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20.50: Dan Wells’ Personal Writing Process · Writing Excuses

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• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Season 20, episode 50, this is writing excuses.
• 1:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Dan's personal writing process.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Mary Robinette.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm dog one.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm Dan.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Erin.
• 1:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I'm an awkward pause.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're going to talk about my writing process today, but what we're really going to talk about today is writing with depression.
• 1:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... because by writing process has changed drastically over the last five years um... covid hit and changed a lot of things for a lot of people i did not expect that it would have as big of an effect on me because i work from home anyway and so i thought locked down would be easy uh... what i was not
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: reckoning with at the time were first of all highly elevated stress and second of all I had six kids at home all day every day slowly going crazy in the other room
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: which kind of changed a lot of things for me and the one-two punch of that plus my diagnosis of severe depression in 2023 really changed everything and my writing process
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: is basically something I'm trying to rebuild now.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hit the point in 23 when I realized, oh, I'd better talk to somebody about this, where I would just go into my office.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: and stare at my computer for eight hours, kind of screaming internally at myself, to please write something, please, and completely unable to do it, which turns out is one of the many symptoms of depression, and that inability to function.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so, I, and I know this is not something that is unique to me.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, many people on our podcast also right with depression and many of you listeners out there.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um,
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's been a massive spike in U.S. diagnoses of depression and anxiety since COVID.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is up now to one in five Americans have some form of depression and or anxiety.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of what I want to talk about today, but first because I want to know how other people pull this off because I'm still learning, I want to ask the rest of our podcasters because I know this is something Mary Robinette that you have gone through a few years earlier than me and have found some things that help you.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: For me, I found that it's breaking it down into smaller pieces.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Things that I didn't realize about myself before I got diagnosed.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was 40 and at the time that we're recording this on 56.
• 4:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, in hindsight, I have done this pattern my entire life.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But now I know why and can recognize the downward spiral.
• 4:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's the been the most helpful thing with getting the diagnosis has been recognizing it and that I can activate tools to kind of head it off before that.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what I realized was that when writing is hard, a lot of it is because at its core writing
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: In terms of the mechanics of it, you know, you're chasing an emotion and all of that, the problem is that when you try to write with depression, nothing is interesting, there's no joy.
• 5:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so what I learned was that I could, if I had to write, that I could craft my way through it, and that I could do that by, by breaking it down into smaller things.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: sitting down, it's like here's a bullet point list of the objectives that I need to accomplish in this scene.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, just chunking through peace at a time, really, really mechanically.
• 6:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the joyless way of writing.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing that is better in healthier is that I treat it like an emotional injury, and I would not try to power through a physical injury because I know that there will be consequences for that.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there are consequences when I try to power through an emotional injury injury.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So unless there is like some really compelling reason that I have to write, I find that it is better for me to take a day off as a conscious day off so that I'm not adding guilt and shame onto it.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, nope, you are, you are injured right now, you're going to take a break and you're going to go do something that makes you feel healthier.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to quote my friend Margaret Dunlap, sometimes that means doing stupid exercise for my stupid mental health.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_03]: The the step that was unspoken there my rabbit is a step that a lot of people don't even realize it's a step It's a cognitive behavioral therapy technique that
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: expands out into spectating, but it is the ability to recognize when today is a bad day.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: It is the ability to look at your emotional state and say, and interrogate
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_03]: interrogate the circumstance and and determine is today awful because I read about the dumpster fire of the world or is today awful because something by a chemical is wrong and it is very difficult at first to make those sorts of determinations.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think of spectating like there's a guy up in the nose bleed seats who's watching the game and he's me I'm also on the playing field, but he's the me who doesn't take the hits and who doesn't have to do any of the exercise And he was just back there spectating just watching and will every so often tell me hey, you know what today is one of those days where you don't
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_03]: go shopping and you don't make big decisions because right now you're not thinking clearly.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: No, I can't make the decisions for you.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's all I've got.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: That's all the spectator does is tell me when things are going to be bad.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's for me the first step every step thereafter is built out of, you know, coping strategies.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, you know, in my process episode, we talked a lot about mindfulness techniques and sort of those kind of things.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of that is rooted in stuff I learned from, you know, my own journeys through mental health stuff.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I wanna flag a thing at the top here about
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: everyone's own experience of depression, anxiety, other mental health issues, other types of neurodivergence is going to be distinct in unique.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I spend too much time on TikTok or whatever.
• 9:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the thing that I see on there is a lot of people saying, oh, ADHD is like this.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Autism is like this.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Depression is like this, right?
• 9:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there are so many,
• 9:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: different reasons from biochemical ones, situation ones, trauma-oriented ones, to be in a certain mental health place.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Some tools will work for you, some tools won't work for you.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that always started to, what, you know, how we're just saying in terms of that self-assessment being able to check in one of my feelings, where am I at, what do I need right now?
• 9:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at the end of the day or not, at the end of the day, at the start of the day, the thing that I would recommend above everything else is work with professionals.
• 9:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Get a mental health professional, get a therapist, preferably not just like better help or something like that.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like an actual licensed therapist that you have a relationship with that you're talking to on a regular basis in a psychiatrist if you need one, right?
