R.L. Syme is a USA Today best-selling author of small-town romance and cozy mystery. She writes small-town romance as Becca Boyd and cozy culinary mysteries as R.L. Syme. As Becca Syme, she is the creator and founder of the Better-Faster Academy. She teaches the popular Write Better-Faster course for several years as well as Strengths for Writers, and is the author of the Dear Writer You Need to Quit series.
How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.
Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!
And for a chance to win Becca’s book, simply sign up for my writer’s email list HERE and shoot me a return email saying you’d like to enter. Or if you’re on the email list already, you have my email address, just write and tell me you’d like a shot at the book!
And HERE is the Decision Tree! (Twitter link, feel free to download from there.)
Transcript
Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] 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 #199 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron, and I am so thrilled that you are here today because today, we have Becca Syme on the show. If you do not know who Becca Syme is and what she does for writers, this is gonna blow your mind. She has blown mine. I’m gonna do a little fangirling here, pre-show and then I’m going to fan girl all over her in the interview. She is this amazing coach who uses a tool called Clifton strengths to basically look at where you are strong and look at where you are weak. There are 34 core strengths. This is something that coaches use in many different professions. Businesses do this, it’s scientific. It’s super interesting, but not that useful if you don’t know what to do with it. And Becca knows what to do with it for writers. It has changed my life, I took her Write Better, Faster Class, maybe about a year ago. Didn’t actually even finish it, just got so much from being in the class and doing the homework and stuff. I was kind of haphazard with it, but I really, really appreciated what she said to me in our one-on-one, about my strengths and how they could work for me and that changed a lot of my process. Basically, we talk about this in the interview, but Becca has you look at the things you’re really good at, and do better with those and basically forget about the stuff that you are bad at, because even if you worked really, really hard to make the things that you are naturally bad at better, they’re not going to get as good as working hard to make the things you’re already a bad-ass at even better. [00:00:15] So I’m just going to tell you what my strengths are, so, and what I’ve learned from them just really, really quickly. This is not back talking. This is me talking with my very limited knowledge but how it works, and how it’s changed in my writing. So, my number one is input. That means that I want to absorb all information all the time. If you are constantly reading, constantly scrolling, constantly diving deep into rabbit holes that really interest you, you might have high input. It’s great. That serves to really inspire me for a lot of my writing. That’s my number one. My number two is intellection. That can be a little bit problematic and it’s also awesome. But it means I need to think a lot. I can’t just go off halfcocked, even though I try, I really have to do a lot of thinking before I do something. This has been pivotal in me understanding my process, that I can’t just sit down and write garbage. I definitely write garbage. That’s what I write. That’s the first draft, but I have to think about the garbage before I write it, or I just can’t write, if I don’t know what is, if I haven’t thought about what’s going to happen next, I can’t write and I have been forcing myself for a dozen years using sheer discipline and will to make myself sit down and write something that I know on a really deep level that isn’t working, and I throw myself against it again and again, without thinking, it turns out the discipline for me is way down the list. I do not have high discipline, which explains a lot about it, but as soon as I sit down and start jotting notes about what I’m going to write next, as soon as I start brainstorming, as soon as I start thinking it, the, the ice breaks up and I’m able to move through the water again, to use a very clunky metaphor. [00:04:00] So knowing that for me, writing has to have additional time built in just for thinking, has changed everything it has made writing for first drafts so much easier and it’s made revision even more pleasant. Number three for me is achiever, I’m just going to do the top five. Number three for me is achiever, which means I love a list. I love to check something off and here is something that has concretely helped me as an achiever. I now have a completed list and everything I complete during the day, I write down, I keep it per week. And at the end of the week, I have a majorly long list of all the things I did. One of the things with achiever is that my achiever in my brain is always telling me I’m not doing a much, not doing enough. I’m not doing as much as I could. And I’m being lazy. I have known on the surface that that is a lie, but that is something that’s gotten me down since I was like seven. I swear to God, since I was seven or eight, I remember the feeling of not being able to get as much as I wanted done. And that’s just part of the achievers’ job. The achiever will always say there’s more to do. Check off more off of those boxes. And now I get to say, Oh, that’s your job. That’s why you feel like that. But look at your list. Oh my God. How much have you gotten done? Life changing, life changing people. [00:05:19] Number four is surprise, positivity, which is excellent trait. I love having it as a trait. It means I am a great cheerleader, combined with achiever however, my positivity can sometimes sneak up on me from behind and tap me on the shoulder and say, you really could write three more books this month. You got this. So knowing that I need to balance my positivity against my achiever and know that probably one of them is lying, if not both super, super helpful. I have a tendency to say yes to everything and that I need to backpedal out of things, knowing that has helped so much. And number five, I have strategic, which really helps me with my low discipline, I have, I make strategies to get work done. I don’t need discipline. I have strategies. I have plans in place to get my work done and it’s been working. So what if I don’t have a perfectly disciplined day where everything happens the same way every day. I’ve never had that. And Becca has given me the permission not to need that. I think we talk a little about that a little bit in the interview, and I’ll just mention really quick that my number seven is activator. An activator married with achiever, amazing. Activator gets things started. Achiever finishes things. So combining achiever with activator, along with strategic, to do the planning and intellection to do the thinking, and input to know where to get the information that I need plus positivity, which makes me believe in myself. These are my super powers when I put them together. Who needs discipline? Who needs adaptability, which is just like my, almost my lowest trait. Who needs developer? I don’t need these things. I’ve got these other things that I can focus on and become strong in. [00:07:03] So that is a brief testimonial for Becca and seriously my wife asks me if I’m in a cult, I’m a member of Beccan nation, which is an official. I am a member of her Patreon. I basically will do anything she says. So yeah, maybe I’m in a cult, but it’s a really good cult. And I would like every writer in the world to work with Becca. I am not getting paid anything for this, I am not an affiliate. I don’t even know if she does affiliates, but if you want to up your strengths game, I recommend going to her and I was so pleased to have this interview, with her, I just really, really respect what she’s doing and how she’s bringing writers free. So that is my compelling over, oh my gosh. Can’t wait for you to listen to that interview. [00:07:57] What’s been going on around here, well we had our orange day yesterday. Where what all day I actually started in the morning and then got darker, darker as the day went on. I’m sure you saw it those orange photographs of buildings and cars needing lights to drive because it was so dark, basically the smoke in the Bay