S01E40: When Actions Can't Be Excused

In this week’s episode, Samantha and Matilda talk about how they keep themselves accountable; what tactics do they use? What do they want to use in the future?

By next week, Sam and Matilda will share their R&D list... intrigued? You should be! Tune in to hear all about it!

Where to find Sam and Matilda:

SAM IG: @sammowrimo

Website: www.samantha-cummings.com

Book to start with: Curse of the Wild (Moons & Magic Book 1) https://amzn.eu/d/3QHym3m

Most recent book: Heart of the Wolf (Moons & Magic Book 2) https://amzn.eu/d/4HecH3a

MATILDA IG: @matildaswiftauthor

Website: MatildaSwift.com

Book to start with: https://books2read.com/TheSlayoftheLand (book #1 of The Heathervale Mysteries)

Most recent book: https://books2read.com/ButterLatethanNever (book #3 of The Slippery Spoon Mysteries)

Mentioned on the show:

4thewords: https://app.4thewords.com/

OhWrite: https://ohwrite.co/

Write or Die: https://writeordie.com/

Gretchen Ruben’s Four Tendencies Quiz: https://gretchenrubin.com/quiz/the-four-tendencies-quiz/

Indie Authors Ascending Discord: https://discord.gg/dye7mPtC

Wordtracker app: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/word-tracker/id1541495523

Transcript:

Welcome to your next step of the Self Publishing Mountain.

I'm Matilda Swift, author of Quintessentially British Cozy Mysteries.

And I'm Samantha Cummings, author of Young Adult Books about Magic, Myths and Monsters.

I've written the books, changed their covers, tweaked their blurbs, tried tools from a dozen ad courses, and I'm still not seeing success.

Now, we're working together to plot and plan our way from barely making ends meet to pulling in a living wage.

Join us on our journey where we'll be mastering the pen to snag that paycheck.

Hello and welcome to Pen to Paycheck Authors podcast.

I'm Matilda Swift here with my co-host Samantha Cummings, and we're here to write our way to financial success.

We're two indie authors with over a dozen books between us, and still a long way to go towards the quit the day job dream.

If that sounds familiar, listen along for our Mastery Through Missteps journey.

Each week we cover a topic to help along the way.

This week's topic is accountability.

Before that, what are your wins and whinges of the week?

I'm sorry, I just took a sip of tea right at that point.

Right in the middle of that question.

Excellent.

Is that a win?

Apologies.

It's a win.

It's a very good cup of tea.

I left the tea bag in, it's great.

So I have got a couple of wins.

Actually, I'll say a few wins.

One of my wins, which is non-riding related, is I sold my car, which means I've just got a little bit of extra money.

It was just such a pain trying to get to the point of selling my car than the actual sale of the car was the easiest thing that's ever happened to me.

So I really feel like I'm winning today because I feel like, wow, I could sell cars for a living.

Maybe I'm a car salesman?

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't believe that from you.

Just, yeah, just sold it.

So I feel good about that.

I hit my first goal for making money on my way to be a full-time author at the end of September.

So because I had a book release, it just put me over into my first little monthly target.

That was really fun.

Even though it was a very low amount of money, I still hit it and now I've just got to keep that ball rolling.

And I have also started my first week because I'm doing like a month of planning for the next book that I'm writing.

I've just completed the first week of that.

And it's been really fun and exciting.

And I've got the title of the book and I've come up with character names and I really love to drag out this process.

So I do do it for a full month.

I could do it in a week, but that's not fun.

Like I want to really, really bask in the imaginary scenarios and things that I'm coming up with.

So that's been really great.

I've really enjoyed this week.

I'm looking forward to continuing my planning next week.

My winch is with Amazon.

I've been trying to get my paperback ready to sell and Amazon have printed the cover in colors that were not in the file.

So I've had to get in touch with the customer service and waiting to hear back from them about what the printers have been doing.

So that's a very authory winch.

The colors.

Oh yeah.

Yes, so it's just been printed with the saturation turned up 50%.

So it's way too bright.

And so some of the detail is lost.

There's mist over some water on the cover and you can't see the mist because it's just the saturation of stuff is off.

So that's been fun.

I never, I mean, this is my seventh book and I've never had a problem before.

So I feel lucky in that respect, but it's such a pain.

It's such a stupid admin-y thing that I didn't want to be involved in.

I just thought print the book, easy.

Now, they've ruined the experience for me.

But they were really helpful.

Well, so far they've been really helpful.

So we'll see how that ends up.

It could just be that that's what the cover looks like from now on.

Who knows?

How about you?

Yeah, I think it...

Like I've seen it online, I've seen it on your Instagram post.

Like it looks great.

So I think it's one of those things where you know what it's meant to be like.

And I have seen someone on threads this week who was like throwing their toys out of the pram because their book cover wasn't centered.

And everybody was mentioning me like, I can't even see what you're talking about.

I saw that.

Yes, there's, yeah, I saw that and I was going to reply, but then I saw everybody else did it like, this is nothing.

Like I can't, my eyes can't see it.

Just send it to print.

You're done.

Yeah, like the cover's fine.

It's just, yeah, it's just like, I think it just looks a bit too garish.

It's not a nice color compatibility thing.

Like when they're a bit softer, the colors kind of blend into each other nicely.

And the way it looks, the colors aren't blending very nice.

So I'm hoping they can fix it.

But like you say, like, I'm not, I'm not averse to just putting it live and maybe tweaking it in the future.

I don't know.

Yeah, like that's just it.

I'm just, just get it done.

Yeah, I think I'm more to get done though, because I'm so disinterested in the paperback copies.

Because this is not a big seller for me.

I know.

I think I was maybe, how many books in?

