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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome back everyone. Welcome if you can see and hear me. Please drop your location in the chat.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: and I am going to drop some special links for you.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: You can check those links out.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: There's a special offer there as well as the slides for today.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Hello! I see California, Texas, Canada, Oregon.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: the UK. Scotland, Oklahoma, as always. We love seeing folks joining us from all over the globe.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We love having such an international audience.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: It looks like you can see and hear me. Just fine. So we're going to proceed with our beginning notes, and I'm going to drop those links for you again. Now, since the chat is moving so quickly.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: welcome back to another fantasy writers. Week session.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We're so glad to have you here with us

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: to access your replays, slides, special offers all of that great stuff this week. Head to the fantasy writers. Week Hub, that will have everything that you need. Replays are posted as soon as they are processed by zoom along with slides. Any offers from our speakers offer from pro writing aid our participant guide a link to join the community everything you need there. The replays will also be available by May third on our community page

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: for all of our community members to view and enjoy. So we highly encourage you to sign up for the community. So you have access to those.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Friday is our premium day for premium and premium pro users only. You will receive an email Friday morning with instructions to access that day's schedule or not. Schedule that day's sessions

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: slides all of the those materials. So make sure you keep an eye on your email. You can see the schedule for premium day on the regular Hub page, so you can see what we have planned. If you would like to join us, we would love it if you were, would be there, and we do have an offer for you. If you would like to upgrade to yearly premium or premium pro, we do have an offer for 25% off your first year of prorating a premium or premium pro.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: and that is good until May tenth. But if you would like to upgrade by Friday morning, you will also have access to premium days, events. So if you're thinking about upgrading, now is a great time to do so. Since you do have this link, you have the link on the Hub, and also the 25% discount.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: If you would like to keep talking fantasy writing, we would love to have you over in our community. As I said, the replays will be there, so that will be exciting for you to view. And also we have our live event, chat where there's a lot of fantasy writing topics happening, and a lot of nice chatter surrounding the week, and the speakers and everything like that. So come, join us. You can use the link here. It's also on the Hub page. You just log in with your pro writing aid account information it is free to join, and there's a lot of fun stuff happening

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: reminders for this session. If you have a question for our speaker, please use the QA. Box. This ensures that your question will not get lost, and we'll try to answer as many of these as we can at the end of the session. If you would like to chat with other folks here today. You're welcome to do that in the chat when you wanna make sure that you were clicking the everyone and your

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: dropdown menu, and that way your messages will be view visible by everybody. By default. They just come to host and panelists, so make sure you adjust that before you start chatting. And with that being said, I believe we are ready to begin.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: So I am so excited to introduce our speaker, Carrie savage.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: a voracious reader of all kinds of fiction, and sometimes memoir and nonfiction. Carrie Savage. She, her is an author, accelerator, certified book coach, who works with novelists from the planning stages through revision helping writers get their best book ready for the world. She is also a J. School grad and former project manager, as well as being hard at work on her first novel, a work of historical fiction based on the life of a real badass female pirate.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: She serves as a volunteer mentor for the Women's Fiction Writers, Association and sisters in crime. She loves good wine, cheese, and trying to keep her succulents alive.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Welcome, Kerry. We're so happy to have you.

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Kerry Savage: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Let's see.

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Kerry Savage: Alright! Are we live? Are we good.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yep. Looks great.

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Kerry Savage: Excellent

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Kerry Savage: alright. Well, thank you very much. To Michelle for and pro ready for having me and and welcome everybody. Today we are going to talk about project management for writers. And what I like to say is bringing order to creative chaos.

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Kerry Savage: So I'll just do another quick little introduction, and Michelle did a lot since said much of what I have to say about myself.

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Kerry Savage: But yes, I am an author, accelerator, certified book coach. I'm a writer. I'm actually work now on my second novel, which is a dual timeline supernatural mystery type thing. So I'm a bagpie when it comes to reading and to writing. I'm the founder of shadows and Secrets, which is a writing retreat for mystery and thriller authors, and I'm also a project manager. I've been a project manager for almost 20 years.

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Kerry Savage: mainly in the editorial and digital spheres. So I worked for an educational publisher, and I also primarily worked for a digital agency that built websites for colleges and universities. I never planned for project management to be my career path. I sort of fell into it. I am 100% a reader and writer at heart. I always wanted to be a writer. But I learned quickly that without project management things just don't get done, and I sort of fell into it by default.

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Kerry Savage: Project management work doesn't always feel like the most creative thing. I'm so happy all of you showed up today because when I do this this talk, sometimes I worry that no one's gonna show up because it is not sexy and exciting, but it is 100 how things get done. And I like to say that within a framework project management framework for your book project, that if you, if you put your project within that that frees you up to be more creative, in fact, with with the actual creative piece. Which is the writing.

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Kerry Savage: So what are we going to talk about today?

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Kerry Savage: We're gonna cover what project management actually is, and why we need it.

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Kerry Savage: We're going to talk about setting smart goals, which some of you may be familiar with.

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Kerry Savage: 2 key pillars of project management, as I like to think about it, one of which is strategy, one of which is schedule. And we'll talk about how each one of those things and how they work together.

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Kerry Savage: And then we'll get into actually what a project looks like. So the different phases kicking a project off how to make a project, plan the different phases and tasks and milestones, and then finally closing a project. When you've done it, you've crossed the finish line.

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Kerry Savage: So with that, off we go. I also tend to talk fast. I apologize. I'm trying to be trying to slow down a little bit. And I'm keeping an eye on the clock to make sure that we have plenty of time for questions, so alright officially, off we go.

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Kerry Savage: What is project management? I like to say that it's like herding cats. And I'm only kind of kidding when I say that, because it is taking a lot of disparate pieces of a thing that you know, you wanna do usually a big thing that feels very overwhelming. And you're putting a framework around it. You're putting a plan around it. So the official definition according to the professionals, is the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people.

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Kerry Savage: And sometimes I think when people read that definition they go. Wait a minute. I do that every day all the time, and nobody pays me for it. And you're 100 right

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Kerry Savage: when you put dinner on the table every night. You have just Project managed dinner. You have taken all of your knowledge of all the things you need, your tools, your food, the things you need to cook with. You've put it all together, and you've served dinner. That was the project of dinner. You have successfully done it. So all of which to say, I don't want project management to feel intimidating or overwhelming, or like. There's something special that you need to know in order to do it.

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Kerry Savage: We do it all the time every day.

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Kerry Savage: and a project manager is a professional who organizes plans and executes projects while working within various restraints, and we tend, we lead teams, we define project goals, we communicate, and we see a project from through from start to finish.