area, much of California, actually the smoke got trapped above the Marine layer. So it shut out all the light. It was like being in that moment of, of a total eclipse except it didn’t stop. It was quite honestly, terrifying in the house, it was pitch black with all the curtains open and our house is very, very bright. It’s got a ton of windows, pitch-black could not walk through the house without all the lights on just as if it were nighttime. My lizard brain did not like it at all. My lizard brain all day was telling me to run, get saved, get out. And there was nowhere to go. So I had one of those days where it was really hard to get the work done. Cause my body kept wanting to stand up and leave, but I didn’t, I have developed through Becca’s classes this was a inspiration from one of her classes. I have developed something I’m not sure if I shared with you yet. So, I think I might’ve mentioned it, but it is the decision tree for when it is hard to focus. I will go ahead and put that in the show notes for this episode at HowDoYouWrite.net if you’re having a hard time in your bothered by current events and current events are keeping you from getting your writing done, come over, grab, download that decision tree and put it into use. It’s been something that’s been helping me a lot when I’m sitting around flapping going, oh my God, the sky is falling. The sky was literally falling and I get out the decision tree and then I go to work. [00:09:48] One thing I almost forgot to mention, because I’m a Patreon at the level than I am for Becca, love to support her, she sent me a free copy, signed copy of Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. If you’re watching on the video, I’m going to hold it up. It’s a fantastic book. Dear Writer, You Need to Quit. What do you need to quit? What do you need to quit to get this stuff done? It’s a fabulous book. I already own it though, of course. So I would like to send this to a lucky listener. All you need to do to enter is either sign up for my email newsletter, which is at RachaelHerron.com/Write and then respond to it. Excuse me, Alexa, stop. I use her for everything. I hope I didn’t just make you’re A-L-E-X-A stop. That’s my reminder, I have a podcast coming up soon, but this is more important. So go sign up for my writer’s a newsletter free encouragement, RachaelHerron.com/Write and then respond to it and say, I joined because I want a chance at Becca’s book. If you are already on my email list, all you have to do is send me a quickie email that says I’d like to enter the drawing for Becca’s book. International entries are okay. I believe in this book so much; I will spend $40 to send it to a lucky winner on Australia, if that is you. So that’s all I got to do. Any questions about that, just go to, HowDoYouWrite.net and click on this episode with Becca. So that horrific orange-ness has gone today. We just have falling ash, which is incredibly thick, very hard to breathe. My wife is having a problem cause she’s got asthma and it’s really difficult. But you know what? Our houses aren’t burning down. The firefighters are doing their level best to protect California and Oregon and Washington, and hoping global warming overlords. It’s, it looked yesterday like being in the middle of blade runner or living on Mars, it was, it was, it was scary. I’m glad it’s over. It’s gonna happen again though. If you go to my Instagram, you can see how I show, how Californians were a double mask. Cause you gotta wear N95 to filter the smoke when you’re outside, but in N95 doesn’t protect anyone from COVID. [00:12:00] So, then you have to wear a mask over that. So I have a special method of doing that. Go to my Instagram, RachaelHerron to look at that it’s quite alarming. Nothing else I’ve noticed going on. I turned in the final, final, final, final little mini revision. It took me like an hour to my editor. So Hush Little Baby is off my desk. And what being off my desk means is that it has been accepted. Formally accepted by my editor as a book that is good enough to go to print. I have succeeded in fulfilling my part of that contract. It does not occur inside the contract until the very last revision is done. This is pre-copy edit. So now my editor pushes it off her desk. As soon as she pushes it off her desk, over to the copy editor station, I get paid. That is when it’s called delivery and acceptance. The acceptance is the hard part. So I’ll get paid next week. The one quarter of this royalty, again, I, they broke this book, and my last book, up into three or four payments instead of the old fashioned three, I guess now we’re going to four. You get a quarter of your royalty, not royalty- a quarter of your advance when you sign the contract, you get another quarter when you deliver the book and it’s accepted, which just happened. You get another quarter when the book is published, which will happen in spring in hardcover. And then in my contract, I get another quarter when the book comes out in paperback the next year, which is fine. That means that money is rolling in. And actually, because Stolen Things just came out in paperback a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago. I just got paid for that. So it’s really nice to have those little chunks of money coming in. Would I love to get an advance all upfront? Sure. Do I mind getting money over the transom into my bank account? I really love it. I can recommend. So that’s happening, I’m working on revisions of You’re Already Ready and my classes are divine. My new 90 days to Done and 90-day Revision are filled with the best people and we’re having so much fun and they’re working so hard and I am so proud of them and I’m in the trenches with them working on my revision. [00:14:00] So, all of that is good. Anyway, I’m babbling because we are wasting precious time. You need to get into this interview with Becca Syme, audio writer, you need to quit. You need to do a lot of things, but first on that list is to be here with Becca. I hope that you enjoy, I hope that you become a convert and join our non-cult it is not a cult buddy, it is freaking awesome. So enjoy writers, happy writing, and we’ll talk soon. [00:14:37] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through? Again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who’ve been just Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month. Which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here writing desk. If you pledge the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts for me that you can respond to. And if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life, that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael (R A C H A E L) to get these perks and more. And thank you so much.Rachael Herron: [00:15:37] Well I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show, Becca Syme. Hello, Becca.
Becca Syme: [00:15:42] Hi! I’m so excited to be here.
Rachael Herron: [00:15:45] Stop it, I am the most excited. Let me give you a little bio and then I will go ahead and fan girl all over you some more. R.L. Syme is a USA Today best-selling author of small town romance and cozy mystery. She writes small town romance as Becca Boyd and cozy culinary mysteries as R.L. Syme. As Becca Syme, she is the creator and founder of the Better-Faster Academy. She teaches the popular Write Better-Faster course as well as Strengths for Writers, and is the author of the Dear Writer You Need to Quit book series. Bec, I think that’s honestly, the first place I heard of you was Dear Writer You Need to Quit, I think I heard you on a podcast or something. And I remember becoming really mortally soul offended by the words, Dear Writer You Need to Quit. And of course, like I’m really interested in those kinds of reactions. So like, well, I gotta, I gotta look up that book. And I read the book, fell in love, I just can’t get enough of what you do. I’ve done your courses. I’m a Patreon supporter. I’m doing your little, what are you calling those? The intensives that were doing
Becca Syme: [00:16:48] The intensives. Yeah, there are secret masses, yeah
Rachael Herron: [00:16:53] Exactly. And I just want to talk to you basically about your writing process, because you probably don’t get a chance to talk about that very often. You’re always talking about the Clifton strengths. But will you tell our listeners who have never heard of you? What the heck a Clifton strength is, it why and what it means to writers?