Four or five books in before I got any paperbacks delivered to my house for what they look like.

I was like, they probably look fine.

And they did look fine, but also fine.

I've still never updated the paperbacks of the new covers.

They've got two different covers now, paperbacks and ebooks.

I've got several books without paperbacks.

And I know that it's the thing that's like, it increases your, like, it looks more professional, but also...

If you readers aren't asking for it.

But I have, yeah, I have people asking me like when's the paperback out because I don't read Kindle.

So, like, I know I have, I've got customers who are waiting.

I want to get that money.

So, yeah, I'm...

Yeah, I think it's just like Cozy Readers.

Yeah, people are not clamoring for paperbacks in Cozy so much.

Yes, my wins and whinges.

I feel that this weekend has felt really different to other weekends that I've had.

So, I work four days in my day job.

I work Monday to Thursday.

This week, I had an extra day off.

I had Tuesday off.

Was that just this week?

Was that the week before?

Yeah, it's crazy.

No, it was this week, I'm sure.

Was it just this week?

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure, yeah.

It was the first week of this week.

I sent myself a list of all the admin tasks, every single one that you could possibly want to do, order the covers, order the editing.

And this is for several books in a row, because I've got all the dates planned out for the next three, and the fourth, I know when it will come roughly.

So I booked all the editing, I booked in the covers, I researched everything, I did research, I did all the nuts and bolts of things as well.

And I think I had a list of maybe 50 things long.

It was incredibly long.

It felt very draining to do, but I got it done.

And then this weekend, I still had more things to do.

Like some of them was follow up to that.

So for example, I had to respond to someone about something that ordering and respond about book covers.

And I had a few other things like I wanted to get an Amazon ad underway.

So I've sorted that.

I want to start book web ads.

I've just done all those things and I have really, really wanted to get my weekends under control.

Because I think I made this last week in scheduling.

Like I just don't have any, and this sounds very privileged.

I don't have any constraints on my time.

And I set my life up that way on purpose.

That I, if it's a writing day, I don't want to be squeezing it in around other things.

So I really just set a whole writing day aside.

And I try and do at least two, four writing days a weekend and then maybe one social day.

But because of that, I just let myself procrastinate for ages and then not do the writing until it's the middle of the night.

And I hate that, and I hate myself when I do that.

So I was like, I'm going to get around that.

I'm going to start having an actual schedule on my days off.

And this weekend, I really accomplished it.

And I felt so much better.

And I felt like my best self this weekend, which is so lovely to experience and to kind of have that to refer back to.

The weekend has felt really long.

On Thursday, I had a critique partner chat, which was fantastic.

Then on Friday, I set myself a schedule for writing, and I got my three chapters done, and I got loads of admin stuff done, and I had an evening off, had a long, lovely bath, watched, oh, watch Nobody Wants This, which if you've not watched it, get on it.

It's so good.

I...

I've not watched it yet.

On Saturday, I had both my COVID and my flu jabs.

So I had to walk and get those and was just gave myself an easy day off that, but also loads of admin.

And then today, Sunday, did my three chapters, did my admin stuff, finished at the end of like a workday time.

And I just feel, I feel like the best version of myself and it didn't feel hard being that version.

And that was amazing.

And part of that is cause the topic we're going to talk about today.

So this is a, anyway, I don't have any whinges cause I'm just amazing this week.

Yay me.

And once again, you've done so much this week, like way more than I've done, like in my entire life.

So congratulations.

Oh dear.

Yeah, so this week, to bring us to the topic, we're talking about accountability.

What does that mean to you in terms of being an author and how do you work on it?

So we, I think we've talked about this few times and we think of these episode titles, it's always related to something that we want to work on personally in ourselves.

And then we write these words down, accountability, and then we go away and they sort of drift in their meaning over the times.

And next week's episode, neither of us think I've got a clue what it's about.

So we'll come to that in a little bit.

But this week's episode, the word accountability.

I think it's quite a good general word.

It could mean lots of different things to you at different times of your career.

For me, the reason I'm thinking about accountability right now is just in terms of I sort of like I was just saying, like I don't have any accountability in a real practical sense in my day to day.

I can write at midnight and no one is going to say anything.

But I don't like myself and I feel like I've wasted my time when I spend the rest of the day thinking about procrastinating.

And what I want to do is I'm trying to find ways to get more done and be more productive and make better use of my rest time and kind of a way to do that for me feels like accountability.

I've already got good accountability in terms of schedules and things like that, like longer term schedules.

I think people often, when I told them about like publishing, self-publishing, will ask like, Oh, are the deadlines?

Like, can you set yourself a deadline?

Or is someone appraising that on you?

And I think that's a really weird thing for people who are not in the self-pub world to figure out and like to even get the head around is like when I often say, Oh, gosh, I'm on a deadline, I've got to get this book done.

It's like, no one's making me.

It's just me.

But I'm, that's all the accountability works for me.

And like setting a deadline and you meet the deadline, I just that's, that feels comfortable to me.

That's that works with how I think and how I process stuff.

But there are areas in my life where I don't have any accountability and there's nobody to observe my bad behavior and it gets worse and worse.

And so I want to try and figure out ways to get around that.

So I've got some ideas, but that's kind of what it's that's where I'm coming to it from.

How are you thinking about accountability?

Yes.

Same really.

It's just like you say, when you're in self-publishing, you already have it kind of built in.

If you're going to have down the self-publishing route, you know you have to set yourself a release date.

Like you have to, and you hold yourself accountable to it.

So everyone's got that kind of, has got that part.

I, like you, I find it really easy to set myself targets and goals and meet them.

It's the strength of mine.

It's always has been since I was a kid.

Like I can decide something.

So I find like showing up to do the work is fine.