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Kerry Savage: As I said, projects are big and messy and amorphous, especially book projects.

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Kerry Savage: And in a nutshell project management applies order to chaos. So shit gets done

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Kerry Savage: well, and why do we need it? Why is it important? How does it help us?

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Kerry Savage: There's a number of reasons, and I'm gonna go over them here. For one, it provides accountability. You make a project plan that gives you deadlines. It shows you very clearly what you have to do, and when and that accountability can keep us honest

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Kerry Savage: and a big one, I think the biggest one that I like to emphasize

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Kerry Savage: specifically with writing projects is, it sets and manages expectations.

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Kerry Savage: Things always take longer than we think they will. Human beings, just as a general rule, seem to be terrible at time management, and estimating how long things are going to take. And I think you know the writing world doesn't help us a lot. When you see sort of flashy, you know. Finish your book in 90 days, or whatever I mean. Have I seen someone write a draft or revise a draft within 90 days? Yeah, it's possible but it was something that they did that they really, you know.

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Kerry Savage: they had a lot of time that they were able to dedicate to it, and they were very focused and had a list of tasks that they needed to get done. And so we're able to knock them out that way. Generally speaking, a brook project is going to take people a lot longer than they think, and so when we walk through how to plan it out, it's really eye opening, and that can be helpful because it sets those expectations. So you know, if you're not done in 90 days, that's okay. You haven't failed. You're doing fine.

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Kerry Savage: it gives a project direction. So it defines project parameters. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about this. When we talk about strategy. It sets very clear guidelines for what you want to do, and when you want to do it by, and that gives you a framework for certain decision making those pieces of strategy can help you when you get stuck and they will unstick you. They're things that you can go back to to say well, in the overall sort of scheme and design that I have for this project.

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Kerry Savage: If I answer this question this way, how does that work? What does that do? Does that change anything?

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Kerry Savage: It breaks a complex thing into manageable chunks, you know. I will talk a little bit further on the presentation about sort of 4 big phases of writing a book project being planning, drafting, revising, and then pitching, or publishing.

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Kerry Savage: Each of those

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Kerry Savage: phases has an

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Kerry Savage: really, you know, at least probably

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Kerry Savage: 1012, maybe even 20, maybe even more, depending on the scope of what you're working on. With fantasy. You do a lot of world building. So all of those things, putting together a plan for the world building that can be several dozen tasks all on its own.

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Kerry Savage: just thinking about. Oh, well, I have to, you know, construct this world could be very overwhelming. But project management allows you to break that down into manageable chunks. So you're only thinking and focusing on one thing at a time, and then you can check that thing off and move into the next one.

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Kerry Savage: and being able to see that progress encourages your motivation and your confidence. You know you're getting things done. You're seeing you're seeing progress. It's building on itself, and it's keeping things on track.

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Kerry Savage: and last, but not least, it avoids burnout and overwhelm. It is so easy to get overwhelmed when you're working out of a project. There's so many different things that you need to hold into your in your head, and when you have a list of them, when you're not trying to keep all of that going while you're also trying to be creative that can set you on a much clearer path and not feel like you want to throw your computer out the window. On a Saturday when you're just completely stuck and you don't know where to go.

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Kerry Savage: 1 Si just have soup of water.

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Kerry Savage: Okay.

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Kerry Savage: so what makes for a successful project?

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Kerry Savage: I like to say that there are these 2 pillars strategy, which is the why, the what and the who and then schedule, which is when and how, and if you have those 5 things, that's success.

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Kerry Savage: So let's talk a little bit more about each of these key pillars.

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Kerry Savage: The first one is strategy. Why are you writing this book?

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Kerry Savage: What are you wanting to say? And who are you writing it for? And let's talk about those a little bit more in detail.

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Kerry Savage: Why are you writing this book? This isn't just a I wanna write a book kind of answer that we're looking for here. Gonna ask you to go deep. We want you to really think about what is so meaningful to you about writing this book that you're going to spend

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Kerry Savage: tens of dozens of hours, maybe hundreds of hours, over the next year or 2, or however long the the project takes

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Kerry Savage: you. You want that motivation, that why statement to make sure that you can keep going? This is a thing that you're going to come back to?

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Kerry Savage: What are you wanting to say?

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Kerry Savage: This is not.

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Kerry Savage: I want to write a book. This is getting really specific about your genre, about

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Kerry Savage: your themes, about your ideas about your audience, and that leads me to my final question here in the strategy. Who are you writing for?

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Kerry Savage: Who are you writing for? Is your ideal reader, and I think we've probably heard before, you know. If you're right for everybody, you will satisfy nobody.

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Kerry Savage: And that is very much true. You can write a book that has universal appeal. But what you wanna do is focus on, or you will write that book. You could potentially write that book that has universal appeal when you focus on this very specific person? Because getting very clear on why, what? And who is going to lead you down into those nitty, gritty details that then tie back to something that's more universal. It's sort of magical how that happens, but it does

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Kerry Savage: so when we think. Oh, I need to like.

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Kerry Savage: consider this person and this person, and I want everybody to to want to write like my book

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Kerry Savage: that is not going to be helpful when you're trying to satisfy everybody

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Kerry Savage: of.

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Kerry Savage: So

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Kerry Savage: that's strategy.

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Kerry Savage: the schedule, your project plan.

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Kerry Savage: You want to get real specific here, too. You notice I'm talking a lot about getting very specific. Talking about what are the tasks that you want to do?

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Kerry Savage: How long are each of those tasks going to take in estimate. And you want to think of this in hours that's going to be a lot easier. We all want to round up. As I said before, we're terrible at time management. We're terrible about setting expectations for how long things are going to take. So you want to round up and give yourself more time. You're almost always going to need it.

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Kerry Savage: How are you going to accomplish those things? How much time can you regularly schedule

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Kerry Savage: in your week.

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Kerry Savage: whether it's every day or 3 times a week, whatever it is, how much time can you regularly dedicate to getting your work done?

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Kerry Savage: When are you going to start? And when do you want to finish?

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Kerry Savage: And how long will it take

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Kerry Savage: these questions? All sort of go together? You can have a date that you know that you're ready to go. You're going to be ready to get started.

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Kerry Savage: The amount of time that this thing is going to take

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Kerry Savage: set against your start. Date is going to give you your end date, and if you don't love your end date, then there is variables and different levels levers. Excuse me.

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Kerry Savage: That you can pull on to manipulate that and see if you can change it to where you want to be.

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Kerry Savage: We'll talk a little bit more about that when we get into setting a schedule as well.