Becca Syme: [00:17:11] Yeah, it’s a, it’s a success metric, right? Like I, I’m a success coach. That’s what I like, what I have done previous to being a writer and what I do. And primarily I’m looking for the designated patterns in which people are successful. So the Clifton strengths was an active, started off as the academic research project where someone was asking, you know, decades and decades ago. Is it possible that there’s a pattern to how people are good at stuff, and how like the best of the best people stand out at what they do? Is there a pattern to that that’s predictable? And which is different from how most personality tests are created, right. Where they’re like, Hey, I think there’s four types of people let’s make a test for that. This was very much like, let’s go interview the best NBA basketball stars, the best housekeepers at Disneyland, the best CEOs, like what’s the best teachers. Let’s see how they do what they do. And is there a pattern there? and they interviewed 2 million people. They found a pattern, 2 million best of the best people pattern.
Rachael Herron: [00:18:18] Oh my god
Becca Syme: [00:18:19] Yeah. It was an amazing process. And, and then when they created the test, it was not to try to explain everything about life. It’s specifically tried to explain how are you successful? And, and so what I do then, cause I’ve been doing this since 2006, 2005-ish, so what I do is we look at how you score on that metric because it’s, you know, it was gathered, been analyzed, like whatever, it’s a metric. So we look at how you score on that metric and what your top strengths are. And then how can we translate that into helping you be more successful, in how you are the most successful already, right. But in writing, instead of just like, as a human, although we talk about the human stuff too, but
Rachael Herron: [00:19:15] The human stuff comes in, but where I think you catch all of the, all of our eyeballs is through the writer portal. And the thing that kind of blew my mind is that there are 34 strengths that they look at and you, and probably, you know, gallop in the people who do it, who, who owned the metrics, you know, probably say this too, but I really take it from you, is that you look at strengthening your top strengths and kind of ignoring your bottom strengths. Right? Why did we do that?
Becca Syme: [00:19:46] Yes, cause- well, cause, cause I want people to be successful, right. And because that’s the way they gathered the data was specifically about, let’s go intervie the people who are known to be the best at what they do in their industry. Like the top of the top and the guy who made this, he has one of the strengths that’s obsessed with success. And so he was not wanting to know what the general personality of the population was that literally how did you get to be successful? Right. And so he did those interviews and it’s like, well, there’s a pattern here and it’s not just a pattern like, Oh, this is a generic pattern. It’s down to, so one of Rachael’s top strengths is intellection, it’s down to like, she was just in a class with 30 other intellection writers and they’d literally use the same language to describe how they do things without even knowing that they’re doing that. And that’s what they discovered when they were doing these interviews
Rachael Herron: [00:20:56] Wow
Becca Syme: [00:20:57] It’s like a futuristic in Bangladesh and a futuristic in Canada, talk the same way about their, how their success happens, because they’re utilizing these neural nets that are very cemented. Right? and so for me, a lot of people are really into neuroplasticity and they’re like, oh, but we’re plastic. We can do whatever we want. And I’m like, no, we can’t. Like when, I mean, first of all, that’s a hard enough thing for people to hear, right. Is you can’t just do whatever you want because you have all of these cemented pathways that are less plastic. It’s not that they’re not plastic. It’s that they’re less plastic. So for me then I think strategically, right? If I know what those less plastic places are, then I’m already firing so quickly and easily in those places. Let’s work with the places where I’m already like, absolutely focused in on how to be successful naturally in those places, instead of saying, for instance, there’s a strength called discipline. Instead of saying-
Rachael Herron: [00:22:05] It’s very low for me.
Becca Syme: [00:22:06] Which is also low for me,
Rachael Herron: [00:22:07] Yeah
Becca Syme: [00:22:08] And, and no offense to the discipline people, but like, I’m plenty successful without it. Thank you very much. I don’t need it. And so I would say like, if we decide as a culture, discipline is the strength everyone should have, which is kind of what we have done, especially for writers. Then all the people who are not hardwired for discipline as a success pattern again, it’s not that I can’t be disciplined with a small beat, but if I’m not hardwired for that as a success pattern, then what am I doing trying to make myself do that when I could have just as much or more success than someone doing the way that I do it right. So then for me, what I like about it is, it doesn’t try to say we’re not plastic. It doesn’t try to say you can’t change. In fact, the big part of what I do is try to make you better and, and hone those places, better, faster, right? Like that’s why we’re called that. But to say, let’s not fight against the places where we’re less plastic than the other places and let’s work with what we’re already so good at because you’ve had decades and decades of firing in your neurons and this way. So unlearning those patterns is going to take a lot of time. And do you really want to do that?
Rachael Herron: [00:23:23] Right
Becca Syme: [00:23:24] Wouldn’t it be easier to just do it this way? I go with like,
Rachael Herron: [00:23:28] I could spend so much energy, so much of my energy trying to be disciplined
Becca Syme: [00:23:32] Yes
Rachael Herron: [00:23:33] And I would not do well at it and I’ve spent basically 48 years trying to be disciplined. Right. But now that I know that I’m achiever activator are in my top 10,
Becca Syme: [00:23:41] Yeah
Rachael Herron: [00:23:42] I just, I rested that is all the discipline I need. I know how to.
Becca Syme: [00:23:45] Yes
Rachael Herron: [00:23:46] Activate. And I know how to check off a list, you know, and putting those things together. So you have, this is my time to say you have really changed my life and the way
Becca Syme: [00:23:55] Thank you
Rachael Herron: [00:23:56] that I work, and the way that I accept not only myself, but all of my students for the last like semester or two. I’ve had a real, since I’ve been working with you, I’ve had a much better appreciation for that diversity and my, you know, I never knew, I never thought my way was the best way, but I know that my way is the best way for me. And I like to present a lot of different options to people, which is why I have a podcast all about writing process, because people need to hear all of the things. But knowing that everybody is so different and has these incredible skills that I might not even understand because they’re so low in my strengths has really changed me as a person. My, my, my wife isn’t- not really, really Becca again. Let’s talk about that again. Yeah. Great.