But it is, it's just more like the long-term accountability that I really am looking for.

And I find that I work better.

Like you say, like I don't have any commitments.

Like I don't have kids.

I can work till midnight if I want.

And sometimes I do.

I don't hate myself for it because I'm a night owl.

So like I actually love it.

I feel great.

I feel like, like a little gremlin.

I sit at my desk and it feels cool.

I spend all day telling myself I'm going to do it in five minutes and I never do it in five minutes.

Yes.

To be fair, yeah.

Yeah.

You like you set yourself earlier goals where I'm just like, like whenevs as long as I do it at some point.

The thing that I like for my kind of current and future goals for accountability, is like current goals are I like to be perceived doing things.

So I know in myself, if I tell people I'm going to do things that makes me feel better, because like I don't want to let people down, and like because my people please.

But I try and use that to my advantage.

So I realized quite recently, like this year I realized I always wait for my boyfriend to be in the room before I do anything.

Like if I think to myself, I'm going to tidy, I'm going to clean the kitchen.

I won't do it till he's around because I need, it's like I need to be witnessed.

I need somebody to see.

Apparently that's called body doubling.

I don't know what to learn about that this year.

And yeah, I really like to be witnessed.

You know, you want someone to praise you doing something there, right?

So like you don't want to just clean.

And I love praise.

Yeah, I want to be, I want people to see me doing stuff.

Like I love praise.

I am, my friends think it's hilarious because I'm always like waiting for someone to tell me that I've done a good job.

Like I love it.

That is like, it makes me feel good.

And I'm fine accepting that.

So I love to be witnessed doing things, which is why I will always tell people that I'm doing things.

And like when I'm like planning this book that I'm writing and writing a book, I've always relied on things like NaNoWriMo because I like to tell people what I'm doing.

I like to tell people how many words I've written in a day.

I like to see what other people have done.

But for my future goals, I've got this like really weird dream.

And I don't think that really many people think this, who are writing because everyone likes to write on their own.

I say everyone, that's like a very generalised, but you kind of assume that you're supposed to.

But I have this dream of like opening a writing, like cafe sort of thing where people can come and write with me.

Like when I'm a professional writer, I'll have this place.

Yeah.

Yeah, let's co-work this place with Just For Writers.

Why isn't that a thing?

Just For Writers.

Exactly.

So there's always like offices to rent near me.

And I always look at them like, you know, if you just got like a few people to like club together, we could just have a writing room.

Like, wouldn't that be cool?

And that's like the accountability that I really, that I really look forward to in the future is having people come and like watch me work and I'll watch them work and it'll be great.

So that's kind of where I'm at with it.

Like I know that I do do things on my own and I can set myself targets and I will meet them, but nothing feels better than somebody watching me.

Somebody like knowing that I've done it.

You write a midnight, how are you doing this?

Is it a midnight cafe?

It's going to be a 24 hours.

It's going to be open 24 hours.

Yeah.

It's basically an intake cafe.

So this is a UK problem.

I have not like in other countries, and I have seen this happen, but I've never seen this in UK.

Maybe like in London, probably in London, maybe Manchester.

But I want a 24 hour coffee shop.

I don't want to go home at 6 o'clock.

I want to go out for a coffee at 6 o'clock.

I want to go somewhere at half 11 and grab a coffee and read a book.

Not in my house.

I want to be outside having coffee at night time.

And not in a bar, just in like a little writing room.

I think I miss Hong Kong.

Yeah, I think it's going to be open.

9, 10 o'clock.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what I need in my life.

I don't want to, I mean, I love my morning coffees, but I want evening coffees as somebody who's fueled by caffeine.

Just for the fun of it, like not even because I need it to stay awake.

I just love it so much.

Yeah, I would love to have myself a little like midnight cafe where it's only writers.

How, how cool.

Right?

Yeah, I would definitely attend that.

I think I, I don't know what it is, because I what I was thinking about when I think about this week is often when we're thinking about how we get things done.

So that's what kind of where the point of accountability is, like, is making sure things get done.

And you can be accountable to yourself or you can be accountable to people.

It doesn't really matter what works for you, don't figure out what works for you.

But I was thinking about this topic and I was thinking a lot of the things in my life when I have got things done, I think I'm not very good at analyzing why I got them done.

And I think I'm, I often rely on things that I am naturally good at and not examining those.

So for example, we were talking earlier about testing and testing well.

I am someone who found it very easy to succeed at school.

And if somebody had asked me how you do that, how do you get good grades?

My answer would be just do it at the last possible minute and just do, you know, just do the task.

That's it.

That's not that's not how I got things done.

How I got things done was being somewhat smarter than everyone else in my school.

Because when I went to university, I went to Cambridge and that did not get things done.

I was not smarter than everybody else there.

I was, you know, average at best.

And just doing things at last minute, and like, just reading the instructions, doing it, that did not get you there.

And that made me think like, oh, I wasn't just, you know, I didn't have any tools before, I had zero because I could just skate by.

And then I had to develop tools deliberately.

And so I think I'm not a very good and I don't think I did a great job of actually what I did there was a lot of not sleeping and spending weeks in the library, going slightly insane, but in a fun way with my best friend.

So are you worried we come on?

I mean, much crazier.

There were like gumbear theaters and there was like a scavenger hunt with the geodesimal system.

We relied a lot on trying to make the library fun and spend like 19 hours a day there.

It was a 24-hour library.

It was not quite because it shut up between like maybe two and three in the morning to make sure you did not actually live at the library.

But it was effectively 24 hours.

I went to my college.

So I think I have not, I don't have good accountability tactics.

And I'm not good at examining it because I have been in many situations where I found things easy.

