Ep. 162: Show Me The Money, 2019 Edition

Rachael talks about not only how much she made in 2019, but how authors need to be thinking about their finances, and gives recommendations on how to start today to fix your financial situation. 

Transcript

Rachael Herron: Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode 162 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So pleased that you’re here today as I do my annual finances talk, finances for writers. It is January 9th, 2020 as I record this and I am always really excited to do this particular episode because I believe in transparency in writers’ income, that does not mean that you have to tell everyone what you make. But my commitment to transparency means that I need to tell you how much I make because I, that’s something I promised to do in the past, and I’ve done it in the earlier years of this show. The first episode is all about what I made the year before. So that’s what we’re talking about today. So I’m doing a little bit of a bait and switch on you this time.

[00:01:08] I’m going to give you a very quick and dirty rundown of the finances for authors workshop that Sophie Littlefield and I have presented in many different places, including this last week at Seton Hill. If you watch on the YouTube, you can see that I’m in a hotel room. I’m still in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. We’re leaving today. But I thought while all of this is still fresh in my mind, we just taught the class two days ago. I will do literally like a 20-minute rundown, hopefully no more than that. And then I’ll tell you what I made. You can absolutely scroll forward. I won’t be able to tell. But, this is kind of the things that I really, really believe about money.

[00:01:47] And I am by no means a financial expert. In fact, I am a financial failure in a lot of different ways, which is why Sophie and I teach this class. We kind of did everything the hard way before we figured out what money was and what it meant to us and how to handle it as, people who take care of ourselves and our loved ones in our lives financially. So just, I’m going to just going to jump right into it and this is going to be fun. I want to talk real quickly about, what we have control and what we don’t have control of as authors. I know a lot of you have the dream of moving from a day job to full time writing, and that’s why I want to share this with you because a lot of these things are the things that you have to think about before making that jump. If you are in the lucky and privileged position of being able to write and not worrying about the money that you bring in, you do not have to listen to a word of this. Skip on over. If you’ve got your retirement settled and taken care of, skip to the end or skip to the next episode. That might work too. But if you have any concerns about these things, keep on listening. So in writerlandia, there are some things that are true. Our income, unfortunately, is unpredictable. We cannot know from year to year what we will make, and if you got three huge traditional deals, six figure deals three years in a row, one book not earning out puts you back to the model where you get paid $2,500 for a book. If you can sell one, that is in the traditional side.

[00:03:32] Well on the self-publishing side, income is also unpredictable. Algorithms are always changing. We’ve seen a massive shift of income that authors are able to make now that it really is a pay to play landscape. It used to be that also bought on Amazons’ page that showed what people bought that liked your book. That was a really good way of organic reach of finding a new audience that is less and less available as sponsored products are pushed up in Amazon. So now you have to take out ads to be discoverable. If you’re starting, if you don’t have a mailing list, even if you do have a mailing list, these are things we have to consider. So we never know when Amazon or Kobo or Google, any of them are going to change their royalty scheme. None of us have signed contracts with them that say, we will always give you 70% of net if your book is between 2.99 and 9.99. We never made that bargain with them, like we do with a traditional deal. 

[00:04:31] Traditional deal, you signed something, they signed something, this is what you will get paid. Granted, it is a much lower percentage of what you will ever get self-publishing. Well, not ever what you will get now, self-publishing, but self-publishing rules can change. We have no control over that. Our income is inconsistent. It does not come on the first of the month and the 15th of the month. I can go months where I make not enough to get by, and then I’ll have some big five figure months, which for me are really big, but that has to tide me over for those lean months. So, it’s inconsistent. I never know when I’m going to get a $4,000 check or a $2 and 50 cent check.

