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EP 80 - A Creative Process: Reflections on The Boy & Bus 13
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This episode wraps up this series on the creative process. It also coincides with the release of my latest book, The Boy & Bus 13. On today’s episode, I’m going to reflect on the stages of my creative process that were needed to bring this book from idea to finished product.
The Boy & Bus 13 Links:
Website
Goodreads
The Story Graph
For more info & to download a free PDF of today's episode notes, visit: www.chriskreuter.com/CDWI
Join the Kreuter Studios mailing list: https://mailchi.mp/810367311f3d/ksbulletin
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Transcript
Introduction and Mission of 'Chris Deals With It'
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On Chris deals with it, I talk about the frameworks and methods I use to clear personal, creative, and professional roadblocks. My goal is to help others bridge the gaps between where they're at now and what they want to achieve.
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If you're new to the show, I'm an engineer, writer, parent, game designer, leader, and reader who leverages that experience to develop creative solutions to problems. First, an AI statement, that all elements of this episode are products of the author, Chris Kreuter, and made without the use of any AI tools.
Reflection on Creative Process and Novel 'The Boy and Bus 13'
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Welcome to episode 80 of Chris Deals With It, where I wrap up my series on the creative process with some reflections on writing The Boy and Bus 13, my next novel. So this is the conclusion of a multi part series about the creative process.
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We've covered my thoughts on how this process applies to creating and publishing works, and how it applies to games, fiction writing, other creative endeavors, and our professional careers. As always, the views expressed in this podcast are mine.
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What's worked for me isn't likely to work for you in exactly the same way.
Creative Frameworks and Mindsets
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The usefulness of these various pieces of advice over this series are going to depend on your project experience tools, and more that I got into.
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The goal of this series was to share my frameworks, mindsets, strategies, and experiences that have led me to this point on my creative journey. And this has been an ever evolving process as it should be for everyone.
Overview of 'The Boy and Bus 13'
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So like I said at the start, this episode is wrapping up this whole series and it coincides with the release of my latest book, The Boy and Bus 13. So on today's episode, I wanna reflect on the stages of my creative process over the last five episodes that I needed to go through to bring this book from idea to a finished product.
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Real briefly about the book, and I'm going to have links to all the different sites to get this on in the show notes and on my website. My new book is a sci-fi story that's written for middle grade and young adult audiences.
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Verlin Buckley is a shy and lonely eighth grader whose parents are going through a divorce. While playing his favorite city building video game, he finds bizarre hidden messages, but it's not a
Ideation and Influences for the Story
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prank.
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The messages are actually a test put there by Twin River Transit bus number 13. It's the dawn of a true artificial intelligence, and it wants to be Verlin's friend? Can they figure out how to relate to each other before politics tear apart their small, Midwestern city's transit system?
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And what does this mean for 13's favorite driver, Jaconte Hooper, aiming to advance his career? Or will this newly self-aware bus get destroyed by accident before they figure out how to save it?
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Let's start with ideation, the first stage. Around January of 2021, I got the first inklings for this book. I wanted to tell a transit-related story, preferably within the genre of science fiction that I love.
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Now, I've spent more than two decades as a professional within the transit industry in various roles. And through the COVID-19 pandemic and all the supply chain hassles that followed, retirements and lower ridership had major lasting impacts.
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So I wanted a way to expose younger readers to this amazing field, giving them an inside look at the issues, opportunities, and realities of working in transit.
Creating Fictional Settings and Games
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Around the same time, I read Max Tegmark's incredible book, Life 3.0, Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
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Added to all this was the aftermath of the 2020 election, the January 6th attack at the U.S. Capitol, and of course, COVID. It felt like the rifts between ideological sides were widening, as they continue to do now, red versus blue, humans versus AI, etc.
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As a father, I was reflecting on what impacts all these rapid changes will have, and it also brought up a lot of memories of my own childhood, especially living through my parents' divorce. All these ideas molded my head for a while, and and they started clicking together.