So this is why I think I often get frustrated at myself when I'm not performing to my best ability.

Because I have had a lot of experience of finding things come quite naturally.

So I'm trying to really consciously kind of figure out what makes me do things more and deliberately work on that and try and make it, you know, get more productive.

So one thing that I know is I also like having somebody there with me.

I used to, I sort of discovered it by accident.

You know, like I said, in Hong Kong, cafes are open very late.

So I had a friend who ran like a Tuesday evening writing group, and I just went because I wanted to meet more writers.

I like I'm a morning writer really.

So I thought I can't write in the evening.

I'll just go and I'll eat ice cream with them, which is like also a winner because it's an ice cream cafe.

But I found I could write in the evenings.

Great.

Because I didn't work on Fridays.

And she worked full time as a writer.

I just went to sit in her cafe.

She wrote in Starbucks.

I went to sit there and wrote with her all day.

And I was like, oh, this is great.

I can get things done.

I can stay focused all day.

She was like me, someone who intends to arrive early and actually arrive to do a day of writing.

Because we have quite a kind of flexible like, arrive when you, you know, when you want to, we'd say 10 and it'd be 11, which is like an ideal start time.

But we get a load of work done.

And she is such a, like she's someone who I think many people describe as like a writing machine.

I think this is trivializing of her hard work.

But she is really good at saying focused and she can really consistently get words down in a way that makes you think, I'm also going to do that.

I'm not going to look at my phone.

I'm going to hammer the keys away and also be good.

But then we're like, well, I also got Facebook on my computer, so I could just be on here and she won't see because I'm facing the other way.

Anyway, but that made me see like the benefit of a whole day of writing that you really wouldn't get to just kind of discover accidentally, you know, because it's quite a lot.

It's intense.

And that really from that, I found that I benefit a lot from sitting with other people in their company and writing.

And I've tried to, I put out a call on like a local Facebook group since I moved here to find some accountability partners on Fridays.

And people said yes, they didn't show up, which is like, they feel the first hurdle of being an accountability partner.

I know very few people in my sprint groups online, but I don't really care for strangers.

I like to have someone who, yeah, we can like show up and have a bit of a chat and then get down to work.

And then if you're having a bad day, be like, I should go get some lunch.

And then you, yeah, there's like more authentic about it.

Or they can, you can kind of both push each other along a bit, which I think you don't get with a stranger, even someone that you know, but you're online.

So I've been trying this week anyway, long story short, say, I've been trying this week a few different accountability tools, or looking into them.

And there are kind of three that are similar in some way to that.

So in some way to having a person with you, but they're not quite the same.

And before I really got into all those, I was also really trying to think about how do I make myself accountable?

How do I value accountability?

So I sent you this morning, the Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies Quiz, which I did in the start of the pandemic.

And to find it, I had to look back through my like old group chat messages in the pandemic.

And it was like, oh, it was like nostalgia essential for, you know, a lot of Zoom chats, just a lot of intense conversations.

Just like a lot of oversharing.

It was nice.

Anyway, one of the things we did was the Four Tendencies Quiz, which I'll put in the show notes.

And in it, it just asks you like how you measure your responsibility to something and how you consider what you're responsible to or who you're responsible to.

And it gives you an evaluation of kind of, are you more internally motivated or externally motivated?

And really, I would have said I'm very deadline focused.

Like I will get things done to a deadline and then I'll leave it at the last minute apart from that.

And actually the results of this quiz were saying I was very internally motivated.

I was like, yeah, that is true actually.

It's more that I don't want to let myself, I don't want to be less than my best self.

That's why I meet a deadline.

And I will also equally meet an internal one to an external one.

And it's sort of because of how I care about myself.

And this is a slight tangent, but it's like, that's what made me get a Fitbit.

And it was in that quiz, it recommends if you're an internally motivated person, what you actually want is things to measure yourself and ways to measure yourself to see how you're improving.

And because to me, Fitbit always felt like a real external thing.

It's like, oh, I'm having a watch time, we go and do more exercise.

I'm not listening to a watch.

But this quiz maybe goes like, oh, it's about you.

You see the numbers and then you think to yourself, oh, I haven't done enough steps today, I should do some more steps.

Which is oversimplifying it, but anyway.

So it really helped me to kind of figure out in what way am I motivated?

And a bit like when I was talking earlier about kind of succeeding at school, I think I just wasn't very good at observing it before, like how I'm motivated.

I would make these assumptions based on the outcome rather than the actual process.

So it's been a long way around to say, when looking at these different tools, I tried to really evaluate how I was feeling and where the responsibility for the accountability lay.

Was it with me or was it with the program with somebody else?

So there are three that are relatively well known that I looked into.

There's four of the words, the number four, and then the words.

There's oh right and oh my goodness.

Oh right, which I know Sasha Black uses, and right or die.

And all three of them are ways in which you are basically trying to work online with either somebody else or a fake somebody to meet a word count goal.

And I looked at all these and oh right, you propose a word count goal in a group, almost like a sort of like an old fashioned chat room.

In fact, it looks like you put your word count goal in, and then you just write to achieve that.

And then you can update how well you've done.

And you can go into direct, I think, like small groups of people and get to know them.

But I was like, I just don't care about other people.

Like I don't value their judgment.

So no, I'm doing that.

Yeah, I'm not going to make more friends.

And I know Sasha Black really likes it, because she is in terms of strength, like very high competition.

But I am a very competitive person, but I am actually relatively low competition.

It's not even in my top 10.

Because I'm not competing as other people, I'm competing against myself.

And I'm, yeah, so O-Write didn't really didn't look great for me.

But I think if you are someone who is externally motivated, you would find it very motivating.

It's a real bare bones kind of display.

So it's not distracting.