[00:05:15] All money is welcome. I would like to say I love money. Money loves me. I bring it to me. All of those mantras that we say.  And this is really something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year in particular. Money is not evil. Money is just a symbol of energy. It, symbolizes the work that I put into something. The work that you put into something, the work that others put into actual things. If you want this widget, you must be able to pay money which you have earned with your energy to purchase something that someone else has made with their energy. And that’s all it is, is this, energy being transferred back and forth. And it, thinking of it like this has really helped me get over some of the guilty feelings that I have for wanting it or collecting it or feeling like I’m not worthy of it or feeling like I’m not collecting enough of it. So, knowing that income is inconsistent and we don’t know where it comes from. All of the time when our writers, it comes really inconsistent dribs and drabs helps us remember that we have to have knowledge of what is in our bank accounts and how that works. Other things about writing Monet’s, authors may often rely on day jobs or other income, and that includes your partner who’s helping you. That is a fantastic thing. I left from my day job and I am so glad that I did. That was almost four years ago, but having the day job for the 10 years that I was working both jobs was what allowed me to make the jump. So day jobs are fabulous in America. They’re really important to for your health insurance. If my wife lost her job, which is how I’m insured. And wasn’t able to find one quick enough, I’d jumped right back into the job market because, this particular body often needs things surgically examined. So I need health insurance. I’m one of those people. So, we may really rely on day jobs. We might have multiple writing income sources, which is what I’m going to talk about later when I talk about my income. I made more than six figures this year. But less than a quart- well, we’ll probably did or, let me do math. That’s what a quarter of it was actually from books. So hang on for that multiple writing income sources. We have to, this is another fact of being an author, we have to pay and track our own expenses. That’s our responsibility. We owe quarterly taxes and self-employment tax. So not only are you taxed at your tax rate, but you’re also taxed the additional 15% self-employment tax, which in the United States of America is what is true.

[00:07:59] So when I take home a check for $10,000, I don’t keep $10,000. I keep less of it than I would if I were working for a company. And the documentation of that is our responsibility. So, understanding your own situation is key. The thing about talking about money, if you’re driving in your car and your stomach is tight, that’s what I want to talk to you about. The things that keep us in place around money are fear, inertia, and shame. And for me, the mixture of fear about my finances and the shame that I’ve had in the past about my finances kept me in inertia. I didn’t really understand how money worked and we were in a hell of a lot of debt, which is something that was very, very shameful to me. And it is something that in the U S and other places is incredibly filled with shame. And that’s what I want to encourage you right now is that this is a no shame zone. You can email me privately. And tell me what you’re ashamed of in your, in your finances. You can tell anyone that you want, but you know, in this world of Brene Brown that we live in now, we know that shame when spoken aloud, and met with empathy cannot continue to exist. That is how we get rid of shame. We speak it. And so that’s what I like to do when I’m talking about money. But you do have to understand your current situation, and that is one of the most difficult things to do. I believe it takes bravery, it takes courage. And when we are talking about money, that is something that is very hard to find. When I finally sat down to really address our debt, I cried and cried and cried and cried. I don’t remember how I got the courage to do it honestly, because I thought we were in a place of such shame that we would never recover. We were losing, this was back in 2008 or so when the financial world had collapsed. I had had a condo. We had leveraged the condo to buy house. I had fallen prey to all of the funny money that was out there. I had balloon mortgages; I didn’t know what that meant. It was the time when banks were doing really shady things. I should never, on my salary have been able to do that. Ever. It should never happen. But because there were businesses that were willing to give me that money, I got that money. We ended up losing the condo after a year of trying to short sell it. And this was back in the day when no one short sold or the people were just starting to, and no one foreclosed. This was right in the days of the beginning of the crisis. So no one was talking about it. And I was so deeply mired in shame. We tried to short sell that condo. Unsuccessfully, no one would buy it for that loss. For a year. And that whole year I was putting everything on a credit card, like the mortgage that we couldn’t afford because we’re paying the mortgage on our house. So we got deeply mired in a lot more debt. And the day that I had to sit down and look at all of this, and ask for help was one of the darkest days of my life, and one of the scariest days. And I just like to put that out there that. It is very, very, very, very hard. But you must understand your current situation. And if that means that your partner has been taking care of these kind of bills and knows where all the money is, it is incumbent upon you to talk to your partner and sit down and say, where are we healthy? If we are completely unhealthy, where are we unhealthy? What do we lack? What is our debt and how can we start to dig out of it?