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Kerry Savage: So the next thing we're gonna do is talk about smart goals setting a a smart goal for your project, and smart goals are a thing that have been around for a really long time. They're not new. If you've been in the business world at all. As I mentioned, you've probably heard of them. Smart is an acronym that stands for specific.

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Kerry Savage: measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.

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Kerry Savage: So let's get into it a little bit specific.

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Kerry Savage: What are we going to do? And who is going to do it well with a book project unless you have a Co. Writer? Or you're ghost writing for something. You are the person who's doing the work.

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Kerry Savage: What are we doing? This is again, you're not wanting to write a book. Right? Yes, you are. Of course you are. But I want you to get really specific here about what kind of book what your account is going to be.

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Kerry Savage: any other things that you know you, you know who your protagonist is. You know that you want to build a certain kind of world. Any of those kinds of things are exactly what you want to put in your specific section of your project. Goal

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Kerry Savage: measurable. How do we define progress?

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Kerry Savage: This is a little bit trickier, because unlike certain kinds of projects like a business project, might have a metric for something very specific, tied to revenue or social media followers, or or something like that. We don't exactly have those when we are talking about book projects.

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Kerry Savage: So we can use different things like word count or amount of time. Things like that. What you wanna do is find some kind of stake in the ground around something that's measurable, and just pick that and see if that will work for you.

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Kerry Savage: So you'll see in the example that I have here the top one that we're writing a first draft of the historical fiction novel approximately 90,000 words. So that's a metric that I can then use to to measure my progress. How far along am I? Have I written 40,000 words? Have I written 10,000 words, and see that number go up and see, progress measured that way.

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Kerry Savage: So achievable is the timeframe realistic.

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Kerry Savage: I'm gonna hammer this home a lot because it was the number one thing that I encountered as a project manager. Can you actually write? Do whatever the thing is that you want to do within the timeframe in which you are asking yourself to do it. If you have 2 HA day to dedicate to your writing, perhaps it is realistic that you can crank through, you know, and turn out 90,000 words in 90 days.

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Kerry Savage: perhaps you only have 30 min 3 times a week while you're on the train going to work. In that case it probably is not realistic that you're going to get it done in 90 days. And that's fine. That's good. This is the point where you wanna to figure out whether that is the truth or not

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Kerry Savage: relevant. Why is this goal important? That goes back to the Y statement that we were talking about a little while ago. This is the thing that's going to keep you anchored to the project and keep you motivated, and when you get stuck, or when you're bored, or want to throw your computer out the window or say like, why am I bothering to do this? What does it mean to me? That's the piece that you want to go back to. Why is it relevant? Why is it important? This is ha! Your sort of inner motivational statement?

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Kerry Savage: And lastly, timely, which, relating back to measurable what is the timeframe or deadline to achieve this goal?

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Kerry Savage: Usually, unless you're on deadline for for a specific thing. You will set your own timeframe. And that's fine you

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Kerry Savage: that means you can move the end date if you want to. And again.

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Kerry Savage: flexibility is key here giving yourself a little bit of grace, is is key here. What you wanna do when you're first starting out, though, is just pick something that seems reasonable. You're gonna stress. Test that a little bit. But you wanna put a stake in the run in the ground and don't be afraid to do that. That's, I think, a place where a lot of people sort of freeze up. It starts to get really real when that happens. And so just to know that it can adjust. You can change it. That's fine, but be brave. Be bold. Go ahead, stick the stake in the ground.

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Kerry Savage: so

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Kerry Savage: if you've got your smart goal.

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Kerry Savage: Where do you start? Where do you start planning a project?

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Kerry Savage: Well, the first place to start is to have a kickoff and I used to always kind of love these kickoffs when I was managing big web projects brought all the teams together, and it was almost like a little celebration. You know. We're having fun. We're we're embarking on this big goal that we're going to see through together. So I encourage you to have a little bit of a kickoff party for yourself when you're setting up your project and getting ready to go.

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Kerry Savage: and sort of make a make a thing of it, you know. Sit down. You're gonna work through these questions. But it's also like a celebration time. You're you're getting started. You're finally doing the thing that you've that you've always wanted to do that's going back to your my statement.

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Kerry Savage: So the first thing is defining your strategy, which we just talked about. So you wanna answer these key questions of what and why and who, and then make your smart goal statement, using what you've created by answering those strategy questions. So you're gonna have, like in the slide we just looked at.

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Kerry Savage: You're gonna have almost like a paragraph. It's not just a simple, you know, run a Marathon, write a book statement. It's gonna be longer, and that's fine. The more detail that you have in there the better.

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Kerry Savage: And then, starting to define your schedule.

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Kerry Savage: So what is your smart goal? What does done look like to you is done when you're done with? The revision is done when you're done, when you're when you're pitching or getting ready to self publish. Figure out what that looks like for you.

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Kerry Savage: and then start to think about how you can break the project down into discrete units or pieces. This is where, like that overwhelm piece can come in. You're looking at it, and you're going like this is just such a big thing. I don't know where I'm gonna get started or how I'm going to make this work.

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Kerry Savage: Just take it in pieces. Let me talk a little bit more about that in a second.

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Kerry Savage: Think also about what the major points are along the way where you're gonna have check-ins, or you're gonna want to stop and sort of take stock of where you are and how far you've come.

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Kerry Savage: and then think about, do the different phases of the project have different requirements or tasks, so like what you're doing in the planning stages, it's going to look very different, probably, than when you're drafting. And then again, when you're revising. So each of those things is going to have its own sort of set of set of to do. And potentially, you know the its own tools or other kinds of things that you need to consider. And that's the kind of stuff that you want to think about or start thinking about now.

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Kerry Savage: So

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Kerry Savage: defining the work.

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Kerry Savage: we kind of tend to break work down as we're thinking about a project plan into 3 different buckets.

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Kerry Savage: and the first bucket is a phase, and that is a big chunk of work, so like drafting would be a phase, or planning, or revising, or pitching, publishing.

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Kerry Savage: Those are sort of the 4 main phases that I like to think about in the book project, but depending on the kind of work that you're doing. You might have additional phases, or you might slot like a sub phase into your bigger phase, I'm thinking, for fantasy or historical.

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Kerry Savage: You might have world building. You might have research, and that might go under your planning stage, or there might be something where, when you're done with your draft, you realize. Oh, I still have to answer these 3 or 4 questions. So that becomes like a little mini phase of of getting that research done, or that world building thinking done.

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Kerry Savage: A phase usually can span multiple weeks or months. They're, as I said, a big chunk of work.

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Kerry Savage: So that's why we wanna break it down even further. And that's we start talking about tasks.

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Kerry Savage: So tasks are a discrete unit of work. And it's sort of the basic building block of a plan. So when you get it down to its finest level, that's when you're on the task level.