It's the setup is pretty simple.

I think there's a free version you can use.

So we'd recommend having a look at that.

Write or Die, I do not like, there's a couple of different similar websites.

But Write or Die, I think is the most famous in the writing community where you have to write continuously and if you stop for a certain number of time at a time, it starts deleting your words.

To me, horrible.

That feels like external control.

Someone else is controlling my writing.

No, please leave me alone.

That looks awful.

And then the one that I have started using and I have been trying to use perpetually for the last like week, and I made a pretty good job of it.

And I think I think I'll keep using it in perpetuity.

It's called For the Words.

And in it, you're on a quest to save a world.

And each little quest has got things like monsters you have to defeat.

And you defeat them by writing certain words in certain minutes.

And you choose the monster you want to fight for sometimes.

And then sometimes to complete the quest, you have to defeat certain of the monsters.

But they're all like, to defeat this monster, you have to write 70 words in four minutes, or 600 words in 70 minutes.

So you can pick different amounts and meet that target.

And this is another thing about thinking consciously about accountability.

The only time I've ever taken up running successfully was doing the couch to 5k version that is zombies run, where there is a narrative and you're trying to save your community by running.

And I hate running, but I was like, I will run to save our post apocalyptic zombie ridden community.

I will be the hero.

In for the words, it's a bit like that as well.

You get to defeat these monsters.

The story line to it seems very convoluted, in a way that I sort of love.

There's some sort of dust.

There are clans, there are tree monsters, there are all sorts of mystic people.

I don't care.

The four monsters and you defeat them by hitting a number, the narrative is enough to keep me going through.

And that I'm trying to be really conscious of saying like, and notice, I find this beneficial to my accountability is having a narrative in there.

And I would like to find more things or narratives in, in future to kind of keep me accountable.

And maybe I need to find a way to make my own like self publishing journey into a narrative.

That is often what feels a bit unsatisfying to me is like, I don't know what part of the story I'm in.

Am I in the part of the story where I'm about to like, make a giant discovery or disaster is about to before me or something great is going to happen.

I just feel like I've never I never know where I'm in the story.

Yeah, maybe that is it.

I know I've talked a lot, but I have definitely thought about this as well.

So hopefully the thoughts were useful.

Have you got any thoughts for your own about this?

Yeah.

So I think that it goes about saying that this mastermind and this podcast is a huge accountability for both of us, because we are telling each other and listeners what we're going to do this week and we have to do it.

And I think that for anybody who is like listening to this and thinking like, yeah, like I need people to talk to, and starting a group with people that you know, in some way, is always a good idea, because this is like, you can't, there is nothing else like that.

There is nothing online that can replicate a human being a real person.

And so like, for accountability, nothing has spurred me on more than doing work with you.

I have tried, like, I know we're both in the Discord group, and you're using like a little accountability section where you can put a to-do list and stuff.

And I tried that because I thought...

Yeah.

So for you, I think it works well.

I'm still like, even though I use Discord for things, it's not part of my process yet.

So doing accountability on Discord isn't helpful because it's like, it's not part of my routine.

So like, it's a barrier, really.

Like, there's no way for me to broach that unless I really work to make that a new habit.

And I'm not looking to make new habits that involve more people.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Even though I love people seeing what I'm doing and stuff, there's a lot of people in there.

Well, it's interesting, to explain that is the Discord server is called Indoor for the Sending, I'll put the invite in in the show notes.

And in that there are loads of different threads about different things.

And there's one section that's about daily goals and monthly goals.

And I put mine in and I find it so helpful.

And I do not care about other people seeing it or interacting with it could not mean less to me.

I find it useful that it's in a public forum, that it sort of makes it exist as a real thing as opposed to like, when I write a list in my notebook or I write a list on my whiteboard, those things, it's like they're not real, they're just between me and my head.

But as putting it in here, I don't feel accountable to anybody else in there.

And yet, I feel more accountable to myself by putting it in public.

Yes, and I hope that's not a great thing in terms of like, I'm trying to avoid my own personal public shame.

But I do find it so helpful.

Maybe one of the things is that I'm a morning writer.

So I start my day by writing my to do list.

And I, I'm also trying to use it as a way to see what I can get done.

So if I put too many things on, I don't get more done.

That is fine.

It's useful for me to know what I can and can't do in a day.

So I'm not necessarily trying to win every day.

I'm trying to become a better me every day.

That sounds awful, doesn't it?

No, but like every day, hopefully, you're a little bit better than the day before.

That's how I like to think of it.

It's fine, I'm rubbish.

I do have a thing that I say to people.

It's like if I say something out loud, it makes it real.

So if I have a thought to a goal or anything that I want to do, I'll say it out loud.

And I think that more people should say things out loud that they want to do.

Because before I was doing this writing publicly, and I was just doing it and not telling anyone about it, there was nothing stopping me from quitting and nothing spurring me on to continue and achieve anything.

And then as soon as I started telling people about it, it made it so much more real.

And that in itself spurred me on.

That was the accountability, just letting people know this is me and this is what I spend my time doing.

And now everyone knows that I do it.

Everyone in my life knows that I do it.

And that's the biggest accountability you can ever get.

Because I don't want people to think that I'm a failure.

Because as somebody who wasn't great at school, I hold myself really high.

I give myself really big lofty goals and things.

Because I am desperate, and this is like a therapy session, like desperate to prove to people that you don't have to be good at school, to be good at life.

And that's always been something that I've been so desperate to prove.

So that's like my big, that's a personal accountability thing is, I tell people what I'm doing, and I don't care if it sounds nuts.

Like one of my big goals in life is also to buy land and build an eco house on it.

And everyone thinks that I'm insane, like that will never happen.

