This week, Jerry and Rich return under storm clouds, weak internet, and the comforting glow of Jerry trying to watch The A-Team while podcasting like the professional he absolutely claims to be. Rich opens with the joy of spending two hours on the phone with Bank of America while dealing with his mother’s estate, which sounds exactly as fun as you’d imagine. Jerry counters by explaining that he is currently trying to release a novella, prep a novel, set up a preorder for another novel, avoid jury duty, work a full-time job, play golf, and launch a publishing company at the same time. So, naturally, everything is going great. Jerry talks through finishing Book 1.5, expanding it with the first chapter of Book 2, and discovering that his writers club and editor were absolutely right about one thing: he uses “looked,” “glanced,” “smiled,” and other action beats like they’re being handed out for free. That leads into a funny but useful discussion about overwriting dialogue beats, how writers lean on visual tics when the scene already does the work, and how to fix that without turning every conversation into two floating heads in a void. So if you’ve ever had an editor politely tell you that your characters spend too much time looking at each other, congratulations, you are among friends here. There’s also a whole pile of indie publishing talk in this one. Jerry gets deeper into Seven Four Press, buys ISBNs, wrestles with Atticus formatting, builds out front and back matter, sets up BookFunnel delivery, works on a MailerLite automation sequence, and realizes Amazon still makes certain things harder than they need to be because apparently that is part of the author experience package. He also builds fake newspaper articles for Book 2, hides Easter eggs for future books, and gets caught by Rich after accidentally uploading a version with a blank Chapter 38. Which is not ideal for a murder mystery unless the killer was white space. Rich brings his own writer-life chaos to the table too. He gets some editing done, tests 11 Labs for read-aloud revisions, realizes his chapter one needs real work, gets distracted by train cams, buys enough canned fish to alarm coworkers, immediately undercuts the health kick with cookies, and somehow still makes progress. There’s also book club fallout from Dean Koontz, note-taking experiments in Obsidian, cucumber planting, and the ongoing mystery of how either of these guys ever finish a manuscript while constantly inventing new side quests. Contact UsJerry EvanoffEmail: jerry@jerryevanoff.comWebsite: https://jerryevanoff.comhttps://jerryevanoffauthor.substack.com/ Rich KacyEmail: rich@richkacy.comBlueSky: @RichKacyhttps://richkacy.substack.com/