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Kerry Savage: And when you group tasks together that makes up a phase. So you see, you've got all your tasks listed together. Boom! There's your phase phase. Break it down all the things that you need to do. There's your tasks.

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Kerry Savage: tasks usually span hours or days. So the more granular that you can get the better you don't necessarily want to have a task that's gonna say, you know, like, if you just said, Oh, my task is research. Well, research is probably gonna take you a couple of weeks right? But what are you going to research? What things do you need to do? Where do you need to go? Or who do you need to talk to in order to get your answers there, or world building is a big thing. So what is the world?

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Kerry Savage: What is the magic systems? If there are magic systems in there. How is it different from the real world and all of those other kinds of planning things?

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Kerry Savage: You want to break them down so that you can look at it and say, Okay.

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Kerry Savage: I want to get it to the point where there's, you know, this is going to take me 2 h or 4 h, you know, however much time you want to be able to define it in hours. I say, days.

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Kerry Savage: days are hard. I would usually recommend. If you have something that's like 8 or more hours. See if you can break it down into even smaller tasks, because, again, seeing that progress, being able to check that off is very empowering.

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Kerry Savage: So those are the 2 main things. And then I just wanna talk a little bit, too, about milestones. Milestones can tend to kind of get blown off, because there isn't any specific work associated with a milestone. There isn't any time necessarily associated with a milestone, but they are a very, a very important piece of a project, because their specific point in the project where you sort of stop and take stock

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Kerry Savage: and figure out like, you know, identify your progress.

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Kerry Savage: As I mentioned, there's no actionable time associated with a milestone, but

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Kerry Savage: examples could include, like the beginning and end dates not only of your project, but of each of your phases, and then sometimes, when you've completed a significant task like, I would look at drafting and say, Oh, I might put a milestone at, you know, 2025%, 50%, 75%. And then 100%. So completion.

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Kerry Savage: So it's just a little reminder in there for you to like. Hey? It's okay. Take a moment. Look around. See, how are things are going? Do I need to change anything?

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Kerry Savage: You know. Am I on track? If not, why not? And what needs to change?

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Kerry Savage: That's sort of why they're important. We don't want to just go from start to finish blindly finding our way through to to the end, and then thinking, Oh, well, that was, you know, an interesting experience, but not one I would care to repeat. Milestones are an opportunity for reflection and adjustment. So they're really important that way.

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Kerry Savage: So let's talk a little bit about how we translate that into a project plan.

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Kerry Savage: you're going to take your smart goal, and then you're going to break it down into phases and then tasks for each phase, and then don't forget to identify your major milestones. So

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Kerry Savage: you know, I'm going to write the first draft of the historical fiction novel of about 90,000 words, so on and so forth. So this particular I could just say, my project right now is just going to be to create the draft, and that's fine. You can also just take it like a a project being a single phase. And then, when you're done with that phase, move on to your next project, which would be the next phase.

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Kerry Savage: sometimes

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Kerry Savage: planning a whole book project from start to finish, can be really overwhelming. It can be sort of too much, especially if you've never planned a project before. So I recommend that approach, just taking it sort of phase by phase, as a little mini project and then you can put them all together and then see? Oh, okay, like, here's how things are sort of playing out

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Kerry Savage: but

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Kerry Savage: going back to your goal. And you're you're making your project plans. You're identifying your phases. Then you're going to break it down. All the tasks that you need to do in your planning phase, or all the tasks that you need to do in your drafting phase. Honestly, drafting is probably the easiest one, because it's sort of like, well, I wanna write roughly this many scenes, and I'm

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Kerry Savage: targeting this word count. And it's gonna take me roughly, you know, I don't know 6 h to write a scene, and that's sort of it for drafting, which is great. You can have a few more things in there for sure, if you think of them? There's nothing wrong with that. But that is your main goal of your drafting task or your draft drafting phase. Excuse me.

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Kerry Savage: you wanted to find your schedule. When do you want to be done?

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Kerry Savage: And then you're gonna do some math. You're gonna say, okay.

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Kerry Savage: I'm starting on this date. I have this much time to work, and I'm going like each day or each week. And I want to be done here. Do those things come together. Do they make sense?

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Kerry Savage: You need to do some math there to say, Okay, I'm going to say, divide the number of hours that I have

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Kerry Savage: by. You know the time. I think it's going to take me to do each one of these tasks and see, does that put you at your end day or not.

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Kerry Savage: and maybe it doesn't. And then you need to adjust. So either you're gonna push out your end date or you're going to figure out a way that you could add a few more hours to your work week, if possible.

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Kerry Savage: be as realistic as you possibly can be here because

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Kerry Savage: you want to, as I said, set reasonable expectations for yourself.

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Kerry Savage: and if you're constantly missing your deadlines or missing your dates because you haven't, you? You thought oh, I can work super fast, and I'm going to write each scene in 2 h, and you know I'll be done in in a week or something. Obviously, you're not gonna say that. But it gets really discouraging. Honestly, if you're constantly having to adjust your schedule out, just your schedule out, the more realistic you can be right off the the bat the better off you will be, because you'll be encouraged by seeing that progress

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Kerry Savage: build in some buffer. Please build in some buffer. If you do nothing else, build in some buffer and plan for some breaks you're going to want to take some time. Sometimes it'll just be a couple of days. Sometimes you might need to walk away from it for a week. Hopefully, you've got like a little vacation planned, or something else, fun or something that's going on that you know. Oh, I'm not gonna realistically be able to write this week definitely build that into your plan so that you know, upfront. You know, I have this week. I'm not gonna get any work done, and that's fine, not a problem.

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Kerry Savage: So this is just an example of what a project roadmap could look like, which is sort of the the task list.

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Kerry Savage: and your schedule broken out.

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Kerry Savage: This is actually in an excel spreadsheet that I created, which is part of my course. And the thing that's nice about that is, it will do the math for you. The math that I was just talking about where you're

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Kerry Savage: planning out your tasks and then plugging them into

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Kerry Savage: a formula to figure out when exactly you're going to be done, and if your end date is realistic.

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Kerry Savage: but you can, you should certainly don't need to to to use this any sort of spreadsheet or or math. Little simple equations will do it for you. There's probably simple scheduling tools out on the Internet.

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Kerry Savage: But I sort of built this exactly with a structure of a book projects in mind. So you see, you're listing out your tasks.

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Kerry Savage: You've got the time and estimate in hours that you wanted to

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Kerry Savage: that you want the task to take, and then you can add a priority to, and that doesn't actually have to translate into a schedule at all. But the thing that I like about adding a priority is, there will be days along the way where you do not feel like doing any work.