[00:11:46] That only comes from conversation. It can’t come from hope. I had lived in hope with my head buried under the sand for many years as an adult. So, you need to understand your assets, what you have in the bank, your debts, all of them, including your mortgage, your student debt, all those things that we think of as good debt, there’s still debt. And student loans, I would argue are not good debt, but we can come back to that. You need to understand your retirement savings. Something which is very difficult to understand sometimes. You need to understand as a writer, your income trend and projection. Look at the last few years, what have you made? What can you hope to make in the upcoming years, knowing that it is unstable? You need to understand your upcoming and potential expenses, something that I never understood at all. I am a Pollyanna. I always hoped that the money would be there and it normally wasn’t because I didn’t know how to save for it. And that sounds super boring, and changing that has been one of the most exciting things in my life. You need to understand if you have a rainy day fund, and if you don’t, how to make one. Also, are you adequately insured? Are your dependents provided for? You have to understand your personal advantages and your personal limitations. I know that I like looking at money and my wife does not like looking at money, so I keep her informed of where it all is and what we’re doing with it. But her, one of her limitations is she just can’t, it stresses her out too much. So I get to do that, but I do that, making sure that she knows what I’m doing. Does that make sense? I’m just flipping through the slides here. So debts, it is time to be honest with yourself about debts and call a friend if you need to. Get someone over to your house to do it with you. Things like, like I said, mortgage and car loans, all of those things count. What I did was I had decided to call MMI. Can’t remember what stands for M M I, and it is a nonprofit consumer credit consolidation service. It does not make money. There are a bunch of them that do make money and those are predatory. This one, I think charged me $35 a month. They got a bunch of my credit card bills down. When I called them to ask for help, I thought I owed $20,000 on our credit cards. It turns out that we owed more than 40,000. That is what my brain had said. Even though every month I wrote up the minimum payment for these things, my brain would not allow me to add them up correctly. And I just remember sobbing through that phone call and the woman on the other end of the line was able to consolidate our credit cards. We went from paying $1,800 a month in credit card, minimum payment to $800 a month. Instead of taking the 26 years, it would’ve paid, it would’ve taken to pay them all off, it took four- it took four years of that work. They were done and gone, and that was one of the happiest days of my life when that was paid off. For me, a consumer credit consolidation nonprofit firm helped me so much. It’s helped a bunch of people that I know and love in my life. I recommend MMI, but do your own due diligence research, obviously. Look at your student loans. Mine. Were you serious? I had deferred like a dummy for many years, not being able to pay rent in the Bay area and pay my student loans, so I defer, defer, deferred. For many years, I had borrowed 40,000. I got a good job. I started paying them $350 a month. Every month, I paid them for seven years, $350 a month. It might be the right math. It might not be the right math. But I know that when I finally looked to see how much I’d paid them, I had paid them $27,000, you know, including much of, most of that was interest. I had paid them $27,000 of a $40,000 loan, and I owed them $50,000. I owed them more than I had started out because of all those years of deferment deferral, which made me so mad. All of our money went to paying that off next. This was after we had worked on paying down and off a tax bill that my wife had had from a previous life of hers where she owed $25,000 so if you’re doing the math, 25,000 plus 40,000 plus 50,000 of student debt equals $115,000 that we were in debt. The time that I was doing all of this, my mother had just died. We had just lost the condo and Lala lost her job. We had no money. We had no money to deal with these things. So I had to, and it was one of the most painful times in my life. But it took this direct look to start working on it. And on the positive side, while Lala was very unemployed for – under-employed for three years, she would attempt sometimes, but this was during the tech meltdown. I’m in the Bay area, so she was not able to get jobs. We actually ended up saving more than we did when we had two jobs because we went so frugal and we were so careful with our money. So it absolutely can be done. It’s something to think about is retirement savings. This is something that, I’m only starting to think about at 47 years old. Oh, this was another mistake in buying my first condo. I cashed out my only big 401k, although it’s, you know, through the government, so it’s called something else. But, for – So that was smart. So I really didn’t have retirement savings and I really honestly, barely do. I am in the, in the constant process of building those up now. Now that I know that in 20 years I don’t really want to retire. I never want to retire from writing, but I want Lala to be able to stop working. I want myself to take a year off if I want to from writing a book or I can’t imagine that, but I want to be in a place of financial independence. You’ve heard me talk about this over on the Writers with Jay, where I have money in a bank that is working for me rather than me working so hard for my money. And so I’m really interested in the fire movement, financial independence movement. I have no idea how to do that because we just don’t make enough in the Bay area to put away enough to get there quickly. But I’m always thinking creatively about these things. Should we move? Should we, should I get a job? Should we do any of these things? So I’m, I’m always thinking about retirement savings. Lala is maxed out in her 401k so she brings home not that much money because all of it is going as much of it as we can put is going into retirement. So that is something I’m proud of. I fully fund my own SEP IRA, my self-employment IRA, every year. 