00:03:49
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As I said back in episode 75, good ideas tend to gather momentum. This felt like it would be a fun novel to write, and based more on our current world than past sci-fi books that I've written.
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I liked the parallel between stops on a transit system with chapters of stories. I also had a pretty good sense of the kinds of characters I wanted in my story, especially Verlin Buckley in Bus No. 13.
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I knew too that it was a story that I could write well given my experience within the transit industry. I was writing what I know. Very similar to what I did with the Raining River Bees, which was basically my merging my two loves of science fiction and hockey.
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Let's get into scaffolding. Early on, it became clear that I didn't want to base my story in some real world city or use an existing transit system. I wanted my story to take place in a small, somewhat rural city around the central United States.
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I researched places that had interesting geographies, not too close to any major cities, but preferably a place that would make sense to have a larger population. I did find a good place in southeastern Missouri. It's a few hours between Memphis, Louisville, Nashville, and St. Louis.
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While not the most practical to position a city right where two major rivers, the Mississippi and Ohio, emerge, it worked perfectly for a work of fiction, and I love the idea of a city named Twin River. Now, it is daunting to have to come up with an entire fake city, but I found inspiration from a video game called Cities Skylines.
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This game allows you to procedurally build up a city, similar to what happens with my fake game within the book, Stottbauer Extreme. So I'll talk more about that in a minute. It was cool having this research serve multiple purposes.
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Cities has this option that allows you to import height maps of real world topographical data. So I grabbed the data for the exact region I wanted in my fictional city to set up my fictional one.
Research and Plot Development
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The game auto-generated road names and buildings while allowing me control over where key buildings, bridges, neighborhoods, and highways went, and of course how transit buses were routed. Most of the places in the book, like the bus stop road names and even the description of Verlund's house, came directly from what was procedurally generated by the game.
00:05:55
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And I've got some images of this process in the show notes. Now, I needed to make up a video game for my main character, Verlin, to be obsessed with. I landed on a city building game, which was inspired by SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, and the aforementioned Cities Skylines.
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I named the game Stottbauer Extreme, which is German for city builder extreme. There's a whole German language and cultural undercurrent to the book. Then I scaffolded rules, playstyles, a development backstory, a fanbase, needing to go as far as to how it was programmed, and more on that later.
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I didn't need every detail of the game since it was mainly a plot device, something my main character loves to play, and could be exploited by my newly sentient bus. But during writing, Stoppour Extreme provided additional, unexpected opportunities to reflect on various aspects of urban development and cultural differences.
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I also did a lot of research on sentient vehicles and popular culture, wanting to both inspire my work and avoid doing anything too similar. At the time, my kids were younger and were enjoying shows like Thomas the Tank Engine, Tao the Little Bus, ah Trash Truck, and of course Disney's Cars series.
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I also re-watched old episodes of Knight Rider, Herbie the Love Bug, and the Transformers. And of course, classic sci-fi movies were inspiring as well. ah AI by Steven Spielberg, The Terminator, and Bicentennial Man especially.
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Alongside my city taking shape, I was also developing the plot. Now I typically scaffold my plots using index cards, one card per scene. This allows me to start grouping scenes into chapters and easily move them in a sensical order.
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I love this way of plotting as it also allows me to gauge pacing of the larger story, where I may need to add or remove scenes, and keeping consistent action beats through it, which is very important in middle grade writing.
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I did have to come back to the scaffolding process after the first draft of the book since the original story structure just wasn't working. So after conversations with early beta readers and a writing coach that I had hired, I landed on this triangular story structure with three main characters rather than everything taking place through only Verlin's perspective or only the bus's perspective.
Production Phases and Tools
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So let's jump into production. Writing the book came in three major phases with large breaks between them. So during this first phase, which encompassed the first draft, I went back and rescaffolded the next two drafts after that, I wrote in a program called Scrivener.
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I've written the early drafts of all my books in this program. It's a got an excellent note card view, which mimics my scaffolding process really closely for scenes and chapters. It also allows me to compile all of my notes into their own section of the editor and provide split screen views of what you're writing alongside your notes, which is extremely helpful.
