SPA Girls Podcast – EP369 – Make Luck Through Belief
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Today we talk about not relying on luck to build your career.
We believe you can make your own luck, but don’t wait for it to happen!
Ron Weasley (or not, we’re not really sure) says believing in yourself is 100% more powerful than luck!
Overnight success may happen for some, but if you dig deeper often, what appears to be a lucky break is actually from years of hard work to get to that point.
Wendy, Cheryl, and Trudi dig deeper into this subject in the podcast.
❤️ The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us on Patreon. Thank you so much, we love our listeners and our patrons!
Join us at the $10 tier, and you’ll be invited to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing, marketing and writing PLUS answer all your questions. Come on in and join us, we’d love to see you there!
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
Visit www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com for our FREE self-publishing resources, podcast episodes and info
SPA Girls Podcast – EP367 – How To Self Edit Your Second Draft
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There are many types of editing and today we’re discussing how the SPA Girls approach a second draft. Plus, we’ve produced a checklist, which is an amalgamation of all our processes.
First, we suggest you start with a break from the project altogether, and how long that is will depend on your timeline, so going forward factor this in.There are many types of editing and today we’re discussing how the SPA Girls approach a second draft. Plus, we’ve produced a checklist, which is an amalgamation of all our processes.
Here’s our checklist:
Does your story make sense?
Is there enough conflict?
Pacing is vital – Does it flow and read well? It is too slow or fast? Does the tension build?
Setting – Does it hit all the feels? Can I visualise it? Buildings, places, etc.
Characterisation – Are your characters consistent? Do they do what they are supposed to? Do the support cast do their job? Do the hero or heroine achieve growth in the book? Or reach the goal you originally set for them?
Description – are you recounting or summarising, or are you world building?
Hooks – Does each of the last lines in chapters make you want to read on?
Action – is it clear what the roles of your protagonists and antagonists are playing in your book?
Black moments – that moment when everything is changed and there is no going back.
Is it compelling, – or do the sentences run on, (overwriting) Does each scene move the book forward? Not all of them will be action-packed, but they must have a purpose.
Would you want to read this book again? Because if you don’t no one else will. Love your book!
There is so much more, so listen in to the podcast.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us on Patreon. Thank you so much, we love our listeners and our patrons!
⭐ Join us at the $10 tier, and you’ll be invited to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing, marketing and writing PLUS answer all your questions. Come on in and join us, we’d love to see you there!
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
✍️ Visit www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com for our FREE self-publishing resources, podcast episodes and info
SPA Girls Podcast – EP361 – Mia Brody and Instalove Short Romance
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This week we talk to the amazing Mia Brody all about how she makes a fulltime living writing instalove short romances. It’s an informative episode with plenty of wow moments, that you won’t want to miss!
Mia writes steamy stories about alpha men who fall in love with big, beautiful women. She loves happy endings and every couple she writes will get one.
When she’s not writing, Mia is searching for the perfect slice of cheesecake and watching way too many K-dramas. You can find her at miabrody.com
Resources mentioned: Bookfunnel, Grit by Angela Duckworth, Writing Instalove Facebook Group Writing Instalove | Facebook
The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us on Patreon. Thank you so much, we love our listeners and our patrons!
Join us at the $10 tier, and you’ll be invited to our private Self-Publishing Mastermind group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing, marketing and writing PLUS answer all your questions. Come on in and join us, we’d love to see you there!
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
Don’t forget, all our FREE self-publishing resources, podcast episodes and info are at: at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
SPA Girls Podcast – EP356 – Running With Your Ideas
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This week we talk about how to find new ideas, and how to use those ideas in new ways. How to find them in the everyday hustle and bustle of our lives, and how to turn them on their heads to create something intriguing and interesting to our readers.
We go through a series of story starters, of intriguing kernels that you can use to create an awesome story that your readers will love to read…
SHOW NOTES:
Places to find ideas:
🌺 Invent something from irritation – create a list of everything that annoys you, and try to find a way to use it in your writing.
🌺 Change the weather – put in a storm, make it rain, put them in a heatwave. All things that will change how the characters will act.
🌺 Use writing prompts – for example Reedsy writing prompts – https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/
🌺 Create something from a mash up – for example two tropes that don’t usually go together. An example could be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
🌺 It can be something small – one of the characters in Wendy’s book has a pet duck and her readers love it.
🌺 Find something funny about a particular situation.
🌺 Adjust the focus – write it from a different character’s viewpoint, or put the scene in a different setting, or take them out of their comfort zone, like a fish out of water scene.
🌺 Do the opposite – flip, reverse, and rotate. Make the familiar strange.
🌺 Turn up the heat – make things worse for your characters, add to their troubles.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us Patreon.
Buy us a coffee from $3/month! If you join us on the $10 tier, you’ll have access to us (warts and all!) in our private Facebook group for authors, where we discuss all things self-publishing and answer your questions.
www.patreon.com/spagirlspodcast
All SPA Girls Podcast Episodes, Resource Links and free Self-Publishing Info at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
SPA Girls Podcast – EP340 – Successful First Drafts
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Hit the ground running with this episode all about how to successfully finish the first draft of your novel!
We talk about how we stay motivated, what you need to know before you can start, how we keep going when we get to the saggy middle, what we plan beforehand, and what we leave to figure out as we go.
If you’ve been struggling to get started on your first draft, or you’re wallowing somewhere in the middle, this is the episode for you!
SPA Girls Podcast – EP338 – Psychology Tools For Authors
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Struggling to write compelling characters and compelling but realistic conflict in your stories? Well, have we got a show for you!
Darian Smith is a prize winning fiction writer with a degree in psychology, and is a member of the New Zealand Association of Counsellors. He combines these two sides of his background to provide simple, easy to follow tools that make use of established psychological theory to help writers develop fully rounded, interesting, realistic characters and inject conflict into their stories.
We cover plot development AND character development and you’ll come away (hopefully!) with some awesome tips to improve your story telling and create compelling characters that your readers will love – or love to hate!
Along with his fiction, Darian has written The Psychology Workbook for Writers: Tools for Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict in Fiction https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0143K2MNU/
You can find him at http://www.darian-smith.com/
About Darian Smith
I’m a writer and reader of fiction and live in Auckland, New Zealand. While I have dabbled in non-fiction, my true love is crafting exciting stories that interest and move me – and hopefully my readers! I mainly write fantasy. I’m a member of SpecFicNZ, an organisation for writers of speculative fiction here in New Zealand, and also of RWNZ. I’ve won the Koru award and the Sir Julius Vogel award. My literary agent is Word|Link. In my day job, I’m a Fieldworker for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I’m also a counsellor/family therapist. I live with my beautiful partner, who is also a writer, and two naughty black cats named Apollo and Athena. The cats don’t write.
💗 The SPA Girls podcast is sponsored by everyone who supports us Patreon.
Your support allows us to create the weekly show for self-publishers, as well as for us to take time away from our own writing to produce it. Thank you so much! If you’d like to join our supporters community, click here to be a patron of SPA Girls.
All SPA Girls Podcast Episodes, Resource Links and free Self-Publishing Info at www.SelfPublishingAuthorsPodcast.com