Becca Syme: [00:24:41] I get that, I always I’m like, it’s not me. I mean, I’m happy to be the purveyor of the information, right. But what I love about it is that it’s not me at all. It’s this tool, the tool is just what the work that they did to make sure that it was accurate is amazing. And it’s because the guy who did it was so committed to wanting something that could be completely accurate for every single person. So instead of like the four quadrant stuff, which is always only a few, if you’re familiar with the bell curve, right? Like the standard deviation, they’re only ever accurate for like one standard deviation. And he didn’t like that. He wanted it to be because he knows how complex people are and in order for it to explain our complexity, the tool itself has to be incredibly complex. And it is like, it’s the reason there’s 34 instead of 4, or like their, some other strengths programs that have come up since this are like 12 or 15 or something like that. But it really is. He wanted it to be as precise as possible and that’s why people get such a huge change out of it is because all the work that needed to be done was done 60, you know, 50 years ago and so, it’s pretty amazing
Rachael Herron: [00:26:03] Yeah. You are also incredibly talented at knowing writers. That’s actually brings me right into where I, I wanted to talk about. You are not just this strength coach for writers. You’re a writer. You are a working, butt-in-the-chair writer, which I so appreciate, I, I, one of my pet peeves in life is that people who write books about how to write, but they haven’t written any books or they coach people how to write and they don’t write. So you are doing it. So I would love to know you can feel free to use any of the strengths language and explain any of that.
Becca Syme: [00:26:33] Sure
Rachael Herron: [00:26:34] But what is your writing process? How do you actually get, and I’m specifically, I guess asking about the fiction, first here, how-
Becca Syme: [00:26:42] because the nonfiction process is completely different, totally different. So I started writing fiction, like a lot of us, right? Like I started writing fiction as soon as I could write. And my very first novel that I wrote, which was the one that ended up selling, I was one of those Indies who got into Indie very early. So like, you know, 2012, when you could just sort of throw a book up and it would make you, you know, a hundred thousand dollars. So I was one of the early adopters and my very first book, I always say, which is why it’s not available anymore was basically Julie Garwood fanfiction. Like it was my own story, but it was pretty much like
Rachael Herron: [00:27:23] It sounds great.
Becca Syme: [00:27:24] And so I kind of what I love, you know, and which is why it’s sold so well because everybody else who also likes 13th century, you know, Scottish kilted, you know, whatever. The Highland Renegades was the name of the series and, and it sold well, and it did well and, you know, and then as I started transitioning, because one of my personality traits is I don’t stick in one genre because I get really bored.
Rachael Herron: [00:27:55] What is that to you
Becca Syme: [00:27:56] So both learner and ideation have some of that where it’s the, like the process of learning how to write in a genre is really fun for me. And so, I mean, I think I’ve written in eight different fiction genres at this point. Well, three of them have sold well enough that I could have made like a living doing it, but then like 5 of them, did not. You know what I mean?
Rachael Herron: [00:28:22] I do
Becca Syme: [00:28:23] So, yeah, it was definitely experimental, but so, so much of my process as a writer was driven by, I love learning how to write a new thing and because as a reader, I love to read so much, you know, broad spectrum of stuff. Anytime I would get kind of bored with what I was writing, I’d be like, oh, maybe I’ll go try romantic suspense. I’ll try paranormal romance. I’ll try, you know, and I would keep sort of moving into what I thought was fun and even cozy, which I’ve loved and have had a great time writing. Like I’m, I’m gonna transition into another version of cozy because like as a learner, I just love learning how to make the audience happy in that genre. And so I don’t have one of those trajectories where like I hit, like sometimes I wish I had where I just hit the Highlanders and then I would have like 700 Highlanders books out by now, and I would be a million dollars
Rachael Herron: [00:29:25] The Highlander writer.
Becca Syme: [00:29:27] Yeah. I’d be like the queen or whatever, like I, that’s just not me.
Rachael Herron: [00:29:31] This explains a lot about why I have written in five different genres I have high learner, and I just, yeah, I just can’t get, I can’t, I, I got so bored with romance I could kill myself with contemporary romance.
Becca Syme: [00:29:44] Yeah, me too. And yeah, but now, like I’m coming back, like now that I’ve been doing mystery for three and a half, three and a half years now. I’m like, oh, I’m a little bored with the mystery. So like, I’m gonna go back and do another version of romance that I haven’t done before. And so I feel like as a learner, that’s part of my process, is knowing that I’m not gonna be one of those people. And what I love about this though, and this is why I think the strengths are just so consistent is I also don’t care. Like do I want to make money? Of course everybody needs to eat, but like, I want to make enough money to be not stressed out, but like, I definitely am not one of those people who looks at all of the big, you know, high figure or whatever, or things that like, I don’t shoot for those things. I love to just write stories and so I’m wired to be happy being a learner and the most fun I will ever have, is like right now, I’m reading all of these books and this new genre to like, get a feel for the emotions and stuff like that. And to just see what people are doing so I don’t do anything too similar and, and I’m like, I love just cracking books open and learning about the genre expectations and reading the reviews and seeing what people like, like that is craft to me.
Rachael Herron: [00:31:13] That is so totally, totally- where is your input?
Becca Syme: [00:31:17] One. It’s number one.
Rachael Herron: [00:31:18] Yeah, me too. Okay. So then how do you, in terms of process, how do you structure your days so that you get fiction done as well as all, I mean, you are so busy coaching. I can’t even believe all of the things you do. The more I see what you’re doing behind the scenes. Like she’s doing that. Oh my God. She’s got that class going. She’s got that with like, how do you do it?