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Kerry Savage: or you're well. I'm sitting down to write the scene, but it's just not happening, and

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Kerry Savage: but I do want to keep working on it. I feel like if I don't get something done on the book. Then.

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Kerry Savage: you know, I don't feel like a wasted day. But if you have a low priority task or a task that feels sort of easier. You can still make progress on that, and and even complete that, and know that you're still working on your book, and then you can keep your momentum going.

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Kerry Savage: So those are great to have in your back pocket for the days when you're just not feeling it.

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Kerry Savage: Alright, and then another nice thing to keep track of, too, is your is your status? This has a little percent complete. That will happen, and I know for myself and for other people who've used this, it's really fun to see the percent complete go up because it shows you again that you're making progress, and it feels really good.

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Kerry Savage: so this is a basic outline for for a project schedule. It doesn't have to look like this. But these again are the kind of things that you want to keep in mind.

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Kerry Savage: A start date here and then just how many hours per day that you'll work, and I'd like to think of it as a little bit of an algebra equation. You're plugging in these variables, and you can pick one or more things that are the constant, like the date that you want to be done, or you know there's absolutely no way that I can work more than an hour a day and see where that puts you. And then if you wanna adjust, that's those are the levers that you're pulling.

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Kerry Savage: Your start date your end date the number of hours that you're going to work. And then, as a very last resort, and I sort of beg you not to do this, but I will tell you, anyway.

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Kerry Savage: that you can play with the number of hours that you've assigned to each task to see if you can get things done faster. I always just hate to say that, because very rarely does it actually work out that we are faster than we think we are sometimes, and it's great when it happens, but really having that buffer and being able to then check it off and move on to a next thing, maybe early, is a great feeling. It's much better feeling than constantly missing

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Kerry Savage: your due date for a task, and then having to go back.

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Kerry Savage: So how do you stay on track with this lovely plan that you've created for yourself?

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Kerry Savage: I recommend having regular check-ins in in my other project world we would have status meetings with a team both on the client side and the and the internal team that was working on a project at least once a week. Sometimes, if things were really hot, we would check in every day, you know. Think for a writing project you need to check in every day, but but once a week is great, even once every other week, I think just to take stock for a moment.

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Kerry Savage: And I know, I said, that's basically what that mil what milestones are for. And that's true. But I would think of your regular check ins as just a really brief like, where am I at? How am I? How am I doing? How are things going? Do I feel good about this plan? And oftentimes the answer will just be, yes, and you move on, and that's great. But if there is something that is sticking in your mind that you know you might want to.

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Kerry Savage: You know this isn't feeling good, or I'm feeling behind, and I'm not really sure what to do about it. It's great. The earlier you can catch it the better off you are.

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Kerry Savage: So it's worth taking that time at least on a bi weekly basis to sort of review your plan. Make sure you're you're feeling that you're on track, and that things are aligning the way you expect them to. Make sure you keep track of your progress like chart it so that you can see that you're checking things off, that things are going well and make sure that you're acknowledging and celebrating when you finish things, because that is the big thing. I think we don't do enough of this stuff is really hard. We're working.

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Kerry Savage: probably doing a million other things on top of our book projects so it can feel like, oh, what's big deal? If I just, you know, wrote those 5 scenes this week, that is a big deal. That's a huge deal. It's really really hard to do so, you know, whatever whatever it is like. If you go for a walk, or you know, have a cookie, whatever whatever it is that that will feel like a little bit of something special to reward yourself. I think that that's really important.

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Kerry Savage: And another thing is, be prepared to adjust.

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Kerry Savage: If it's not working, don't abandon your plan. Please figure out what needs to change, to make it work. It is fine to be flexible, being flexible is critical. The beauty of the plan is that you're defining the constants and you're adjusting the remaining variables to make it work. It's all about how it can work for you.

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Kerry Savage: You've I've never had a plan. Stay constant from start to finish. I used to joke with my clients that if I did I would retire. And that hasn't happened yet. Unfortunately and frankly, I don't think it ever will. That is what project management and making a plan are all about. It's never going to run 100% smoothly from start to finish.

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Kerry Savage: And that's okay. That's exactly why we do this. It's fine to adjust, and that's why we check in regularly, too.

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Kerry Savage: So, closing out a project

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Kerry Savage: celebrate, can you tell? I'm a big celebration fan

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Kerry Savage: celebrating is really important. I think you know we don't. Again. We don't acknowledge these things often enough.

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Kerry Savage: and then take some time to, especially if you if you just you know you wanted to write one book, and you've written that book and you're done amazing congratulations. That's fantastic. It's always great to get to that point.

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Kerry Savage: But if you have another book in you, and a lot of us do, or like to think that we do it's also a great time to take a moment and review the strategy and the plan. What worked? What could you have done differently?

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Kerry Savage: Acknowledge all of the hard work that you did, and acknowledge all the people who may have helped you get there along the way, whether it's your family or, you know, some research partners or someone who took some time to to answer a question for you or a beta reader, or anybody along the way that helped you get to that point. You know this is a great time to reach out and say, Hey! Like I did it, and thank you so much. I couldn't have done it without you

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Kerry Savage: and then celebrate some more because you've just done this amazing thing. And it's really hard. And you're done.

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Kerry Savage: So. Wow! I talked really fast. It's QA time. So it looks like we do have some questions. That's good.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yes.

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Kerry Savage: Sorry I talked so fast.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: That's okay. That just leaves more time for questions. We have about 12 of them right now, and I'm sure that more will filter in as we get going.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Okay. So our first one from an anonymous attendee, they ask, What if we're a pancer, even when it comes to project planning.

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Kerry Savage: A pancer when it comes to project planning.

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Kerry Savage: I mean, I'd love to know a little bit more about exactly what you mean by that, but I will try to take a stab at it. And I think you know, I definitely have encountered resistance from people who say, Yeah, I'm a pancer. I do my best creative work when I'm just sort of flying, you know, around and and letting going where the muse takes me. And that's fine. I just I don't think that. This

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Kerry Savage: have to exclude that for you. I think it's just a matter of of being able to take a little bit of time to think about the big picture questions that we talked about the strategy which is really important. And

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Kerry Savage: the thing about as I was talking about with the flexibility piece of it is, there's a little bit of inherent pants, panciness, pantsness built into that, and that you want to go back and you wanna adjust you know, we all do discover things about our books, about our goals and our reasons why.

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Kerry Savage: and need to adjust our strategy along the way, and that's a very pansy thing to do, and that's fine.