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While I'm working on later drafts, I do like to transfer that work over to Microsoft Word or another word processing program. While Scrivener has great export and publication tools, I find Word is more like a finished book and easier to do editing and tweaks, at least with the way I work.
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I also have a lot more control over fonts, chapter headings, and layout options. as i like ten As I prefer self-publishing, this is also really important for me is that from a graphic design and production standpoint.
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It helps me get more of a feel for how the words will look as a finished product. Later, when I talk about the editing phase, I'm going to talk about what led me to a new third phase of production for the last draft using Adobe InDesign.
00:09:17
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Research was important, not just during the scaffolding stage for this book. Over all the years and drafts that took to produce this book, I remained open to opportunities to learn and to get inspired.
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It was fortunate that I got plenty of time around buses during my day job. A key example of this was researching the methods that Verlin eventually uses to change buses 13s wiring. I based much of it off of real world bus cabinets and wiring diagrams.
00:09:42
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Since one of my goals was to honestly reflect the transit industry, these realistic reflections weren't very important.
Incorporating Feedback and Revisions
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Being very familiar with bus systems and technology allowed me to ensure things like cameras, mirrors, the operations center, the business practices were accurately represented.
00:09:59
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While i was at a customer office waiting for a meeting, I picked up a copy of a route book. Not typically meant just for the public so they know where the routes are and timetables are, it did eventually inspire the traffic map that i made before chapter one of of the published book, and I'll have an image of that in the show notes, as well as the styling of the back cover copy.
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Another important area of research was adding some realism to the fake city building game. Now I'm very fortunate to have a large and diverse network of friends with expertise in many different fields. One of these good friends is not only a high-level video game programmer, but he's also a fluent German speaker who has lived in Austria, which is where one of Verlund's parents is from.
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We had this amazing conversation early on that really helped me base the game, how Verlin plays it, and helped me come up with at least a plausible way for a newly sentient bus, which is very fictional, to mess with it and attempt to make contact with Verlin.
00:10:51
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The conversation did way more than just produce a list of facts. It resulted in some excellent plot ideas and concepts for Stop Bauer Xtreme's backstory, which were based on the realities of game development, programming, and history.
00:11:03
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it really filled in a lot of gaps of my knowledge. Let's talk about this creative step of editing. Early feedback from beta readers and coaches were vital to seeing the major flaws in my first drafts. I was really trying to cram too many issues into the story, like shoehorning in political commentary that wouldn't age well and wasn't necessary to the plot, although they still informed some of my characters' backstories.
00:11:24
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Friends pointed out or I wasn't being sensitive enough in certain areas or going to a level of depth that was going to be too distracting for a middle-grade reader, especially on the technical side of things. you know Even late in a project, there can be conversations, ideas, and real-world events that can still have major impacts on your work.
00:11:41
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For example, between the fourth and final fifth draft was the 2024 election, which necessitated some changes. I was also pushed to explore this new tool of Adobe InDesign thanks to inspiration from my friend Jess, shout out to Shore Gamers,
00:11:54
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She's a professional graphic designer who pushed me to consider InDesign for the layout of the book, which was a daunting idea to push back releasing the book by months in order to learn this new deeply involved tool.
00:12:05
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Now I was already into the whole Adobe environment and InDesign was always almost more than I needed. But in this case, and probably if I, in retrospect, past cases, it really was the right tool, especially for a book that had more typesetting and formatting things going on than any of my previous works.
00:12:21
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And to be honest, the end product was so much better for it. Now I have another amazing tool in my toolbox for future jobs. It was totally worth that investment. As a bonus, I discovered that InDesign has amazing features for exporting content directly into an EPUB format for eBooks, making the creation of them much easier.
00:12:41
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Now I'm still working on troubleshooting that resulting file because I have, again, a lot of formatting things going on. But I'm excited to be releasing both print and digital versions right around the release date, something I've never been able to do before.