Becca Syme: [00:31:39] Well, thank God I’m not married. And I mean that like very honestly, like, because when I’ve been in periods where I’ve had a because of my personality, and I can explain that in a second. When I’ve been in periods where I’ve had a really intense relationships, like romantic relationships, I always frustrate them because I don’t need as much from the relationship as, as they do. And so I, I’m like, I want to work, I love, and I’ll take my computer while we’re watching TV and I always get like, are you gonna talk to me? and I’m like, I’m listening. You know what I mean? Like while I’m working, and so God bless the dude who eventually ends up with Becca because he will be a Saint I promise. But honestly, I get so much done because I’m not married and I don’t have kids. And there is the, what we call the essential pain, right, of when I have more than one priority in my life, I have more than one priority. If I have a wife or a husband or children, they deserve my time, just as much as my career does.
Rachael Herron: [00:32:50] I forget that
Becca Syme: [00:32:51] And so it’s reasonable, you know, that I would spend more time with them. So some of it is I have a lot of freedom, to make my own, the another part of it is with my personality. I have a strength called a ranger, which means that I like filling the plate more and more to sort of see how much I can have spinning at one time. And I actually do better and more productive the more stuff that I give myself to do, as opposed to like, cutting down. So it’s very similar to achiever in that way, right. Where like, I feel really good if I am, I have a big plate and when it’s full, I feel great.
Rachael Herron: [00:33:30] Yeah.
Becca Syme: [00:33:31] And so my structure is different every day. And I think this is the other piece about, you know, not having something like discipline or consistency as a strength, which are all about predictability and sameness, which are awesome. They’re great. I just don’t have them. And so I don’t write every day, I don’t write fiction every day, and what I tend to do, one of my friends calls it portalling, is like I’ll sort of portal into a book, and just want to like write as much as I can because I get really lost in the world. And then I kind of portal out, and I don’t do well with the 10 minutes and 15 minutes and it’s like my friend Terry jokes, he’s like, he’s one of our coaches, right. He always jokes with me. He’s like, I could see when you did the Vangie book. Cause my last mystery I did in like two, two or two or two and a half weeks, I think I wrote 80,000 words.
Rachael Herron: [00:34:30] Oh my God.
Becca Syme: [00:34:31] And yeah. And he’s like, I could see it because you’ve got high. Like, you felt like a druggie, right, and he’s like, I picked out. Yeah. Like I was cracked out and he’s like, I could see that you wanted to do that more again and of course, you know, that can’t happen all the time. And so I was in a slower period and I really just put the blinders on and kinda, you know, went into the world for a while. And then I had to come back out after the re- the book was done. And then, so now I’ll have to get back in and so when I do structure my days, when I’m doing fiction, I will often like, you know, with, with my assistant, I’ll be like, I’m going to block off until 9 o’clock. You know, or 10 o’clock and then I’ll get up at 4 and I’ll just write for 6 hours. And, I have this thing on my Patreon called The Office, where we all meet in person on zoom and we write together and I’ll just go sit in the office and write, write, write, write, write. And then go, you know, work and then get back in and write, write, write, write. So that’s kinda how I, but yeah, I’d never do the same thing every day
Rachael Herron: [00:35:42] That explains you and I are similar in many ways. And that, that explains so much about me to where I’ve, I’ve always been trying to craft the perfect day for myself and it just doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick. And it’s awesome. Every perfect day is different.
Becca Syme: [00:35:52] I love it. I love the how different my days are. I would never want- and that’s again, evidence of the low discipline. It’s not that I think people who do that are doing something wrong. It literally is that I don’t get any feeling of success out of doing the same thing every single day. And people who are higher in discipline or higher consistency responsibility sometimes those are all strengths, right. They feel so good when they can just do like every single day, the same, they feel so great. And it’s like that feeling that they get that euphoria, that’s what I feel when all my days are different.
Rachael Herron: [00:36:34] Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing?
Becca Syme: [00:36:40] The fact that all my days are different. So like sometimes, you know, the, the, what is that from Peter Parker, like, with great power comes great responsibility. I feel like it’s the, there’s always a downside when you’re really good at something. And that means that when I really good at not being consistent, then times when I need consistency are super challenging for me, because I’ll get into a deadline and it’ll be like, I need to write every single day for the next three weeks. But because I’m so used to being available for people, like, I’ll get a call, like, Hey, can we do coaching? You know, I’m in a crisis. And, and crystal will be like, you really need to, you know, can you do this? And I admit, I have these times of like, yes, you know, like I want to stay in the consistency, but then part of me is like,
Rachael Herron: [00:37:36] but I’ve got to get out. Yeah.
Becca Syme: [00:37:37] To do the non-consistent things. So, planning is hard because I never- I like that it’s unpredictable, but I think I’ve just come to terms with that and I’m like, yeah, it’s just, it’s what’s gonna happen.
Rachael Herron: [00:37:50] Where is your adaptability?
Becca Syme: [00:37:53] 16 or 17 out of 34.
Rachael Herron: [00:37:54] Okay. Yeah
Becca Syme: [00:37:55] So it’s not super high, but a ranger is like adaptability, but not people focused-task focused instead, and so it’s very, almost, let’s see how we can fit all of this together and I literally will think of it in my head. I’ll be like, well, I have this block, so let me split that block and half will do the coaching here, I’ll move this block here. And it just kinda half like click, like that. Yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:38:21] Wow. Cool. What is your biggest joy when it comes to the writing?
Becca Syme: [00:38:26] Probably the readers, like, so the Vangie series, which is my mystery, has not sold as well as really probably any of my other series it’s weirdly is not the bestselling, and I say weirdly because it has a cult following, like I cannot even explain, like I wrote three books in a row and release them three months apart, back in, I think 2018 was the last release. And, and then I took almost two years off before I released the next book and that was not intentional. I got emails almost every day or Facebook posts almost every day and sometimes multiple times a day, but it was from like the same 400 people. So it was not, it wasn’t like when you hear of a cult following like that, usually it’s like, you know, representative of 10,000 people or something. This was literally like the same, you know, 400 fans and God bless them, they are obsessed with her. They talk about her, my sleuth, like she’s a real person, they’ll sometimes post about, Oh, I think Vangie would like this and then they’ll tag me and something
Rachael Herron: [00:39:44] That’s adorable
Becca Syme: [00:39:45] It’s so fun. It’s the best. But it’s frustrating that the books don’t better but I also get it. So like in cozy, I am on the long side, I write 90-ish thousand and most cozies are long at 60.
Rachael Herron: [00:40:43] Yeah, yeah.