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Kerry Savage: So I think it's all about adapting and and using the tools of project management to fit the style that works for you. That, said I, would still encourage you to do the best thing that best that you can to sort of set up a little bit of a framework, and then do those check ins regularly, so that you are adjusting to your to your pantiness to your fancy, delight.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have another anonymous question. Do you approve purposefully giving yourself shorter deadlines in order to force yourself to accomplish a task, especially if you struggle with Adhd.

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Kerry Savage: Yes.

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Kerry Savage: yes.

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Kerry Savage: I'm also a neurodiverse brain. So absolutely, I say, whatever works for you, I mean, I'm

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Kerry Savage: 48 years old. It took me a long time to figure out how I could trans honestly like even managing projects for these these, you know, web redesigns and and these educational books that I was working on. Honestly, when I first started writing.

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Kerry Savage: I took a project management class for writers, and the person who was in the class said, What are you doing here? You're a project manager who said, No, I I still I need help thinking about how I can apply all of this. So I've done a lot of thinking about it. And yes, if that is what will work for your brain absolutely break it down into the smallest chunks you possibly can, because I think those of us who have Adhd and and can get easily distracted by things

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Kerry Savage: that little hit of dopamine that you get when you can check the box off that something is done. It feels really really good, and is encouraging in terms of like, in ways that we probably don't even realize

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Kerry Savage: in order to to keep that up and do more. So.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yes, we were just talking about how nice it feels to check those tasks off our to do list.

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Kerry Savage: It feels real, good.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Nancy asks any advice for making yourself stick to deadlines you set for yourself. I have a hard time being accountable when there aren't others to be accountable to.

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Kerry Savage: That is a great question. Yes, and if at all possible. I am a big fan of accountability buddies or

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Kerry Savage: co-writing sessions. I also tend to be someone that shows up for other people before I show up for myself. So, knowing that somebody else is going to be in a zoom room, for example.

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Kerry Savage: waiting for me and expecting me to show up. I'm much more likely to show up for that person than, and because I know they're waiting for me than I would if it was just like, Oh, I'm gonna log onto a zoom or something. I'm also a big fan like said of accountability partners, and it doesn't even have to be another writer. It could be a friend of yours who is just going to expect your email at the end of the day with.

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Kerry Savage: you know the 5 paragraphs that you wrote that day, and they're not going to read it. And they're not going to comment. But if you don't send it, they're going to say.

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Kerry Savage: Hey, where? Where are your pages? I thought you were? Gonna get this to me. So a little bit of like outside coercion or accountability, I think, is really really helpful.

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Kerry Savage: otherwise, again, it just kind of goes back to that like feeling that encouragement if you can get yourself on a role. But I know that even when those happen, then they they sort of stop happening. So I think for those of us who it's it's hard to show up for ourselves. Build in a little bit of outside accountability. If you can.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Randy asks, do you use project, man, project, managing software like Ms project or visio.

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Kerry Savage: I use. So for my book projects, I use the spreadsheets that I was showing you because, I developed them specifically for that. So that is how I sort of process that specific thing. But in my sort of daily life I use a sauna. I just use the free version. I build projects and give myself tasks and due dates, and that's sort of the thing that keeps me on track. So I'm a big fan of Asana. I know there are other other software out there, and I think whatever

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Kerry Savage: works best for you or what makes sense for you. I know sometimes a Sauna, isn't, you know, for some people they don't like it. It's not. It's not how their brain works.

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Kerry Savage: So whatever it is that you can do. Yes, I love A. I love a project management software. I love a to do list, anything that can help you keep track of anything.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Maria asks, Do you do a smart goal for each book or the whole series.

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Kerry Savage: That yeah, I would do. I would do both. Honestly, I would do a goal for your overarching series.

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Kerry Savage: because I think that way you get like it. When if you think about a book project, and then when you're writing and you're in the weeds, that's sort of your you're down at ground level, wise, I think, of a circle as being like the 50,000 foot view, and that's where I would be for each book. And then it's almost like with the series. You need to go up another 25,000 feet. So you need that 75,000 foot view of the overarching. Here's where we're going from, start to finish. So yeah, I would do. I would do one for the series, and then one for each of the books.

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Kerry Savage: And so there, there will obviously, or there could be some overlap there, you know your why statement might be really similar. And some of the specifics of that

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Kerry Savage: for each book you know, your word count is probably gonna be very would probably be similar. Maybe not and that's fine. But yeah, that's how I would handle that.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Lucy asks, how do you decide on word, count, goal, or the amount of scenes needed for your work?

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Kerry Savage: Well, if you are a planner like me, you have an outline. That sort of dictates how many scenes you at least you expect to have

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Kerry Savage: and so that is what I've used for my number of scenes. And I have done enough of my own writing to know that I'm you know. It'll probably take me roughly

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Kerry Savage: 2 to 4 h to knock out a scene depending on. You know how much I've done in the outline. And as I said, I like to build in a lot of buffer time so that I will. I will pick that 4 h per scene. Just to know that, hey? If I'm having an inspired day, and I've cranked out the scene in an hour. Amazing! I just like bought myself 3 h to do more work.

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Kerry Savage: There was another part of the question. I feel like I was. I didn't answer.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Word countal, and the amount of scenes.

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Kerry Savage: Or account goal, yes, or account goal. Is really dependent on. Well, the overall book goal should be, whatever your genre sort of specifications are so for fantasy, I mean, we have a little more leeway than you know, say

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Kerry Savage: historical necessarily, or like a romantic comedy or something. You know you have probably have more words, but I would set a word, count goal based on your genre guidelines and then break it down, depending on

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Kerry Savage: like how much time you have to work.

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Kerry Savage: It's it can be really nice to set a word count goal per day. So if you feel like maybe 500 words a day for the 4 days of the week that you can write. And then at the end of the week, you've got 2,000 words. That would be amazing, you know. That's probably a scene, or seen plus depending on what? Where you are.

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Kerry Savage: But that's how I would think about a word like I would think about the overall world word, count, goal, based on your genre. And then I would break it down into like a how much a goal would be for whatever day slash time you have to work.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Building off of that. Santa says, how much buffer do you suggest? We build in percentage wise.

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Kerry Savage: Oh, that's a good question, too.

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Kerry Savage: I've never really thought about it in percentages, honestly. But I would say at least 10%, maybe 20, if you're being more real like, if you're being realistic.

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Kerry Savage: and the a an easier way to think of it, I mean, percentages are are fine way to think of it, but an easier way might be. Well, I feel like this is gonna take me an hour and a half easy round up to 2 h, and that's why you'll see like in the in the project plan. Everything was a whole hour. Amount. Always round up

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Kerry Savage: is my rule of thumb. So whenever you think don't get, you can get more granular than that, you can say it's gonna take an hour and a half. But I would always just give myself that buffer of 30 min.