[00:18:23] So we had to learn about these things and think about them. If these words don’t make any sense to you, don’t worry about them right now. What I recommend is you buy, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” It’s a terrible title, and he admits it to, by Ramit Sethi. It is an amazing book. I had kind of learned all the principles in his book over my last eight or so years of learning about finances and learning what money is. But he puts them all into one place, and I got so much out of it reading it this year, so that is highly recommended. Okay. What next do I want to talk about? I want to recommend; You Need a Budget. It’s called YNAB.com, https://www.youneedabudget.com and it is life changing. If you’ve never heard me talk about it before, it is the app. It’s a pay per month app, which you know I dislike, but it is absolutely worth it. It is like mentor or quicken or any of the budgeting apps, although it doesn’t work like a budget. Budgets have never worked for me because it didn’t matter what was in my budget. I spent what I spent, and so YNAB has this unique way of you look at your money. You give every dollar that you have today, a job. If, later this afternoon you spent something that changes those dollars’ jobs, then you move them around on their spreadsheet. Where would, where will this next $5 go? What? Where does it belong? It is what finally taught me at about 39 or 40 years old, what money was, I was so clueless. I understood where money was. I understood it intellectually. That I needed to spend less than I took in, but I didn’t know what that looked like amortized over a year. And I also didn’t want to know, I was very much the ostrich head in the sand, which apparently I don’t think they actually do. I read somewhere or they- anyway. YNAB changed my life. It changed – it has changed the life of so many people that I have told about it, that I still hear regularly back from people who tell me, I heard about it from you eight years ago. We are now out of debt. We are now building for this. It is how we got out of debt. When people ask me how we got out of debt, number one, I was writing on top of working full time and I was working like a hundred hours a week. But, that was hard. But, that aside, every bit of writing money, if I didn’t buy myself a pair of blue shoes, which is my fancy luxury, it was going towards debt. So I had that. And that’s the wonderful thing about writing as a side hustle. You can put that toward a debt. You can move that money there. So, but though the number one thing that got us out of debt was YNAB, was me finally understanding, how it worked and how much we needed to have around for everyday expenses. I always thought that if we had a couple thousand dollars in the bank, we’d be okay. And suddenly there was no money in the bank because that’s not enough. When you’re looking at car repairs, a vet bills, roof repair, the money is just gone so quickly and it just, it is amazing. I can’t, if I can tell you one thing to do, get YNAB. And the second thing is read Ramit Sethi’s book, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich”. The only other thing I want to share with you is, if you want to make more money or save more money, there are only two ways to do it. You can cut your spending or increase what you make. Those are the only two ways. Luckily, as writers, we have that ability to learn our craft and hone our skills so that eventually you can sell what is in your brain to other people and they will pay you for it and you can create money from the inside of your brain, and I just didn’t think that that is the most exciting thing. 

[00:22:15] Also, I would like to say a couple more things. Number one, you need an emergency fund. I wanted to have six months’ worth of emergency savings in the bank before I quit. I didn’t, I only had four months. I jumped a little bit early because of a family illness. But knowing that we have an emergency fund to me is key to sleeping at night. And the other thing is, and bear with me here. Your debt is an emergency, it is not unacceptable thing, and you might get mad at me for that and you might unsubscribe to this podcast. And God knows I held that for decades, decades, because I bought into this society that we have that says debt is okay. I do believe debt is okay in terms of a home mortgage, although that could even be argued a little bit. But we will not. But debt is an emergency and it should be the number one thing you are working toward to get rid of. If you ever want to be a writer, who supports herself on her own writing. If you want to be able to be flexible and nimble and move, if you want to or go to Jamaica if you want to, you have to get rid of the debt and that does mean cutting expenses. It means lifestyle modifications, canceling those subscriptions. Why do you need Hulu if you should be writing? I’m going to argue for Netflix because Netflix is Madame. But it also can be long-term radical changes. It can be moving, selling your house, taking in a roommate, selling your car, and going down to one car in your family, consolidating your debt, negotiating with the IRS. These are big things that will give you more income, more money left over to throw at your debt. And I want to just say I, you know, don’t believe in the whole latte idea where you should cut out all that lattes. You should have a couple of luxuries that make you happy. Those are the small things in life, but I don’t think you should buy a latte today if you are still paying off a latte from three years ago on your credit card, that is now costs you $32. Right? So really think of debt as an emergency. As a person who wants to be a writer, I think that is necessary. If you are in a different position and you don’t want to be a writer and debt is comfortable to you, absolutely you do you. But try to hear mama Rachael’s voice in you, in your head at some point saying, debt is an emergency. How can I get out of this? How can I use my brain to make a little bit of extra money on the side to throw towards that debt? Okay, so you listen through my lecture, you came out of it, you are not dead of shame. I guarantee you that if you email me about your shame around money or about your debt, I have heard higher numbers than yours. Someday I’m going to have to give a prize to somebody who breaks the number. That I’ve already heard that someone is in debt. And I will do that at some point. And I want to say that I absolutely know that I am sitting in a place of extreme privilege. I am published. I’m multi-published, I get to talk to you from the place of a person who has paid off her family’s debt.