But that is such a huge goal and dream of mine.

And I've talked to people about it, like real businesses and stuff.

I've had meetings with them.

And whilst I know I'm far away from that, like to me that is like something that's going to happen.

And I told people about it because I knew if I didn't say it out loud, like there'll be nothing to make me do it, nothing to make me chase the dream.

And so I feel like saying things out loud really makes me very accountable.

In terms of like apps and things, I know you're talking about like gamifying.

Something that I have often used in November when doing NaNoWriMo, like I've loved doing it, like using their website to write because there was always, I never used the social element, even though like there is a Manchester group and I've been a part of it for like 12 years or like maybe longer, and I've never been and never been to any of the meetings.

I hardly ever contribute to the conversations.

There's just too many people.

But the thing that I love about the website is that you had a graph.

So every day you'd go in and log how many words you've written, and it will update your graph and tell you how many words you've got left, and just basically whether you're on track.

And that was my favorite thing about the Nanner website.

But I'm not using that website this year, so I found an alternative.

I did build an alternative in Excel because why not?

Why not?

So I made myself a calculator.

It's not very pretty, but I was going to use it.

And then I found an app called Word Tracker.

Just such a basic thing.

And it works basically the same.

You set yourself a word count goal and a date of when you want to hit that word count goal.

Every day you log in, put how many words.

Yeah, it's like, and it's a really nice interface and stuff.

It looks really nice.

And every day you put how many words you've written, and it completes, it says how much of a percentage you've completed, and it updates the pie chart.

That to me is like a good visual accountability.

I love seeing things in a chart or a graph.

And it's such a nice looking app that I'll also, this is so geeky and probably annoying to everybody who follows me on Instagram, but I'm going to screenshot the hell out of that thing every day and share on socials and say, this is how many words I've written today.

Yay!

Because that's...

To me, that's a fun part of accountability.

But it also, like, it just means that people know what I'm doing.

And yeah, I don't know, like, finding that app has made me feel far more excited about writing, because I don't know, it gives you statistics.

I think you probably have to pay for a lot of the stats, but it tells you how many days you've got left.

And yeah, like, I am very excited.

I put in, it tells you how many words are expected for the day as well.

That's the accountability I need, is an app that tells me how many words to write in that day.

And then I just hit that.

Fun.

I mean, that is fascinating, because that sounds like my nightmare.

And I think it's interesting that I haven't past tried to do things like that.

And I think that I love gamified things, and I actually hate gamified things.

I love narrative things.

Like I need a cause to get behind.

I need to be like saving the universe.

And, and like I think I like gamified.

So I get drawn in by gamified things.

I think this is going to be this is going to be a thing that makes me keep going.

And then I invest as time and like learning how it works, learning other tools and sort of setting up all the systems up in it.

And then I abandon it because I don't care.

The game, what I actually liked in that situation was learning the game.

And I need to really be very conscious of that, that like I, I think I will use it and use to be accountable and I will not.

So it's not worth my time.

Yeah, and I think part of that is I can't and I've never done nano, I've never even vaguely been interested in nano.

To me, it sounds like just I don't, I don't care.

It's November, like I don't get any sense of the community of doing a hit of 50,000 words, because I try and write 40,000 words as a standard month amount.

So it's like this, I'm not going to be hanging out with people for this is like a special occasion for them.

I don't want to be cheerleading people that cannot just write on a consistent basis, which I know it sounds very bitter and mean.

That is like the worst part of my head in nano-rimo.

And I hate when the nano people suddenly start coming to things and get enthusiastic about writing.

It's like, I'm here the other 11 months of the year.

Just call your jets.

This is not your...

It was so different.

Where it's...

Because I love that.

I love the people that just show up for nano, they're not doing it for anything else.

Like maybe it's their first time writing anything.

I'm like a fair weather writer.

I'm...

We've talked about this so much about how I really enjoy helping people achieve dreams.

So for me, nano is this opportunity for me to be like...

And I run this writing group that is like on its second year, and it's my opportunity to guide people to this like amazing career that they could have.

And I love teaching people how to do it and encouraging people to write when they've never written, or it seems like impossible to write 2000 words a day, which obviously for us, that's just standard.

Yeah, I really like encouraging people.

It's not really a general.

I've got a real like a nanachip on my hand, I don't know what it is.

I think it's such, to me, it's such an arbitrary day, and I don't understand arbitrary things.

It's like, if someone came to me any time and he was like, I really want to get into the writing, I'll be like, great, let's sit down, let's make a plan, let's figure out how you're going to do this, now we're changing the language.

Just because it's November, just grow a mustache.

Don't come into the writing world with your one month enthusiasm.

This is a life-long passion, it's not a one month thing.

And if you're listening to this and you ever wanted to do Nanou, just come to me instead.

Don't go anywhere near my daughter.

She'll bite your head off.

But I'll accept you with...

Yeah, I'll have my arms open to you.

That's so funny.

I love how we're so opposite.

I think it's useful to pay attention to those things and think where it's worth you spending your effort and not.

I think if I don't like nano, am I going to like any other sort of external group goal setting thing?

No.

Then why do I find it useful to be in writing groups generally?

What about that works for me?

It's like, how could I make more of that thing without accidentally introducing stuff that I don't find useful?

I would also never go to the nano group.

Even if I was doing nano, I would never join the nano group in person.

Something about it doesn't feel...

Again, it's about arbitrary numbers.

It's not a thing that you have set yourself as a life goal.

It's a one month long thing that's like a fun game.

And I'm aware that's not why everyone's doing nano, but that's kind of the prejudice I've got over my head.

