Introduction: My Journey So Far

Hello, and welcome. I’m Talena Winters, host of Coffee and Real Talk for Writers, the podcast where we get real about the writing life.

One of my favourite things about the author community, especially the indie author community, is that it is just that—a community. While I know there are exceptions to this, in general, authors are generous, supportive, and happy to share their knowledge with others to help them along.

I have certainly been the recipient of such generosity from the moment I decided I wanted to learn to write fiction. I typed “how to write fiction” into my search engine, and immediately found a course that would teach me just that in Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways. Thanks to the online forum Holly had built, I also got my first taste of what the author community was like. Since I’m still here, you know how that turned out.

Other mentors and communities would follow. I published my first book, an inspirational clean romance novella I’d written as practice while taking Holly’s course, in 2015. (Five years after I wrote it, by the way. Real talk—I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer, and didn’t even know if I wanted this career even when I published that book. More about that in a bit.) Last month, I published my third full-length novel, which joined a cast of two novelettes and two novellas in three different genres. Yep, I’m a multi-genre author, and I won’t apologize for it.

In 2018, I was interviewed for the Just Joshing podcast, hosted by Joshua Pantalleresco, and I’d never even listened to a podcast before. Soon after that, though, I got the bug, starting with Stark Reflections by Mark Leslie Lefebvre and The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn, followed by many more. By 2019, audio had become my primary way of consuming short-form and non-fiction content, and by 2020, it was my primary way of consuming all content, including fiction and nonfiction books. I’m now a little addicted to podcasts. Last weekend, I changed to a new podcast app, adding podcasts as I went. By the time I was done, I had subscribed to 82 podcasts, most of which are still active. (Not all of them are writing podcasts, but a lot of them are.)

There are so many great podcasts out there that teach you how to be a better writer and book marketer, so why did I decide to start my own?

Several reasons. First of all, I’m a communicator and storyteller who processes things by writing or speaking, and this year, for the first time, I’ve struggled with getting the words out.

I have blogged since 2006. It was because of comments on my blog that I should write a book (I always heard “novel”) that I got the idea that I could be a writer in the first place. I’d grown up wanting to be a professional songwriter, and by that point, I had a nearly complete musical theatre script and songbook under my belt, co-written with one of my BFFs for life, Candace Marshall. But I got married at 22, started having kids at 25, and by the time my kids were old enough for me to consider picking up my career again, my dreams had changed.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I started blogging when my third son was only three months old. Our family had just moved to a new community in northern Alberta, far away from our friends and family further south. (Eventually, my mom and her husband moved here, too.) I had three little boys three and under and no friends where I lived. My friend shared a blog post with me she’d written (she is a wonderful writer), and I loved it so much that five minutes later, I’d started my own blog. And I didn’t just start it—blogging became an obsession for me.

Blogging, scrapbooking, and knitting were my main creative outlets when my kids were small. They kept me sane. If I go for long periods of time without creating something, I get rather cranky. I now feel that way about writing, but I used to be less specific—I love learning things, and I tried a lot of different artsy things before I finally started narrowing my focus. As we’ll likely talk about on this podcast, none of those skills were wasted, and I now apply many of them to my writing business.

2020 was a pivotal year for me. I had been editing professionally for two years by that point, and I don’t know if it was related to the pandemic, but in March of 2020, I got enough queries to fill up my calendar for the rest of the year. It was the first time I’d been booked that far in advance. At the time, I was also teaching piano part-time and working as the lead writer for a quarterly regional magazine, in addition to working on the second book in my young adult epic historical fantasy series. I tried to plan my year well, but, as is often my problem, I underestimated how long everything would take. I also underestimated the effect the pandemic would have on my mental health. We’d lost our fourth son rather traumatically in 2015, and, having survived that trauma, I didn’t expect the pandemic to trigger as much stress for me as it did.

(Oh, sweet, naïve Younger Me.)

In addition to my already-full schedule, my mom got diagnosed with a rare form of abdominal cancer in September of 2020. I got the call that she’d gone to the hospital five minutes after dropping my oldest son off for his first year of college on an island off of British Columbia. Oh, and did I mention we’d been trying to buy a house since the week after the Western world first went into lockdown? The deal finally went through in October. We were moving a house onto our existing property, and we’d hoped to have it all done during the summer. Nope. It came in two pieces, and the second piece was moved during the first real snowstorm of the year at the end of October. And then I got increasing responsibilities at the magazine.

Needless to say, my mental health was going down the toilet. I remember having a clue sometime in November that my two weeks a month of being on the verge of tears might have something to do with menopause. I’m too young for that, I thought, but I knew that some symptoms can start up to ten years early. So I googled it, and yep, it looked like I was well along in perimenopause.

Hey, I warned you right in the title. We’re getting real here.

Fortunately, I’d at least quit teaching piano by that point, thanks to pandemic restrictions I couldn’t acquiesce to in my previous house, which was very small. My editing schedule was too full to allow for teaching, anyway. But I was working over 60 hours a week, and, once the house had been moved, I was working on painting all weekend long. In between all of that, I was occasionally accompanying my mom to Edmonton for treatments that we hoped would prevent her from having a very invasive surgery, and trying to not worry about the possible outcomes for her. Oh, and there was a pandemic, so my two younger sons were home from school at least as often as they were in it that school year.