 [00:25:28] And I am so grateful and I am so happy. And I understand that that might be hard to hear, or you might be angry at me and saying things like, I can’t do that because of this, and you are right. You know your situation much better than the only situation I know is my own. But if you can sit down, and look honestly at your income versus expenses, that’s where it starts. And again, there’s no shame. You haven’t been doing this wrong. You’re not a bad person. We are not taught this stuff. We learn calculus in high school and in college, which has never done me any good. Honest to freaking God. I have never used calculus in my life, but if they had given me a semester’s worth of how money works instead of econ, which I absolutely could not handle, my life would be different. Your life would be different. What if we had known about compounding interest and really known about it? Like put in $100, and we’ve been watching it grow since we were 19 years old. We would be different people. So no shame. You’re not bad. Your money is not you. It has nothing to do with who you are as a human being. It is simply a marker of energy that we get to manipulate. And I would love to hear about your story. Come over to www.howdoyouwrite.net has been having problems, so just shoot me an email at www.rachaelherron.com, but you have to spell it right and I would love to hear about that. 

[00:27:08] So now you made it all the way through the radically synopsized class of finances for authors. Now I’m going to tell you what I made and how I made it in 2019 the last year of the teens. So I’m going to start from the lowest and then go to the highest of all the things that I made. From magazines, I think I only want wrote one article last year, which is weird, but I made $300. From speaking to people, I made $675. From my online class, which is How to Stop Stalling and Write Your Novel, maybe I think it’s called, I made $975 I’ve completely passive income because I’d basically forget that is out there. You can always get to it on my website, www.rachaelherron.com, I think it’s only like $19. I should probably raise that price. From query fixing, I charge it $100 to fix queries. I did 10 of them for $1,000. On audio books, painful, painful. I made $1,475, and considering that I have spent more than $10,000 on narrators over the years. Going to take me a lot of time to earn that back. Those one, two, three, four, five things, they are the lowest things that I made last year. Add up only to $4,425 just $4,425. So I have to think about whether these things are worth it. Do I want to put more time into recording audio books? I don’t know. Do I want to continue to do query fixes? Honestly, yes. Because those are quick and easy and fun for me. Do I want to continue speaking? Maybe not, unless I make more money. Do I want to spend more time on magazine writing? I don’t know. There was only out up to $4,000 total, but you know it’s worth $4,000 that I got to put in the bank and use. So, the bigger things are coaching. I made $9,500. Patreon, I made $26,500. And let’s just talk about Patreon for a moment. I write essays about creativity and living my life over on Patreon. Basically, I am paying myself an advance to write a collection of essays. I have two collections of essays, which I desperately need to revise and either get my agent to sell or put out there, but I’ve already paid myself these advances for these books. Any other money that comes in is just extra, so that’s fantastic. For the retreat, the Venice retreat. This one requires explanation. I made $27,000 but $20,000 of that is expense. It goes to the hotel, to all of the excursions that we took, all of that. So I brought in people’s money at $27,000, but I only made $7,000 from it, but that’s still net so that needs to be remembered. That is something I have forgotten in past years, in fact, I forgot it for the last two years. I thought 2019, thought 2018 was the first time I wrote six figures. I actually broke it in 2017 also because I forgot to add that money in. So this is my third year as a six figure author, which is shocking to me because I, it’s just shocking and amazing, and I don’t even do money well enough to know that right off the top of my head. So now I know that. So I made $7,000 net from the retreat. And books, I know this is what you’re listening for. I made only $42,500 that I’m saying only in quotation marks because that’s a hell of a lot of money, especially that I didn’t do really any marketing whatsoever. That was $19,500 from traditional, and those were mostly new contract, new contracts because I think I only made… I probably made, let me, I can just add it up right here in my head, I made less than $500 on royalties. So let’s say $500 on royalties from books that have earned out traditionally, $19,000 in new contracts, traditional, and I made $23,000 in self-publishing. Organic reach, no advertising. I could do better with that if I did more ads, which is what I’m going to be working on this year, hopefully. So a total of $42,500 for books, which is fantastic! Teaching, I made $49,000. So that is where the majority of my money came from this year. Mostly from schools, Stanford, Berkeley, and from my online stuff to total, total get ready for it; I- it’s freaking me out, is $158,925 let’s round that up to $159,000. That’s incredible. Like I could not believe that number when I said, if you’re watching on the YouTube, you know that my face is crazy lit up and, and honestly, you guys, I want to make more, I want to make more and put it towards my retirement. I want to make more and put it towards Lala’s retirement particularly. That’s what makes me excited is, the thought that someday she might not have to go to the day job, which she likes, but she doesn’t love and she spends two hours or three hours a day commuting. What if she didn’t have to do that? So, in order of making money, I made my most money from teaching. Teaching-writing. And second, I made it from books and third, I made it from Patreon. 