And kind of being aware of that, not saying there's anything right or wrong about nano, but being aware of your own prejudices about it tells you about how you want to be pursuing accountability for something and where it's worth you looking for more things along the lines of what's gonna work for you rather than like jumping from pillar to post.

And so for me, when I saw, oh right, I was like, this is not for me.

I don't care about these like strange people and their like little head icons and the numbers they got by them.

Who were they?

Nobody.

Whereas when I went to like for the words, you get given a quest, there are maps, you get points.

I have like defeated a monster and got some like green leaf boots and a helmet.

I mean, I'm winning.

See, I love the idea.

I do love the idea of that.

And when we looked at it, because we looked at it together in one of our Mastermind meetings, and I loved the sound of it.

And then when I was scrolling through the website, it was so cluttered.

And there was just like a lot going on visually.

It was, I find it really distracting to see things, like that many things on a screen.

And I find visual distractions very difficult.

If there's a lot of things going on, it just turns me blind to things.

So that to me, I love the sound of it, but I know I would never do it because...

I write in word.

Yeah, I write in word and copy into it.

So I will set a timer going, so you're back in one, so it says like maybe 70 words in four minutes.

And I'll say like, press go to start the battle.

I'll go into word, I'll write for what I think is about 70 words, copy it in and be like 12 more words, oh gosh, okay, let's go out, 12 more words, write them, copy it in.

Yes, it is very, very visually full on.

And I also dislike, I look at words like in focus mode, I dislike looking at all the things.

And in fact, I think for me, the only thing I tried for the words a few years ago, and it was a little bit less guided.

And when I went, I was like, I couldn't even figure out where to start, I didn't know what to do.

Whereas now I think I've got a good guiding system in.

When you start, you basically just start writing, it says like, do this one thing right now.

And then when you've done that one thing, it'll pop up a thing saying like, here are three, the next three things to do.

And you go and do those things.

And all the time you're gaining words, but you're also learning a little bit enough about how the game, like the narrative of it works.

And there's parts of it I still don't understand.

I was like, I don't care to understand it, it's fine.

I found enough of it that works for me.

And I like the funny little monsters and I like the narrative.

And I am, I mean, I'm saving the world.

I cannot understate it.

I cannot overstate this.

I am saving the world right now with my words.

Okay.

Okay.

I mean, maybe, maybe I will implement that because I would love to, I don't want to knock it before I've tried it.

So when I start writing in November, maybe, maybe I'll open that up on the side and I'll throw some things in there and see if that excites me.

I don't know, because I'm so attached to my train journey, train journey YouTube video.

I have a video of that one in the background.

Yeah, but not the 25 minute sprint, because I just, I kept finding myself getting tired at like 20 minutes, rather than 25 minute sprint.

Or I'll hit 50 minutes and I'll be at the end of the chapter.

So I do like a 25 minute sprint, but often when I'm with somebody else, otherwise I tend to wander off my attention.

So I now have a video similar to that train journey sprints one, but the ones that are just, you know, a beautiful setting, like a bookstore that's made inside a little oak tree and leaves fall down outside.

And it's autumn and there are little mushrooms and pumpkins everywhere.

So I have that in the background and I use these monster timers to kind of push myself to my limits.

I have those on my TV.

Okay, maybe I'll just try it all then.

Because I'm constantly, if I write...

I mean, if I'm writing in this office, I'll have the train on.

If I'm just writing in my living room, I always just have an ambient video on, which is generally, you know, like you say, cozy coffee shop that's got leaves falling down or a cabin by a lake.

I am all over those videos.

YouTube could not suggest more.

Oh, I love it.

Yeah, there is particular channels that me and my boyfriend are obsessed with for the longest time over COVID, just like for a random throwback story.

We would fall asleep to a sci-fi, like cyberpunk video of like a futuristic cityscape with rain, and we would fall asleep to it every night.

It was an obsession.

It was so good.

Every now and again, I'll just put that on just for the memories.

I remember when it was...

Yeah, when the world was awful outside, so we just decided to go into cyberpunk instead.

Yeah, I like it.

All day, I've been living in this little tree, in the bookshop in the tree, so relaxing, while also fighting monsters and saving the world.

I've really been...

I've lived a thousand lives today, as always.

Yeah, okay.

I think I'll try the monster thing then.

Yeah, I will put a link in the show notes for anybody else that wants to try.

There's no affiliate link here.

I have only been trying it for about a week, but it's definitely working for me, and I think it's worth a try.

But it's also worth...

I'm also gonna put in the four tendencies quiz.

It's worth paying attention to where you get your...

It's not even about accountability.

It's about kind of like where you are, like, essentially responsible for, responsible to.

Just paying attention to that might help you discern what you're liking in something or why it's working for you, rather than necessarily looking for a new thing and trying it and seeing how it feels.

Yeah, it's been an interesting topic.

It's one that I think, a reason when we thought about it, it sounded a bit like it could be lots of things and I want to do something, there's something in this area.

And for me, it's felt like it's part of a big transformation.

This, as of this weekend, I have just felt like I've been the best version of myself and I have done all the words I wanted to do.

I have been relaxed.

I have achieved all the work I wanted to do.

And I have felt like I worked enough, but without feeling stressed, which is just perfection.

Yeah.

I couldn't have done a better job.

And I started watching Nobody Wants This, which again, I know everyone's talking about this.

It's a good way to date the podcast because it's about a podcast as well.

So I really made me think of us.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

I have, my sisters have been harping on and on about watching it.

And I'm like, I love, I do love Adam Brody.

But yeah, like you will.

Do I want to get involved in this?

I know.

I know.

I will.

I know.

I will appreciate it.

Yeah.

Okay.

I was surprised.

I think the first couple of days I thought like, oh, this is nice.

It's really, it's well written and it's interesting.

