful to enough people that they tell their friends. So even though I'm not even on Facebook, probably a third of my traffic comes from Facebook people We'll just sharing posts on there. It's been, I wish I wish I understood analytics a little better to go in and really see what shifted in the time that like I stopped posting and traffic kept going up, because I would love to know what that magic sauce was, I could probably sell that somewhere. But I don't know exactly what that was. But I'll take it, I'm happy to to have the audience and people are really supportive. Like they leave really great comments, or they'll share what worked for them on something like if I write a post about, I don't know, like this historical editor thing, and people will leave comments of like, oh, well, this worked for me. And it almost starts to feel like a community that's built up around the blog, which I feel really lucky to have. It's not a it's not a given when you start a blog, and I feel really, really lucky to have that. Of course it took 10 years of regular posting like it's not like I didn't do the work it does take time. I know that's part of it.

And when it comes to audience building, what do you think is the key thing you think helped you build your because I think everyone has a different reason for why their audience grew. I'm not talking about blonde I'm talking about you in general because of your personal brand.

Oh, my personal brand. I where I would like my personal brand to be is kind of in this like Venn Diagram of like soccer mom, author. And I like rock star there's like this little triangle in the middle where like a little bit badass a little bit like tender mom and a little bit like fiction writer. That's where I would like my, my personal brand to be. My my partner at a very important meeting wrote this wonderful piece for McSweeney's called my personal brand is I don't want to die. Which was all about trying to make a living as a freelance writer. kind of joking on the like, the way her logo looks and like, Okay, do you like it? Will you hire me, please? Because I don't want to die. Like, I need health insurance. I need food, I need to pay my rent, please hire me. So I always think of that whenever I like the question about personal brand, because I know it's important you as we represent ourselves online, which in this day and age, we all do to some degree, you do have to be aware of what you're putting out there. The the only real filter I use is whether it's at all related to writing or mindfulness as we've kind of become the two filters that go through my content. Except for Instagram, where I allow myself a little more of of the personal side of myself,

what's the certain piece of advice you would give to yourself? If you were to just do this all over again? What type of advice would you give to your younger self,

I think I would advise myself to be patient. It just takes a little while to and I I can be very impatient, you know, I try something and it doesn't work. I have to try something else and jump around too much. And I, thankfully had some kind of instinct to stay with the blog, to stay with my fiction. Even as other things in my life kind of got crazy. And staying with it ended up really being the ticket to finding where I wanted to be. And so that patients I think if I could tell my, my 10 years ago, self, anything, it would just be to that it's going to take a little time to finish that first book to, to build up a community around my writing. To find a place where I really feel like I'm grooving with with what I'm doing.

What do you think is the future of your writing now? So you talked a lot about ostriches, are you gonna get into more detail about ostriches, like the size of their eggs?

No, totally done with Ostriches. My next book is almost done. I got a big stack of papers right here. It's almost done. I'm doing a final edit on it now. Then it'll go off to my editor. But this is this is a an epic row. It's not a it's not a romance, but it has romance in it. It has a magical element. It has historical fiction elements. It's the story I wanted to write from my first book, but I just kind of knew I didn't have the chops to do it. Well, so I wrote the ostrich book first. Now I'm writing this book. It doesn't have a title yet. But as soon as I have a title, it'll be on the blog. People can follow along if they want to know. But I'm really excited about the second book. It's a whole different direction. And then I actually already have 150 pages written on Book Three, which is about an ultra marathoner trying to win western states, which is the oldest ultra marathon in the country and these runners they run 100 mile and they're pretty much just alone, like in the wilderness running by themselves for like 18 hours, 20 hours, 24 hours. They don't sleep, they barely eat. They like hallucinate. I'm just fascinated by like why people do this. So the third book is, is set on the trail of western states. But right now, that's just like a hot mess of pages. It's not really a book yet. Hopefully, it will be.

pretty good. And another thing I want to get into a little bit later is definitely creativity and how to sort of spark that over time. However, I'm still sort of interested in your business perspective, how did it sort of work from going from being a normal writer to building an audience and then making money? How did you sort of get to that? Financing and marketing stage? And how hard was that transition? Or how easy was it?