Becca Syme: [00:40:44] Right. And so I write very long and complicated stories and they’re a little bit darker. We call them, this is sort of explains why they don’t sell. We call them Grim Dark Cozies.
Rachael Herron: [00:40:19] That sounds awesome to me.
Becca Syme: [00:40:20] They’re, they’re like, if, if, if you had Disneyland, but then there’s a very thin veneer and underneath, it was like, you know, Halloween town, that’s kind of what they’re like, because they feel very cutesy. But at the same time, they’re super dark and the undertones are very dark. And so, and they’re really complicated. And so and they really don’t follow a genre and so they do not market easily or well, and but the people who love them love them so much. And so I get the most joy, I think, out of talking to the fans, like Vangie’s real, because to me she’s real. Right. And so I love that. I love the, the shared delusion of the fiction, right. It’s just like, we’re all lost in the same world together and, and I just love that.
Rachael Herron: [00:41:20] Speaking of being able to market. How do you, how do- this is not on our list of questions. How do you market? Do you run ads? Do you have somebody that does that for you? What, what level of time are you putting into that? Because I’m speaking selfishly, because I put like zero time into it and I always need, no, I need to do more.
Becca Syme: [00:41:39] Yeah, I would say the same thing. I put almost no time into it and I in fact, the last release, I hired somebody to help me with the release and about halfway through the planning, I was like, I don’t want to do any of this stuff,
Rachael Herron: [00:41:53] I’m out.
Becca Syme: [00:41:54] Yeah. I kind of did. I kind of tapped out a little bit and, and I was like, cause I, I don’t think it sells books and it isn’t that I think it’s worthless for everybody. I think for me and for the way that I work, I don’t easily market things and it’s not that I don’t like talking about it. It’s not- it’s literally is. So I’m gonna nerd out a little bit on strengths for just a sec.
Rachael Herron: [00:42:20] Yes, please.
Becca Syme: [00:42:21] So I have a strength called significance, and it’s my number, number five strength. And what that means is I want what I do to matter to people. And so I don’t, so just as a for instance, I don’t market for my nonfiction, I don’t zero.
Rachael Herron: [00:42:41] Wow
Becca Syme: [00:42:42] I finally started running ads on my nonfiction books because literally my staff was like, we will kill you if you don’t try to get these books into the hands of people. I don’t market, I don’t do affiliates. I don’t do any of that stuff and the purpose is, because if it stops filling, because we’re not being helpful enough, then we need to pay the consequences for that. Like, I’m not going to trick people into taking my classes. Not again, not, this isn’t about anybody else’s marketing except mine, right, right. But I feel for, for what I want to get out of it, I only want to do things that are making such a significant difference to people that they have their own legs. So I feel the same way about my fiction and I’ve had to unlearn some of that because I also need to meet, I mean, I need to make money and I do care about the books and I know that it’s really hard to sell them these days without advertising. And so I will now run ads because I have to, because in order to you know, sort of quell this thing of like, if I don’t run them, no one is gonna see the books but I don’t do any other advertising. Like I have a newsletter, but we don’t use it and I have a Facebook page, but we don’t use it because to me, the test of whether a book should sell or not is an important test for me to pass. So I want to get it in front of enough of the right people that I can tell if I’ve done my job or not. And then at that point, if it doesn’t pick up on its own, I trust the market. I didn’t do a good enough job. I need to go back and figure out how to do a better job as a writer. And so, you know, that’s, that’s what I learned with every genre, right. Is I’ve subsequently learned anytime I do too much marketing my personality bulks a lot.
Rachael Herron: [00:44:43] Yeah
Becca Syme: [00:44:44] Like just for an instance, I feel like the most successful fiction series that I ever wrote, I co-wrote with somebody under a pen name and we made a lot of money, but I feel like I wrote her coat tails into that money, right. Like not into the books being good, but into how much money we made. And I had a real hard time calling myself a six figure author because I was like, like, I don’t know that I would have been able to make that on my own writing in that genre. And so, just knowing how my significance functions has allowed me to make a lot of choices to say like, okay, I’m not gonna be like other people. And so I’m not going to listen to people who are like, Oh, you should only write in one genre. You should do all the marketing you should- and anytime I hear that, I’m just like, what should I?
Rachael Herron: [00:45:42] Well, you have that beautiful thing that everybody who gets to know you knows, learns really quickly is the push back against the should, is the question the premise, or as you say QTP, yeah. So we’re diverting from the questions, throwing the rest of the questions out. What can you tell us a little bit about that QTP?
Becca Syme: [00:46:00] Yeah. So, because I know so much about how different we are and I’ve seen it, cause it isn’t just like a theory for me. It’s literally like I didn’t write a nonfiction book about this stuff until I had seen enough data of how this has changed author’s lives that I felt like I had something important to say about it. So I had coached thousands of writers already by the time I wrote the first book, and the reason I did it was because I saw the biggest transformations always happened when someone was following advice from someone else that doesn’t know them. It doesn’t know anything about their brain, but has decided that they’re an expert about something and for good reason, usually, right? But they were trying to follow advice that wasn’t, for them, it was for somebody else and they didn’t know it wasn’t for them. And so when we came along, I would get this moment of like, you know, but I should write every day and I’m like, but should you? And not just the way I say it now, which is sort of cutesy, like, but should you, but it was actually like, are you looking at the data? Your own data says you shouldn’t write every day, but you’re ignoring the data because someone else has convinced you that they know more than you do about how you should be productive. And, and I sound a little preachy about this because it’s not, for me, it’s not about the experts or what the experts should or shouldn’t say. They should say exactly what they’re saying. We are not good decision makers as listeners of nonfiction and consumers of nonfiction, because we don’t ever question the premise of why somebody might be saying something. So, and that was really how QTP came about was that, you know, starting in 2014 and 2015, I was starting to coach writers and seeing we really are believing things we shouldn’t believe, because our assumption is that the expert knows the best practice. And most of us don’t know enough about neurobiology to know just what it means that we have different neural nets than other people they don’t understand. And especially because neuroplasticity is such a big buzz word and everybody’s like, you can do whatever you want your neuroplastic. And I’m like, you don’t understand her plasticity, buddy.