And then as I progressed through it, I was like, gosh, this is, it's a lot of people who are romance writers have been talking about how well, like how well the beats are done.

It felt like it wasn't, it was taken very seriously.

Like it's just a romance.

Like it's a simple, there's nothing more to it.

There's not like also a murder mystery, like a lot of things on Netflix are these days.

It's just a romance, but it's just really well done.

And it's not formulaic and it's not squeezed into an hour and a half.

Lovely.

I cannot wait for the next series.

I thought it was a limited series, but it's definitely not.

I love everything about it.

Cannot.

Anyway, that was not what I was talking about right now.

I was just saying, I did that this weekend.

Watched all that this weekend as well as getting us done.

Just been on it.

Okay.

So next week, we are on to a quite different topic.

It's in our series on professionalism and professionalizing.

We've got an episode on research and development, aka R&D.

Sam, do you have any initial thoughts on that?

What is it?

I do.

Okay.

I wrote the notes.

So R&D is all about being in this stage of our writing career, where we can try new things and throw time and money at different things without really any need to commit.

So it's all about being able to try different ads platforms and seeing how they work.

Trying different copy or like we've been doing different book covers and things in the past.

It's all those little things that you're able to do because you don't have a huge audience.

So there's no one, this is like an anti-accountability thing.

Like you've got no one to answer to at this point.

So try different things.

So yes, it's all about just the opportunity to be a little bit silly or try a different writing app.

Try a different, yeah, like try and defeat monsters to write.

See if that works for you.

And I'm looking forward to really delving into this because I think sometimes I am a little bit hesitant to try new things because I don't know how they work or how they're going to work.

But now is the time because when I become a super successful author and everyone has expectations about the sorts of things I should be doing and saying, I won't get the chance to do it again without a lot of eyes on me.

So that's how I'm reading it.

And yeah, that's kind of what I'm going to be delving into.

How about you?

What?

What do you think for me?

And if it's just because of the accountability and the scheduling thing that we talked about recently, a lot of it does feel like it's going to be related to processes for me.

Even now, I feel a bit scared to try new things because I think, oh, my processes, they work.

And what if I tried something new and it took me weeks to figure out, and it turned out not to work, and I could have been writing the book in that time.

And obviously, I've taken off a big chunk in this year to work on myself and my mindset.

So that was a thing I tried that I probably wouldn't be able to try if I were really leveling up and having to put out a book every couple of months and people were expecting that, and that's always bringing in money and improving my career.

So I want to keep that in mind and not get right back onto the hamster wheel.

So things like in the last week or so, I had on my list on that massive to do list on Tuesday, like try dictation and I did not enjoy it.

Not even a little bit.

So Krista, who we had on the podcast recently, has been playing around with dictation and she sent us the link to the tool that she's using.

She talked a bit about her process.

We have a WhatsApp with our guests and it's really great and great conversation.

And I really hesitant to do dictation because I don't like change.

And so it just seems like change.

But I used to only have a handwrite and then I only type now because I developed arthritis and my hands didn't really work well enough for me to handwrite.

And I was like, Oh, you know, it's fine.

I can type.

For ages I thought I could not express myself in typed form and I only had to be in contact with the page.

Not true.

I didn't enjoy rotation at all because I just felt like ideas didn't come in the same way they do when I type, but maybe it's just practice.

And if I don't try it now, seriously, I will never try it.

Because if I get into a routine where I'm releasing on a set schedule and I've got expectation from readers and I've got financial obligations that come from my writing, I'm not going to be like, you know what, guys, no book next month.

I don't need your money.

Thank you.

I'm going to learn how to do notation.

I want to try it now and figure out, is it for me or is it am I just pretending it's not for me and being today to try it?

So I think things like that, that I won't get the opportunity to try later.

I want to take the chance of being small and unobserved for a bit.

Yeah, I like that small and unobserved because it's, yeah, it's a bit of a safety net.

It's, it's okay.

Everyone is, everyone starts at this phase, at this stage of being like a nobody or like a semi nobody.

And it shouldn't be looked at as like, oh, a poor me situation.

It's a, this is the time and space.

It's just like being in high school.

It's, you get to make the mistakes.

And yeah, like I'm, I'm glad, I'll be a teenager again.

Fine.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And it feels so important when you're in it.

But when, as soon as you leave, you're like, Oh, that was not a thing.

Yeah, I wish I had.

You'd be like, Oh, yeah, I should have done a lot more sheepish things.

I did a lot of sheepish things, actually.

I wouldn't say that about myself, but I could have done more.

I could have been more sheepish.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

But yeah, so yeah, I think looking at it like, as our teenage years right now, like, definitely we're beyond being little kids.

Like, I think we know all the things or maybe that's the thing.

We think we know all the things, right?

Because that's the stage right now.

Yeah, I think I know all the things, but I really if someone gave me like, growing responsibility, I'm like, I did not know.

I'm so sorry.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Please don't give responsibility.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm in the teenage stage of my writing career.

That's very fun.

I would keep that.

Okay.

That is a great way to end on and I will look forward to being a teenager with you next week.

We have our face to face session next week as well.

So where we are always also quite childish.

So we will have lots of fun and then we will record our podcast.

And we will see you all next week, or you'll hear from us next week.

Do subscribe, tell friends, get a skywriter.

Maybe do some graffiti this week.

See how it goes.

Just advertise it in any way you can think of.

Tell the world.

I am saving the world right now and you should be spreading the word about this.

It has been lovely to be with everybody.

Hopefully you have had some good thoughts to yourself about accountability and we will see you speak to you next week.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

You've been listening to Pen to Paycheck Authors.

Stay tuned for our next episode.

And don't forget to subscribe to learn how to write your way to financial success.