It's definitely hard. Because again, it takes time. So if you're on the right path, you don't know immediately if you're on the right path, or if you're barking up the wrong tree. I think in terms of people want to make living as a living as a writer freelance is finding a couple of regular clients who call on you for work, and pay you what you're worth is the gold standard, like that's where you want to land in terms of making, making a living as a writer. And that is hard, because as soon as you have enough clients lined up, one of them will disappear for some reason. And then you have to find another client. I always tell people don't write for free, don't write for exposure. Someone said, and I love this. They said people die of exposure, don't write for exposure. I when I was starting off, I would write a little bit for free for like my sister's website, or my mom's website, like I you know, but they were the only people that I wrote for free for. And then when I had the blog, even when the blog was in its early stages. Everyone who hired me, as a freelancer said to me, Oh, I saw your blog. So the blog becomes his calling card of like, okay, I can actually write. And if you can, having sections on your blog, where you showcase people that you've written for, even if they like, they don't have to know that it's my sister, right? We have different last names. So I would showcase her website and the content that I wrote for her website. And so building up your resume, charging what you're worth, which is such a hard question, because what are you worth at any given point in your career, what is your work worth, but I think most writers do undercharge. And I think when you hit the point that you're confident enough to charge more for your writing, then you can actually start to put together a living, because if you're, if you're making $1 an hour, there's no amount of work you can do that will pay your bills, you have to charge what you're worth. And that's always tricky. It's such a hard thing to do. I mean, the majority of my income is freelance work, I actually just did a pie chart the other day, because I was curious, I listed my income for the first six months of this year, there was a little bit of royalties, there's a little bit of coaching work, but like the majority is freelance work. And so in terms of building income, that's where I would focus. And then once you have enough stability in your life, that you can start turning towards things like blogging, then that can be to like build your audience for other things that may come later. But that's slow. That's a long process. You have to build trust with people like one of my most recent coaching clients. He said to me, you know, I've been reading your blog for six years, and he really was like, he quoted me things I'd written years and years ago. And he's like, you've never tried to sell me anything. And so when I saw that you were taking coaching clients, I was like, Oh, I trust her. I want I want her to be my coach. And that's a relationship that's been building for six years. He's been reading my blog, and it just takes time.

yeah, the general theme is usually it just takes time. Yeah. Consistency, hard work and experience. You know, those are the main things. Now, You sort of talk a lot about being creative. And using your creative mind, how do you actually tap into creative because I'm a creative person. How does it work for you? Are you a daydreamer? Are you

I'm a note taker. I think if I had to kind of like I was saying, like, I was at the grocery store the other day, and there's this one woman. I love her. Her name is Judy. And I always try to get in her line, because there's always something dramatic happening in Judy's life. And she's going to tell you about it while she's bringing up your groceries. And I have more than once like run home from the grocery store and like, written down something that Judy said, because, man that woman's life is like a whirlwind. And she I don't know, there's definitely snippets of her life. I will put in a novel Sunday. Or if I'm waiting for the kids at soccer practice, I'll just pull out my journal and write about like, oh, it's windy today and so Oh, it smells like this because I'm near the LA River and I can I can smell something what like, I'll just, I try to take as many notes as possible. And then I have a file where I just shove them all in. And then whenever I'm writing something, or if I need an idea for something, I pull out that file, and it's a mess. I just like sort through it. And most of the ideas like the actual story ideas that go in, they're generally not very good. They're like the dreams I scribbled down while I was half asleep, or, but every now and then there's some observation that is great for a character. Or maybe there's a dream, that wasn't quite a story. But if I pair it with this other idea, it makes a story. For me story, creativity is really about puzzling. It's one of the things I love about storytelling is that you have to, you have to figure out the story, you have this instinct that that person goes this way, and they meet this person, and that there's some conflict, but you have to figure out what the whole story is. When do you start it? When do you end it? How many people get to come into the story? What do they bring into it? Where are they from, and then even down to the very last round of editing, when I'm like, one of the things I'll do is I'll search for the word read. And I allow myself one read, per story. And then the others have to be brick, or rose, or I have to find a shade of red that works. And I do the same for blue. And I love the puzzle of figuring out like, okay, I get one blue. And then but this is really more turquoise. Like when I pictured this in my head, it was more turquoise, and this one was more sky blue. And this one was like midnight blue. But getting more specific with my writing. I love the puzzle and the challenge of making sure what's on the page really matches what I'm seeing in my head. I love that.