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Kerry Savage: If you think something's gonna take you an hour.

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Kerry Savage: Be realistic with yourself. If it's researching something online. It probably that hour might be real like could be fine. You might be able to find the answer in 15 min. But if you've rounded up to an hour, you can move on to something else, and that builds in your buffer on the other end. If you start to go down the rabbit hole, which is really easy to do.

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Kerry Savage: yeah, I would say 10 to 20%

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Kerry Savage: as a starting point, and then round up. If you're getting odd numbers, clunky numbers.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Alicia says I've been writing full time for a little over 2 years. I find that I do a lot of this in my head. Do you recommend doing this on paper for any particular reason? Also? Do you have any recommendations on knowing when to let go of one major project and move on.

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Kerry Savage: so do I recommend. I think.

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Kerry Savage: whatever works for you is great. I need to put it on paper. There's just too many things that float around in my head, and I am afraid that if I leave them all in my head I will forget something critical. So for me if I put it down, whether it's writing it on a scrap of paper for for a moment, or like eventually really organizing it and putting it into a specific to do list.

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Kerry Savage: Then I know it's out of my head, and honestly like that brings my anxiety level down, way down. So I always recommend writing it down for those reasons.

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Kerry Savage: That said, if you manage to keep it all on your head, and and that is the way you love to work. I'm not gonna tell you to do otherwise, like, I'm also a big believer in doing what works for you. But it seems to me that with all of the pieces and parts that go into writing a book, it is just easier to process all of that stuff if you have it written down.

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Kerry Savage: And you can build on that list and take things off if they're no no longer relevant, but just not having to like that extra pressure to keep it in your brain. That's where I say, like, it can allow you to be more creative because you're not thinking about that to do list thing to do. You're thinking about like, oh, what is that character going to do next? And why are they going to do it? Does that make sense?

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Kerry Savage: And then the other question part of the question was to when to set aside a project.

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Kerry Savage: That's a really hard one, I think because it's so personal.

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Kerry Savage: you know, I set aside my first project to work on the second project because I sort of felt like I had. I knew it wasn't quite right yet, but I felt like in that moment I had taken it as far as I could.

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Kerry Savage: And, honest like. I wanted writing to be fun again. So we needed to start something new. And I that's that's a really valid thing. I think. You know, you can always step away from it, and it's not that you're putting it in a drawer forever, never, never to be thought of again. Sometimes we all just need a break from things, and taking a month or 2 or

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Kerry Savage: 2 weeks, whatever it is, can be really really healthy, because to your point about having all of that stuff going on in your brain, giving it a break. Can. Actually, you know, all of that stuff happens behind the scenes and the processing when we're asleep or when we're in the shower. That's

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Kerry Savage: like where we get those moments. We're like. Wait a minute, you know, you weren't even thinking about what this character was gonna do next. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you have an answer. That's what taking those breaks does allow to our allows our brains to sort of process all of that behind the scenes, and then it can hopefully give us that like magical answer that we were looking for so

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Kerry Savage: I feel like it's a little bit of a cop out to say like, Oh, you'll just know but don't ever be afraid to set it down and walk away from it for a little bit, just to see how that feels.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Cb. Asks, what if you're not sure what your timeline is? Realistically, I'm a new writer and also a parent, and it feels like every month is different. I'm rewriting in chunks, and I'm not sure how long is too long to spend on one event.

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Kerry Savage: I

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Kerry Savage: feel that.

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Kerry Savage: I think the thing is to sort of

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Kerry Savage: average. If you're if you're interested, like you wanna put a plan around something. But you know, things are gonna be very variable, like, I would look at. Okay, here's my starting date.

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Kerry Savage: Assuming you have a list of all the things that you need to do. And you've estimated roughly how long you think they're gonna take. Just be really, really honest with yourself about

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Kerry Savage: how much time you're gonna have month to month. And it might be that you know, to your point, like one week, you have

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Kerry Savage: miraculously 5 h to work, and then the next week. You're not working on it at all, because there's so much other stuff going on. So you think about it as well overall. I've maybe got, you know, 15 h this month. Is there a a

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Kerry Savage: a set amount of time that you can do on that basis like, say, oh, I'm going to try to find 10 HA month to work on this, and then you can allocate that time.

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Kerry Savage: However, you want to do it. You know where wherever it can fit. But what you also know then, is, if you've got, say, 10 HA month

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Kerry Savage: again, assuming they're sort of 4 weeks in a month. Then that means what? 2 h!

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Kerry Savage: So sorry an hour! I'll move it.

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Kerry Savage: Fine math right? What did I say?

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Kerry Savage: Let's just go with 20, cause. It's easy. So 20 HA month, times 4 like with 4 weeks, that's 5 HA week. So where can I fit those 5 h in? And then in this week oh, I have 7 h. I'm gonna make that fit that in. And then the next week, if I don't have as much time. That's fine. So I don't know if that like thinking up a level like with, you know, a month, an amount of time you can do each month could could be helpful, and then looking at breaking it down that way

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Kerry Savage: that can still get you to a calculation of like roughly when you would be done.

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Kerry Savage: It's just kind of going at going at it a little bit.

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Kerry Savage: not backwards, but from a different from a different perspective.

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Kerry Savage: I don't know if I entirely answered the question. So if you have a follow up, please feel free.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Leah says my problem is, I don't have an outline because I'm a discovery writer, and I don't know where my story is going. So how do I estimate how much time is seen, or chapter will take page, count, etc.

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Kerry Savage: So, Page Count, I would say, go back to that like the genre expectations. I think that's on. Always a great place to start. You know. Just set yourself that stake in the ground if you go over

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Kerry Savage: because you realize you're writing, you know a massive

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Kerry Savage: a massive book, you know, 145,000 word adventure, fantasy, adventures based opera, whatever like. That's fine. But you've start. You've given yourself a starting point. As far as word count goes, just with that genre expectation. And as a discovery writer, I think you know you just look at

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Kerry Savage: Can you map out

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Kerry Savage: the scenes that you have upcoming, that you know that you want to go to next. Are you a writer? That sort of bounces around from different

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Kerry Savage: from different scene to different scene. Or are you still writing an order?

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Kerry Savage: that could be one way to kind of go about it?

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Kerry Savage: And then I think

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Kerry Savage: you could also look at planning your project differently

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Kerry Savage: by

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Kerry Savage: giving yourself that, or or saying you have a set amount of time again per month. Now I've got months on the brain or per week. If you wanna break it down that way and just give yourself a little mini tiny plan to say I'm gonna get this much done this week, or these are the things that I'm going to tackle this week and just do that over and over again each week. That's actually sort of related to a project management framework for anyone who's who's sort of been in the

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Kerry Savage: software world. There's a framework called agile, which is, you have this whole list of tasks that you want to do.