Rachael Herron: [00:48:30] I have this image of neuroplasticity is one of my, my wife’s relatives lives on the Oregon trail. Like there is a cut from like, you could just walk in front of the ranch and there’s the Oregon trail. And that is neuroplastic. That’s a that’s, that’s a, that’s a piece of mud and he put enough water there. Maybe those ruts would go out, but those ruts were worn, 150 years ago. And the two wagon ruts are still there after all of these storms, after 150 years,
Becca Syme: [00:48:59] Yes
Rachael Herron: [00:49:00] It’s neuroplastic, you could dig that up and move that mud around, but otherwise it’s staying as a rut.
Becca Syme: [00:49:05] Yeah. And unless you have a way to dig it up with like a backhoe, like the natural process itself, you would have to start crossing that path
Rachael Herron: [00:49:17] Yes
Becca Syme: [00:49:18] With another, like the same thing that made it like to keep the metaphor the same. It’s not like you have access to a backhoe. And a lot of people who talk about neuroplasticity, they’re like, Oh, but if you do a knock, you can change it. I’m like, okay, dude, let’s talk about this. Because it’s, it’s always a dude. It’s not always a dude. You know what I mean? But in my head, because sometimes women, but in my head it’s, it’s dude, because it’s the person who doesn’t know anything about it, but thinks they know everything and they’re using the buzzword. So anyway, clearly this is backless issue with this metaphor. It literally is they don’t know enough about how the neuron, how neural nets are made to be able to talk about it, because, so let’s say they’ve never studied the actual statistics for human adult behavioral change, like adult behavioral change for, and this is universal, right? This is not just like limited to a study, it’s replicated over and over again. So anyway, adult behavioral change statistics are out a year 3% of people have assimilated out of a hundred
Rachael Herron: [00:50:33] Wow
Becca Syme: [00:50:34] percent out three years, it goes down to one percent. It’s insane. Like most people do not keep what they assimilate. And again, this is what we talk about in my Write Better, Faster class. The reasons are multivariable, but the biggest one is because people try to change everything or they try to do a giant system change instead of targeted stuff. So for instance, something like atomic habits has a better chance of success, which is why he’s seen so much success because where we are plastic. It’s the repetitive, you know, consistent small
Rachael Herron: [00:51:13] Small things
Becca Syme: [00:51:14] Yeah. Very small. And, and that’s why that particular neuroplastic kind of philosophy has taken off so much is because it’s actually correct. You can actually like people have a better chance of long term assimilation, but most of what we do, is we try to attack the entire system. So like, let me find a new productivity system. Let me find a new weight loss system. And I’m like, actually probably have better, like luck if you just consistently change one thing about your, your stuff for a long time. And then after a while, you eventually start the habit stacking. Right. But because this whole thing of 30 days to a new, a new habit is such a load. It’s like, I’m not sure if this is an explicit podcast or not.
Rachael Herron: [00:52:11] Go for it. We can swear.
Becca Syme: [00:52:12] Yeah. It’s bullshit. Like just period. Because it totally depends on that Oregon trail metaphor is a perfect one. It totally depends on how deep the ruts are and how long you’ve been building them. And so, and this is why strengths are so important for me. Cause I’m like, let’s just assume that you’re not going to do the work to change the ruts. Like let’s just assume you don’t have 40 years to make yourself not intellectual.
Rachael Herron: [00:52:41] And a lot of energy.
Becca Syme: [00:52:42] Yes.
Rachael Herron: [00:52:43] Backhoe and gasoline
Becca Syme: [00:52:45] That’s the thing that you do, right. Yeah. So like, let’s assume you don’t have the energy to change the part about yourself that needs to think about stuff. Let’s just assume that. If we assume that that’s actually a good thing and not a bad thing, what could we do? And this is what strengths does that I love so much. What could we do if we assume that how you are wired as a positive and not a negative,
Rachael Herron: [00:53:09] Yes
Becca Syme: [00:53:10] We don’t try to change anything about your wiring. We try to work with like, let’s build let’s pave the Oregon trail in your head, instead of trying to like gradually blow the wind a little harder. Over the course of how many friggin years you would have to do the- I’m sorry, I just got so frustrated with this.
Rachael Herron: [00:53:32] And I think, can I share with you my most recent, like breakthroughs in this? And I’m also number one input and my curse. And it’s a, it’s a blessing. It’s such a blessing, but my curse for the last, probably three or four years, especially this year, it seems to have reached this, reach, this tipping point. My curse has been email and it is my favorite thing too, because people send me amazing emails and I love responding them to them. But knowing that I was input and knowing that my email inbox felt like the ultimate source of input information, these data points that I needed to go out and collect and use and think about, and then go right into in collection and I was spending two or three days, sorry, two or three hours a day in email, really reluctantly and piss off, and I tried everything and I just, just a couple weeks ago I use boomerang anyway, and I just decided I would look at email on late Monday afternoons and late Friday afternoons. It keeps all the other email out except for my friends, my family, my editor, my publisher. And I, I shit you not, back at you, like your name is white listed because I’m like, I am not going to miss one of those intensive gossips I will get it and the, the quietness, I still keep my email inbox open. I go look at it, and it takes me one second to say, Oh, it’s still empty. And I go back to writing because I know that that input part of my brain wanted to see that information that was coming in. I took it away from myself and there’s so much peace.
Becca Syme: [00:55:04] Yeah. I actually got the email back, the response when I hit reply and it said, I, and I’m like, good job. Like literally I thought in my head that is so smart because we don’t need to respond that quickly. It’s just that most of us have been trained that if people need to hear back from us, right. So what you did was you set the expectation,
Rachael Herron: [00:55:30] Yeah. And I also set a pace that they, right, and if they say, say the word urgent, in the cloud box, you’ll get in and I’ll, and I think I said in the email, I’ll likely see it sooner. I still don’t say I’m gonna a be- treated as urgent. Cause it’s probably not urgent!
Becca Syme: [00:55:45] Yes exactly. Like don’t do that shortcut cause that’s just not cool. But like, but if it really is urgent, you wanna- and that’s what we’re always worried about, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:55:52] Yes
Becca Syme: [00:55:53] Oh, but I’m gonna miss something and I’m like, well, give people away. And I love that you did that, because I thought the wording was perfect.