When you started to get into this whole mindful, You know writers group. How many other people are in there? And is this group sort of a part of your identity is this something you also help to push in market you think you will ever get the idea of bringing that into more of your business to?

it definitely is more and more all the time, just because I'm interested in talking about it, sharing it with people, it's a free group. If folks are interested in writing, they should give it a shot. And we're at a very important meeting.com. It is, like I said, it's just it was such a surprise, because I was doing just this tiny little group with a couple of friends. And when I partnered with this other woman who's in Seattle, and we both we compiled our newsletters and just shot out a note to everyone we know saying like, Hey, we're doing this. And people just started coming. And we're hosting 15 meetings a week now hundreds of people every week coming. And they're just the most awesome people. They're just authentically creative, just looking to carve out an hour of their day to do something creative. And we hear over and over again how even people who've never meditated before taking that 10 minutes to just quiet their minds, has opened up new story ideas. We had a marine vet who was working on a memoir, and he came and he said that doing the meditation helped him kind of open up into the story in ways that he hadn't before and find new layers to the story. It's just been a wonderful experience. And I would highly encourage anyone who has any inclination to write to come join us. It is free. We ask for a $5 donation if people can swing it. But I mean, it's for writers we know writers don't always have money to spare. So we keep the it's a Pay Pal thing. You can shoot a $5 if you want to we keep the attendance list, like totally separate. It's a no pressure thing. But we just it's a wonderful community. So all are all are welcome. If anyone is interested. It's www.averyimportantmeeting.com. Do you think a lot of authors have learned a lot? Do you think? As, do you think you're more of an author that focuses more on books? Are you more of a sort of a coach for authors as well? How is that changing now because I'm assuming now that you have so much experience, there's a lot of authors out there that learn from you now, so you're, you have more of a different role in the community to. I do feel myself more in the middle of the community for a long time, I felt like I was looking up at everyone in my community, all these writers who had like they've finished their books or they you know, they were out being writers in the world. And now I still have all those people I look up to. But now I also have some people I'm working with who are you know, they're still trying to finish their first book. And I I don't think finishing your book makes you any more of a writer. If you write you're a writer, I truly believe that and I also am a big fan of this idea that if you are part of a creative community One person's success is everybody's success. Because if my friend and my writing group finds an agent and a publisher, and her book does really well, that's great for me just for being like in her writing community, not only because she can share her experiences with me, but you know, to pull an example like that, the woman I was thinking of, she ended up blurbing, my book, like her, her quote is on the front page here of what she thought of my book. And so you, you get to a point where you're supporting each other in so many ways. So even though I do feel myself more in the middle of that gradation of of, I guess, right, early career, I really don't think of anyone who hasn't published their book is like less of a writer, it's just maybe they're still learning. They're still figuring some stuff out. And eventually they will. And then there'll be asking them for blurbs. Just like they're asking me, it just becomes the you all help each other out. And I love that about creative communities in the way that people support each other.

And are there any final words or things you would like to say to the audience,

I think everyone has some creative thing they want to do. And there's, I mean, the definition of a creative thing is so broad, but I feel like a lot of times as grownups, we have shut that part away. At some point in our childhood, or adolescence, there was no time for it, or somebody told us that it wasn't important or whatever, you know, fill in the blank for whatever reason, we've stopped engaging in it. And I just feel like life is so much richer. If you can even just touch into something that makes you happy on a creative level. Even if it's just writing in a journal, or doodling a picture or I don't know building a sandcastle like it doesn't matter. But giving yourself permission to be creative without any judgment or expectation. It just makes life richer, and I would wish that for anybody who is feeling stuck, or you know, midlife crisis, see about like, what am I doing? What's the point of all this? Like, find some creative, fun thing to do and and just dive in? I think it makes all the difference in the life.

All right, well, thank you again, April. On the show,

thanks for having me. It's a treat