I had booked two weeks off at the end of December, but I spent the entire two weeks painting our house. (Don’t worry, those of you who wonder what my husband was doing—he was at least as busy on the house project as I was, except he got to do the outside-in-freezing-cold-weather type of jobs. Oh, and he was also super stressed at work. It was a great year.)

By January 2021, I was D-O-N-E, done. Sons 2 and 3 were home for an extra week at the beginning of January on a school lockdown, and my third son commented to me that he was worried about my mental health. Later that day, I called my husband from the bathroom, where I was hiding so my son wouldn’t see me balling my eyes out, to tell him that I thought I was losing my mind.

Yeah, that’s what burnout looked like for me.

I’ve never been so overwhelmed in my life. Fortunately, I had booked an appointment with the naturopathic clinic my mom was seeing to help me deal with the exaggerated menopause symptoms and get back in balance, and that appointment was only a few days away. But I knew getting on supplements wouldn’t fix the things that had gotten me to this point. So I took a hard look at my schedule, and started cutting.

I quit my job with the magazine where I had worked for four years. They had just made me managing editor, but no matter how much I might enjoy the work, it was one of my biggest sources of stress. And I couldn’t handle any extra stress. So out it went.

I had a few smaller freelance writing contracts that I finished up and dropped over the next month or two.

I revamped my editing schedule so projects would be stretched over more time, allowing me to reduce my work week to about 48-50 hours—a very doable pace for me, and compared to the recent 70- to 80-hour weeks I’d been experiencing, it seemed like vacation. But writing those emails to my clients explaining the situation and asking if they still wanted me to work on their projects was maybe the hardest part of this entire process. I hate not fulfilling things I said I was going to do when I said I would do it.

I signed up for Becca Syme’s Write Better-Faster 101 course for March, and started consuming as much of her content as I could in the meantime. (She has an excellent series on burnout on her YouTube podcast, called the Quitcast, if you want to check it out. I also highly recommend the course, and all of her Dear Writer books.)

We had moved into our house at the beginning of January, and I gave myself permission to only worry about future “settling in” projects on weekends when I felt I actually had energy to tackle them. There were lots of weekends when I had none. It’s now December 2021, and I intend to finish painting my living room over the Christmas break. (That’s it, though, just one room, and then the house is done. Yay!)

In March, inspired by how much I enjoyed the community in Becca’s course and realizing how much I’d missed that since I’d stopped teaching piano and stopped interviewing people, I started a small mastermind with several other writer-editors, which was one of the best things I did this year.

Which brings me to why I’m starting this podcast.

In November, I published a massive epic fantasy manuscript I’d been working on since May of 2019. But while writing through burnout to finish that project was tough, I had almost no writing energy left for anything else this year, including my blog. And my love of audio kept growing.

I also got a lot out of the sections of my favourite podcasts where the host or hosts would share what they had been doing in their writing business that week. It was basically like a miniature blog update in audio form, and they often shared tidbits that don’t normally come up in an interview which I could then apply to my own business. Even though I often listened to the interviews that followed, I’d sometimes start listening just to hear the comforting voice of a podcaster whose business I’d become invested in and whose judgement I trusted. That personal update was the kind of podcast I could see myself doing—because although there are a ton of teaching podcasts out there, no one else has made the exact mistakes I have. I try a lot of things, which means there are a lot of things that don’t work out, but some that do. And I love teaching and helping others along.

There are more reasons for me to start this podcast. The biggest one might be that, in my remote location, the pandemic and my reduced energy after burnout have limited my options to give back to the community, which is something I miss.

So, in this podcast, I’m going to share with you my writing trials and triumphs. I’ll get real about what I’ve tried, what’s worked, and what doesn’t. I’ll also share how the decisions I’ve made have affected my success or failure so far, and my perspective on advice offered by other authors in the community. I may even have some of those authors on the show to share that advice themselves.

I look forward to having you with me on this journey, friend. The kettle is always on in my house, and, despite the title, I actually drink coffee, tea, and hot chocolate on a daily basis. (Despite what my naturopath would prefer.) So whatever your preferred poison, we have that. (Also water. Water is good, too.)

Oh, and in case you’re wondering—my hormones have balanced out a great deal, as have the stresses in my life. My mom had surgery this September, and she’s recovering well, which I’m so grateful for. I know life always has more surprises waiting just around the corner, but for now, at least, the rest from excess stress has let me heal a great deal. And then one day not so long ago, I thought, “I think I’ll start a podcast.”

And I did. So grab a cuppa, and let’s get real.

P.S. Shoutout to Leslye Penelope, who hosts the podcast My Imaginary Friends. I recently heard her interviewed on the Kobo Writing Life podcast and found out she was doing exactly the kind of podcast I could see myself doing, I’d just never heard of anyone podcasting this way before. Leslye’s podcast is awesome, and I discovered several other great new podcasts through the Frolic Network, of which she is a part. Leslye is an award-winning fantasy author. I encourage you to go check her podcast out.