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: this is difficult to do insurance in our country, it's the way it is not to help support is the way it is a recognized all the barriers because I've had to claw my way through them myself, right?
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I think a lot of writers have this idea of
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: If I'm unhappy, if I'm miserable, it's going to make me a better writer.
• 10:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: My pain and suffering will make me a better writer.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in my experience, unhappy people, they don't write bad books, unhappy people don't write books, because they're blocked.
• 10:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: because they're letting their mental health get in the way.
• 10:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Their anxieties to high, their depression is too deep.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: Their ADHD is helping, keep them focusing on whatever it is.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to correct one thing that you said, you said they're letting their mental health come away.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not that their mental health is getting in the way.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're not being able to address it.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: 100% agree.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, letting is absolutely the wrong word choice there.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, but my central point is is, if you work on your mental health, if you pursue therapy, if you push in these things, it'll make you a better writer.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I promise you every time I've worked with the writer who has been on that journey, they just get stronger and stronger.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I was talking with my therapist about and it, you know, I frequently am talking to my therapist and she'll say a thing and I'm like, hang on, let me write that down because that's going to be really good for characters.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we were talking about she was asking me how I felt when I went to go sit down to write and I was like,
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, this sense of avoidance and dread, and she said, those are trauma responses.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can do trauma therapy on writing, and what we realized was that I had inadvertently trained myself to dread writing.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And some of it was because of circumstances that were not in my control, and some of it was because, you know, as humans, we tend to focus on the negatives, and some of it was practices that I was doing that were like, you have to sit down and you have to write this much and then if I didn't, I felt like I had failed.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we started doing trauma therapy and it was kind of astonishing because I went from having really a lot of difficulty getting anything done.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: to this period where I wrote every day for like three months straight and wanted to.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't the I had, you know, I had a goal for it.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think that that's one of the things that a lot of people
• 12:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: that like I know myself and I suspect this happened to you, Dan, when you were talking about screaming at yourself internally, that's months and months of punishing yourself for writing or for not writing.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when we come back from our break, I'm going to briefly describe how you were like a dog.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that's a brief conversation, frankly.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think I think it's going to take about 10 words.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So before I said this, before we took our break, I said that I was going to explain to Dan why he was like a dog.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have this puppy.
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guppies is now an adult dog and so we've been working with a trainer.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the things that I've realized, like keep realizing over and over again is like, Oh, right, humans are mammals.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and classical conditioning works on us.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, a tool, you asked what tools we were using to rebuild.
• 13:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the tools that I use is the tool that he uses with guppy when he's trying to get her to do a thing.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He shapes behavior and he captures behavior and he rewards it.
• 14:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, if I sit down to write spontaneously,
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I finish, and I feel so silly every time if you're ever in a coffee shop with me, you will see me do this.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I disguise it as a stretch inside what I am doing is that I'm flinging my arms over my head like an Olympic gymnast.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And internally, I'm going, victory, victory is mine.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's what's happening.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in a coffee shop, it looks like a very gentle stretch, but my internal landscape is doing that.
• 14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and it is, uh, I've found that that, um, finishing writing and saying out loud good job, you know, you sat down to write good job.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_03]: Who's a good writer?
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who's a good writer?
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So good, did you do that?
• 14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did you have some words?
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like I feel silly, but I also feel better.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and that it's, I, I, I talked in my episode about, you know, building up like writing five, you know, five minutes, but, but that's shaping behavior.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's re wiring my brain to remember.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, this is joyful.
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love this.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: and that's such an important thing to do because you have spent at that point months or years shaping a different behavior.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It took me so long to take my own diagnosis seriously because
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like Dung One said, it's different for everybody.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've got a brother with depression.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've three kids with depression.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mine didn't look like theirs.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So when a doctor told me, I think in 2021 or 22, that I had depression, meaning the year not my age, I was like, sure I do.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's fine.
• 15:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can still function.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I can still work whatever.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, it took a couple of years before it got bad enough that I had to take it seriously.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And at that point, I had already shaped all of these avoidance behaviors and isolationist behaviors, um, you know, which is what all authors do anyways.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I still get these animals.
• 16:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and so yeah, a lot of what you're talking about with trauma rings very true.
• 16:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, I have found for my current writing process.
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It works best to get me out of my home office.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've got a great office at home.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Many of the books that you've read for me and love were all written there.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: The modern stuff usually isn't because I have to go into my dragon steel office or I go to the library or I just have to get out and move to my kitchen table instead of my desk.
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because there are all of these feelings of guilt and trauma and whatever wrapped up in that location.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've also found I've been working on a project for Dragonsteel for quite a while.
• 17:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: which has itself become a depression and anxiety trigger.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And all of these bad feelings are tangled up in it because it's overdue, because I haven't been doing what I wish I were doing on it.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And when I finally decided, you know what, I'm gonna back burner this.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna put it on a shelf and work on something new.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was 10 times more productive then because I was not dealing with that trigger.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with dogs going back to mammals again, a lot of times one of the things when they have a bad response to something and you're trying to desensitize them to it is you remove them from the stimulus completely.