[00:32:40] Those are my three greatest chunks, and they’re pretty, pretty close to each other, so that’s fantastic. This is something I wanted to point out though when we’re talking about multiple streams of income, I track all my income. On a, a completely unremarkable Excel spreadsheet that I just list who paid me, what they paid me on, what it was for, with the little code so I can sort it at the end of the year and tell you this story. I made 324 – I got 324 different payments last year, and these ranged from literally a dollar 50 for two payments of some book, to 10 and $15,000 paychecks, right? 324 of those different payments that averages out to 27 payments a month. Somebody was paying me about 27 times a month, and the average of each payment was $490. So I really like knowing that there are so many different little dribs and drabs of money coming in, and it adds up to 159 freaking thousand dollars a year for which I am so grateful and I hope that me talking about this gives you hope. 

[00:33:55] I hope that me talking about this doesn’t make you feel like you can’t do this, but rather makes you feel like you can do something like this. You can’t do this. You cannot do what I’m doing. No one can do what I’m doing. I cannot do what Jay Thorne is doing. Jay cannot do what I am doing. You get to do what you can do, and I’m really concentrating in 2020 on doing the things that I love. Doing the things that are fun for me. Doing this podcast is fun for me. Doing my writing most of the time is fun for me. I want to do things that make me happy and bring me money. There’s that. There’s that, place where they co-habit and that’s where I want to live my life. I’ve, I’ve talked about it with Jay on the other show, but I really love Denise Duffield-Thomas’ book, Chillpreneur, it’s really about being an entrepreneur and doing what you love. A little bit of woo-woo, but just enough for me and a lot of common sense about in entrepreneurship. I’m not talking about your day job. Your day job is what it is. You might hate it. You might love it. You might hate parts of it. You can’t some parts of your day job, unfortunately. Usually, if you can do it, but in your side hustle, if you are not full time author yet and you want to be one; In your side hustle, just do what you’ve love. Also, experiment with things that you think you might not love because teaching honestly was never something I really, really wanted to do, and it has turned out to be the thing I love doing almost the most. So think about that. Be creative. Be willing to try things. And if you don’t ever want to be a full time author, this podcast is just as applicable to you. Still think about your finances though. Think about your retirement. The chances are very likely that you know a lot more about money than I do, and that you are financially comfortable and that you understand where your retirement slash pension are coming from.

[00:35:52] And I applaud you, and I hope you don’t mind me laying all of my dirt out on the line, but this is the podcast I would’ve wanted to hear when I was starting out, or, you know, I’d want to hear it this year too. So this is why I make it. I hope that it was in some way helpful to you. I hope that you can hear in my voice how grateful I am that I live this life, that I get to do this, that people pay me for the things that are in my brain and for sharing that that with them either was my words in a book or with teaching where I’m doing the same thing. I’m pulling stuff out of my head and sharing it. So, and you are part of that community. If you’re listening to me right now and you’ve gotten this far, I thank you for being here and for being part of my world. And I hope that you, if you do want to share any of your financial stuff with me, come over to; try to find the website at www.howdoyouwrite.net maybe you just fix yourself the URL, something I got to work on. Or just email me @Rachael at www.rachaelherron.com or tweet me at twitter.com/RachaelHerron. I would love to hear from you. And, yeah, that’s all. I wish you a very happy new year and may all your money dreams, you know, screw money dreams. May all your dreams come true this year. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.