00:12:53
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So let's talk about putting that work out in the world. This step came in two phases with a major revision of editing in between. ah Initially, I pursued traditional publishing with this book. After the third major revision, I felt confident in starting to pitch literary agents.
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I had built up a large database of agents appropriate
Publishing Experience and Challenges
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for my genre and age range, and i actually used Airtable for this. From May to November of 2023, I pitched a lot of agents.
00:13:19
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While going through that process, I kept on writing, eventually working on the first draft of my next novel. I want to quickly dig deeper into this concept of project nesting. This is something that's been very helpful with fiction writing for me, as well as in board game design.
00:13:33
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Projects in both realms often require iteration, and you're waiting for feedback or playtest opportunities. Sometimes those feedback periods can be weeks or months, often enough time to write or design the first draft of something new.
00:13:47
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It's also helpful to have other projects ready to go when you reach a roadblock on a project or need to change pace so you can continue to make forward progress at a somewhat regular pace. In my case, it's also helpful to have projects at different stages of the creative process as tasks related to that process often have different environments or times where it's feasible to get work done.
00:14:08
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For example, I've found the quiet of the early morning hours before my wife and kids wake up to be the best for deep, focused writing, either novels or these podcast episodes. But late afternoons and evenings tend to be where I can get more project management tasks done.
00:14:23
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This could be pitching agents, editing and publishing a podcast, etc. This allows me to still make progress if there's background distractions and interruptions from kids, phone calls, and other commitments.
00:14:34
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You want to keep in mind that some projects, especially books, have a lot of content and context that needs to be loaded up in your brain before meaningful work can be performed. So the caution here is having too many projects on the go at once.
00:14:48
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This can result in a lot of context switching and spreading yourself too thin. I talked about the second phase. I mean, eventually I made the decision to pursue self-publishing. I didn't get the feedback I wanted from literary agents. Maybe it was just the timing. Maybe it was just...
00:15:03
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I wasn't in the right position. I didn't make a good enough pitch. Whatever the reasons, I've always loved the degree of control I have over the design of a final product. And in the case of this particular book, part of the reason I wanted to get it out in the world is due to the timing of artificial intelligence. AI is kind of a big deal right now.
00:15:21
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It's a very timely book, and I didn't want to miss this window where it's relatable to my target audience. So I went through another major editing pass, polishing a lot of those minor elements. ah Then I did a print test. I really wanted to get the value of the blacks on the cover correct on the background texture that I used so ah of a road.
00:15:39
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I wanted to make sure the graphics, fonts, margins all worked. Once I got that print test, you know, from from the same printer Lulu that I use, I went from page by page and looking for layout issues, anything I just missed, a little format fixes, I did have a one or two little minor edits that I made.
00:15:55
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And then I set up my project with my printer, Lulu, which got me my ISBN number so I can finalize the interior files, start getting all my marketing and things like the book registered on Goodreads and the story graph.
00:16:06
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And I'll have links to those for the book in the show notes. I've also started to pull together my list of transit industry connections and my knowledge, very similar to what I did with the hockey world with the Rainy River Bees trilogy.
00:16:17
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But listen, ultimately, I'm self-publishing a book. I have to level set my expectations. It's going to be very hard with a very limited marketing budget to spread word of my book.
00:16:28
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It's not going to be in every bookstore. I'm not trying to hit some bestseller list. um Ultimately, what am I trying to achieve with this book? It's doing what I can within my means to inspire kids about my industry.
00:16:41
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So that's why I'm going to lean very heavily on the industry connections. I'm going to try to do local literary events. I've got lots of plans for this book. But listen, I don't have to have this huge release where I'm going to try to hit again.
00:16:53
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I'm not trying hit day one sales numbers here. um I'm playing like all of my past work. I'm playing a long tail. and I talked about that on the last episode 79 about putting your work out there in the world. You have to have realistic expectations.
00:17:05
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And if you're doing it on your own, you've got to have a long tail on it. It's going to be very, very hard to get immediate success. You can't get discouraged in those early stages. But listen, in creating this book, I really leveled up.