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Kerry Savage: and you pick a few of them and you get them done, and you release, release that, and then you iterate over and over and over again, so that would be like a little more agile approach to take. If that sort of fits in more with your discovery. Writing.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have an anonymous question, how would the project management plan work when working on a series? I often write. Then, while editing and revising. I'm starting to write the next book. So everything within one project overlaps the next.

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Kerry Savage: Hmm! I would do a plan for each project, and then you can see how like when you're planning your bigger picture. You know you're working on one and the other. It's

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Kerry Savage: you can have those 2 plans running simultaneously. It's just maybe you're building in a task time on one of them that says, you know, editing time for the other one. If that's where you're at versus planning or drafting for this one

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Kerry Savage: you could also adjust the amount of time that you're working each week to put a set number of hours for one project in one plan and a set number of hours. So instead of saying, I have 10 HA week to work, you're giving 5 to one and 5 to the other, or however, that that might adjust. So those kind of that. That's one way that that can overlap

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Kerry Savage: you could use like. So there's a way that you know, one of the project plans that I have in this thing is is

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Kerry Savage: multi phase. So it has like a plan for, or a section for planning a section for drafting a section for revising, you could alter that. To just be like each one is its own separate book, and just play with how those things are going to overlap that way. So you have everything in one big sheet. If that's what you would want to look at.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have another anonymous question, any tips for full time, moms who may be excellent at planning, but live in a world of interruptions.

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Kerry Savage: Hmm! That is a great question. Yes. I actually have a workbook, too, which is on the page. That I think we're gonna share, I will.

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Kerry Savage: I'll put it up here.

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Kerry Savage: that.

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Kerry Savage: That

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Kerry Savage: gives you all kinds of different strategies for for

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Kerry Savage: building yourself a writing practice, because I understand, like

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Kerry Savage: not all of us. Most of us, in fact, are not full time writers. It's amazing if you are, but but very few of us are. And so we're having to fit all of this work into the rest of our lives, and that can leave very little time. But I think the biggest gift that you can give yourself, if at all possible, is set aside some kind of regular time for writing, whether that's 15 min

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Kerry Savage: twice a week. That's still something that's still progress and should not be discounted. So I have some strategies in that workbook that might be helpful for you, but ultimately I would say,

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Kerry Savage: you're probably someone who's gonna need to enlist a little bit of help if you can. If there's I don't know how old the kids are. So if they can, you know.

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Kerry Savage: look out on their own, or if there's somebody who can watch them for half an hour so that you can close the door and just knock out some words if you possibly can.

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Kerry Savage: See if you can negotiate with someone or or find some time. I actually have a friend who had small children and got up at, and and they were very attuned to when she woke up in the morning, so she would get up like silent alarm next to the bed, and go right in her closet for a half an hour every morning, so that they weren't aware that she was awake, because as soon as they were they would run to her. So

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Kerry Savage: you know, there's there's all a little kind of different things that we can do to try to try to carve out that time. So I think, enlisting some help and then just getting creative with with how you can fit that in is gonna be key.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Chris asks if you get overwhelmed easily what are the best suggestions you've given? That would be best to focus on, to get started on.

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Kerry Savage: I think the best thing to do, if you get overwhelmed is to start making those to do lists and breaking down tasks into a small unit of

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Kerry Savage: of to do this as you possibly can. Because that's probably where the overwhelm is coming from is that it feels like it's so much work. There's so many things that you need to do. There's so many things that you're holding in your head so that has that writing it down and making a list sort of offloads all of that cognitive.

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Kerry Savage: not dissonance, but all that cognitive activity onto the the list itself, and not having it floating around in your brain, and then also breaking it down, can help it really feel like it's not that you have to do this big thing I just have to do this little thing, and then this other little thing, and that helps it feel much more manageable. Right? You don't go out and run a marit. Say, I'm gonna run a marathon and run 26.2 miles. You go out and you have a plan where you stop. Okay, today, I'm gonna do this much the next day I'm gonna do this much, and so on and so forth.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: We have an anonymous question. This advice, planning and structure is all amazing. But even though my neuro divergent brain is all over this, I know such an elaborate system will fall through within the week. The urge to write is so spontaneous. Locking them into boxes of time is hard and will lead to burnout and imposter syndrome episodes. Any advice on that.

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Kerry Savage: I think then I would go back to like breaking it down into like week by week, taking it week by week, and not

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Kerry Savage: and reminding yourself, building in building in a lot of buffer so that you don't constantly feel like you're failing. If you haven't, you know, done

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Kerry Savage: the 5 things that you've set out for yourself to do,

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Kerry Savage: being being very kind to yourself.

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Kerry Savage: and

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Kerry Savage: taking it

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Kerry Savage: one day at a time, or one week at a time and saying, like, Okay, yeah, this is this is what I'm gonna be able to get done today. Or this is my goal for what I want to get done today, I would still recommend doing the big planning steps so that you have like a map that you can refer back to when when that mood strikes you, but I would maybe be. I would ease off a little bit of like being super strict about

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Kerry Savage: You know I have to do these 7 things this week. Maybe it's just I'm gonna tackle these 2, and that'll be great. And then, you know, then you can move on to the next thing next week.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I think this is be a great question to end with. Marian asks. I was just about to ask if you had classes, workbooks, or programs. Can you do some promo for your services?

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Kerry Savage: Well, thank you, Mary. Yes.

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Kerry Savage: so I didn't put the link in here, but I know Michelle, you have the link in there right.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Yes.

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Kerry Savage: Send the link.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: I'll drop them

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: again. They're all in the chat there for you.

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Kerry Savage: Perfect. Yes. So there's there's a special landing page on my website that should be a link in there that has some free or free resources. A writing practice, strategies, workbook, and then also a workbook that that helps you sort of dig into your why.

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Kerry Savage: and then I do have a course. I just rolled it out a few months ago. It's called, Bring order. Creative chaos looks

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Kerry Savage: the framework. It's built on this presentation. But it goes much deeper. There's lots of. There's video lessons. There's a bunch of worksheets. And then those scheduling tools that that I showed you to the excel spreadsheet. So there you fill in, fill in certain pieces of information, and it does all of the math for you. So.

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Michelle @ ProWritingAid: Alright. Well, we are out of time. But thank you so much, Carrie, for being here. This is such a helpful session, and thank you to everybody who attended. This was great information, and the the replay link slides. Everything will be on the hub, so you can take a look there, and we have another session starting in 1 h. So thank you so much. Everyone. We'll see you soon.