Rachael Herron: [00:56:00] Thanks
Becca Syme: [00:56:01] And this is an example and I love that you brought that up because this is an example of what could be a debilitating behavior. If you know where it’s coming from,
Rachael Herron: [00:56:12] Yes
Becca Syme: [00:56:13] You can control it, like you can pay that friggin channel and make it and not be like, oh, my input it’s so annoying. It’s so horrible.
Rachael Herron: [00:56:21] You don’t get away from my email, no
Becca Syme: [00:56:23] Right? Like, no. And this is the key to, was like, there were some things about input that are so gold for writing. I mean, it’s, it’s almost like each of the strengths has a way to sort of please readers in a particular way.
Rachael Herron: [00:56:41] Interesting.
Becca Syme: [00:56:42] And there are things about input, like inputs will research farther and longer and deeper than anybody else. And so they find these things and I can always tell when I, when I have read an input book, because it’s like you find these things that nobody else will find, because as an input, like when I write a character, excuse me, sometimes I’ll actually go to like blogs written by people who have the job that my character has. And like, I’ll read those or like, I watch a documentary about a particular location or something, and I’m looking and casting wide. And, and then I find this little golden nugget thing and people be like, oh my gosh, did you use to live there? And I’m like, “Nope, I’m just input.” But it resonates on such a deep level with the readers that they remember it. And I think that’s part of what, why I know it is, that’s part of what as a, as a nonfiction writer. It’s part of what makes people like my book so much because they feel like they hear their own words in the books, and that is because my input collects the phrasing, cause I know that strengths is a language and so my input collects the phrasing. So like I can talk back to you in your own language, even when I don’t have those strengths and that’s, I wouldn’t be able to do that on the same level that I can without input. So I’m like, I love input. It’s the best.
Rachael Herron: [00:58:10] So that’s what makes you so good at this particular job, at both of your job, the writing and the coaching
Becca Syme: [00:58:13] Yes. More so probably in the coaching, because like that particular feeling is something you can’t get from anything else, other than hearing your own words back, you resonate on like literally every level of yourself resonates. When you hear the thing that you’ve said to yourself that you assume makes you weird, right?
Rachael Herron: [00:58:34] Yes. Oh my gosh, Becca, I could talk to you for four more hours but we can’t, we’re running out of time. But I would love you to tell us, so where, tell us about your most recent novel and then tell us where we can find the academies.
Becca Syme: [00:58:50] So my, my, let’s do the Academy first because that’s easy. I always suggest that people go to the Quit Cast
Rachael Herron: [00:58:56] Yes, I forgot to mention that-
Becca Syme: [00:58:57] Q-U-I-T C-A-S-T, on YouTube first and see if they resonate with stuff. Cause, and this is a- and I practice what I preach. If you don’t resonate with us, God bless you on your way. You are gonna do great without us. You’re fine. I’m absolutely a 100% happy for people to not come and check us out, but I always want to let them do it in a way that’s not threatening first, so that you don’t, I don’t know if you liked it or not. You can just come and check it out.
Rachael Herron: [00:59:26] Just go, look at the podcast
Becca Syme: [00:59:26] So, come, yeah.
Rachael Herron: [00:59:28] That’s also a podcast form, right? Like I usually watch it
Becca Syme: [00:59:30] Not yet.
Rachael Herron: [00:59:31] Okay. I usually watch it on YouTube. Great.
Becca Syme: [00:59:34] We’re working on the podcast. So, look for the QTP episodes of this stuff has resonated, because though we QTP everything, we’re like writer’s write, don’t edit as you go, you know, plan, plan your day, all that stuff, book a month, like all that stuff we QTP, again, not to say no one should do it. It’s the question whether you should or shouldn’t and so check out the QTP episodes for sure, so that’s the easy part. The fiction part, which is the fun part. That’s what I love. Like I just love fiction
Rachael Herron: [01:00:08] You just like brightened up your whole soul just-
Becca Syme: [01:00:10] I did. Well, cause like, cause I was a fiction writer for fun, right, before I started doing it full time.
Rachael Herron: [01:00:17] Yeah
Becca Syme: [01:00:18] And then I transitioned out of, out of like communications and success stuff into, into fiction full time in 2012. And then, and I did that for years before I got back into this again with writers. And so that’s really where my heart was. Like, I’ve always wanted to be a full time fiction writer, and so fiction is the thing that I do that makes me happy. And so I love it. And so the, the most recent and the most part I want to say this is, cause this title is the most fun title ever so the- the sixth book, I think in the Vangie series just came out in an anthology. The title of the book is called Vangie Vale and the Full Metal Fran, Japan. I love it and it’s a cozy culinary cozy, and it’s a travel cozy. So the travel cozy is in the passport to murder anthology.
Rachael Herron: [01:02:21] Oh, fun.
Becca Syme: [01:02:22] And it’ll be there until, I think December, January, something like that, but Vangie Vale and the Full Metal Fran, Japan, and it’s a travel cozy about her going to Canada to get away and go on vacation and of course, because she’s Vangie, murder follows her everywhere, wherever she goes. And so she does an investigation when she’s up there and the way that the convention is, because they’re the matchbaker, books. So she does a version of reading people’s behavior that helps her to predict what they’re going to want to eat. And so one of the things she does in the early books, that’s what her business is. It’s called Matchbakery. And so she’s matching people up with, you know, what they want and the woman in this book who dies. There’s a woman who loves Fran, Japan. And so
Rachael Herron: [01:02:16] I’m already like obsessed and I don’t even usually read cozy, but that is, you have all the best ideas in there already.
Becca Syme: [01:02:23] It’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. And, and like I said, they’re grim dark. So if you’re cozy fan be warned, like they do, they do get dark
Rachael Herron: [01:02:31] I want- I want the darkness always. So that makes me even more excited
Becca Syme: [01:02:35] It’s fun. It’s really fun. I really liked it. So, but yeah, that’s the latest fiction. And- and then who knows what I’m going to be doing by the, when this comes out, I may have started a whole new genre who knows, like, that’s the learner, right? I’m like, I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine,
Rachael Herron: [01:02:53] Becca, honestly. Seriously, thank you so much for everything that you have done for me. Thank you for being on the show. I know my listeners are going to freak out when they hear this. So listeners do go over there to HowDoYouWrite.net and leave, leave a comment. Thank you, Becca, so, so, so, so much.
Becca Syme: [01:03:08] Thank you for having me.
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