00:17:16
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The impact that InDesign is going to have on my future books and my day job is amazing, right? um It's now possible for me to go back to my past books and create ebook versions of them, right? Reformat them with professional level tools.
00:17:29
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Now, again, I'm not going to go back and edit past writings of myself, which I talked about again in episode 79. but I can just do more with those products, right? Now I've got this ah these these better tools and built more of a following through the podcast where I can go re-release these books and hit a wider audience.
00:17:46
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I do want to reflect too on the timescale for this particular book. It was way longer than past books. um Part of that was the complex story structure, putting three unique points of view. I did more heavy edits and rewrites and took a lot longer than past books.
00:18:00
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But I focused on quality. For me, this was a big level up book, right? I had more than one main character and perspective. I imbued a lot more emotion and purpose, driving my character's actions, and this one was really based more in the current real world.
00:18:15
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That required more research, more validation, where my process for taking and organizing notes on books, articles, and discussions paid huge dividends. A lot of my viewpoints on artificial intelligence and all that research and all of that thinking about it, it's really helped me be more cognizant and aware both as a creator and as a human with all the current debates going on with AI. I just felt like if that's all that ever happens with this book, I think that was enough.
00:18:45
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Again, someone wants to come make a movie of this book, please reach out to me. You can back the Brinks truck right up. I'd be more than happy.
Growth and Reflections as a Writer
00:18:51
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right I'm not afraid of money or or notoriety or getting my books out there with traditional publishing. I invite all inquiries.
00:18:57
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But again, level set your expectations. And for me... It really crystallized my thinking. It crystallized my love of my industry. um I got to really, i feel like i've through the process of writing and iterating this book, I've become a more refined thinker.
00:19:14
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I've become a more refined writer. um The quality of my writing has gone up. And having seen the first draft ah and the second draft of my next novel, I can see the difference. I can see the confidence.
00:19:25
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Now, again, i solve I'm not under any illusions that I am way further past... you know any other writer, i have a long way to go. I want to continue to level up I want to continue to gain skills. I want to continue to learn and grow.
00:19:38
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But I'm being realistic with where I'm at as a self published writer. I'm being realistic where I'm at in terms of my learning curve, right? I know writers that have been in this way longer than I and so again, it's all about treating people the right way over a long enough timescale.
00:19:51
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The different tidbits and information and advice over the last five podcasts, it's that's who I am, right? It's as I started with the disclaimer, that that may not work perfectly for you. Your creative process likely looks a lot different than mine.
00:20:05
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But I'm always picking up tips and tricks from other people I talk to. you know i so I talked about Carlos Hernandez saying, writing is my best thought. it' just It's a mindset shifter for me, right? you know There was a lot of talks about editing is writing. I'm like, oh, geez, you're right. like And it just continuously shapes your views. I talked about Jess inspiring me at InDesign. I was like very hesitant. The last couple of projects, I had this tool with Creative Cloud that I just was afraid to use.
00:20:31
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But the confidence was there. The timeframe was there. And i was able to have somebody I can bounce some ideas off of and kind of things click together as you grow and as you try things. So you get, as I said at the start, you get better at making things by making things.
00:20:47
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I get better at writing by writing. It's whatever your creative endeavor that holds true. So to close out this series, I'm going to quote from one of Boy and Bus 13's main inspirations.
00:20:58
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ah That's Max Tegmark's book, Life 3.0, which can be related to the creative process as a whole. The growth of our intelligence over our cosmic history has transformed boring uniformity into ever more diverse, differentiated, and complex structures that process information in ever more elaborate ways.
00:21:17
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And with that, have a great day.
00:21:28
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If you feel that Chris dealt with it, I'd appreciate your support of the show by sharing it with someone who might benefit. Ratings on your favorite podcast player are also helpful in growing the audience. Visit chriscreuter.com for free downloadable PDFs with notes and resources from today's episode.
00:21:43
Speaker
Sign up for the CDWI mailing list or to send in your problems or requests for future shows. That's chriscreuter.com or use the link in the show notes.