• 17:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then you you give them lots of other activities and give some space in between and then when you reintroduce the thing you you reintroduce it slowly and with a lot of treats like for instance, got me loves doing agility.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so we have a backyard agility set in one day, she went over the hurdle and at the same time she saw a squirrel which was very exciting squirrels trumpet everything else and she knocked the hurdle over and frightened herself and then didn't want to go through near any of the agility equipment.
• 18:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I just packed it all away.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, later, we brought it out, like, waited a week, we brought out one piece and just gave her lots of treats.
• 18:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Didn't try to do anything with the agility set.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just there.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we were like, you want to do a hurdle?
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she's like, oh, yeah, I love hurdles.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if I know from experience that if I had tried to push her to go over that hurdle, that would have become more and more terrifying.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: before the break, I joked that, you know, describing Dan, how Dan is like a dog, 10 words, eight words.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_03]: Puppy training techniques will work on you.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: There you go.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 19:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Darne Wright, there's your other two.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do want to flag in that there's a lot of different approaches, a lot of techniques, right?
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of people for whom these techniques are not helpful.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know what I mean?
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so just like flagging, there's lots of different schools that thought, and a lot of what it is is you.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a saying that comes from a particular program that's, it only works if you work it, you know what I mean?
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's something that I really want to get across here and sort of, you know, taking the note about letting be a cautionary note here.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: But there's also a thing of,
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: actively pursuing how you engage with the mental health is really important.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think I see things sometimes where somebody is like, oh, I'm in therapy.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got medication.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all better now.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is, those are the tools that are helping, but you sort of need the two parts of it.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of also the active participation in the process alongside the support from a mental health professional and medication if that's what you need.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to support you and perhaps retract a little bit of my objection to the word let because I have a family member who has the same diagnosis that I have in doing and it presents in very much the same way of depression and ADHD.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I look at it and I'm like okay so that's the way my brain is wired.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think of it as a disorder.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean depression is annoying
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think, okay, so that's the way my brain is wired, what are the coping mechanisms work around?
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And my family member looks at it and says, I can't do those things because of.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, I want to do those things, how do I do those things, even though I have this thing happening in my brain?
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I do think that what you're saying about being an active participant is like with my mom and Parkinson's, the thing that they found was, again,
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: that exercise was one of the biggest predictors about how someone's Parkinson's would progress, but that a lot of it was also that it was an indicator of who was being an active participant in their disease instead of letting the disease define them by their couldn't do.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: I have a question, Dan.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: You say you got a right outside of the office because the office now has, and I'm paraphrasing,
• 21:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: If you were to remodel, repaint, re-furnish, re-whatever the office, all the way down to the sightlines, you know, desk goes in a different place, eye lines are different, everything, would that fix it?
• 21:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: Or is it just the process of walking through that door that,
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it would definitely, I don't know, fix it, but change it for the better, because it would be different.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of it is just the memory that comes from sitting down.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of that is just pure muscle memory, because it's, you know, the desk has been in the same place forever.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Moving it to a different place would change that.
• 22:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, did you have a further point to make on that?
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_03]: The question is related to the point, which is sometimes the solution
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: That may not have occurred to you, to me it feels obvious.
• 22:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: The room is broken.
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: Can I change the room to unbreak it, rather than abandoning the room altogether?
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_03]: And I just bring it up because any time you're running into a case where your process is broken because of thing,
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: There are two approaches.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: Approach number one is go around thing.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: Approach number two is change, modify, more, break whatever the thing.
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have I have done the the the changing of the room, but I've also found that if I move from one place to another, like this is the place that I do my email and that is the place that I do writing that my brain makes this connections.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of connections, it is, I think, time for us to connect a homework.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that was quite a segway.
• 23:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know, listen, I'm not like, no, she was homework.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's terminal, sorry.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: there's two parts of the homework today.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Number one is I want you all to just be very kind to yourselves.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is something that I am struggling with clearly from this episode.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's something I'm still trying to figure out.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you are dealing with this, be kind to yourself.
• 23:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you know someone who is dealing with this, be kind to them.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I guarantee you know someone who's dealing with this, because like I said, it's one in five Americans deal with this every day.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you don't know who that is, figure it out and be a better friend.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other...
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: point of homework is some actual working homework.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've talked a lot about changing venues.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would like you to try to figure out what your ideal is.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a process that I went through years ago, and then I'm redoing now that my brain has changed.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Figure out what times of day you are most productive, figure out in what locations or circumstances you are most productive.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Often what these questions come down to is just circadian rhythms and physical environment and all of these other questions, is there a type of music that you should or shouldn't listen to?
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there something else you need to take care of before you can feel good about yourself writing?
• 25:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: take a good look at your life and your schedule and try to identify those moments of when you are best at getting worked done and then try and see how feels.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been writing excuses.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're out of excuses.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now go right.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Writing excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons and friends.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: For this episode, your hosts were Mary Robinette Koal, Dongwon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells and Howard Taylor.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This episode was engineered by Marshall Card Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds.
• 25:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: For more information, visit writing excuses.com.