Episode 177 #AudioWriter

Joshilyn Jackson doesn't just write best-selling thrillers. She narrates them, too. Should we? Episode links and a transcript follow—but first, a preview of the #WritersTopFive that will be dropping into #AmWriting supporter inboxes on Monday, September 23, 2019: Top Five Steps to Burn Chart Success (a How-to). Not joined that club yet? You’ll want to get on that. Support the podcast you love AND get weekly #WriterTopFives with actionable advice you can use for just $7 a month. As always, this episode (and every episode) will appear for all subscribers in your usual podcast listening places, totally free as the #AmWriting Podcast has always been. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it with the shownotes and a transcript every time there’s a new episode. To support the podcast and help it stay free, subscribe to our weekly #WritersTopFive email. LINKS FROM THE PODCAST #AmReading (Watching, Listening) Jess: I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution, Emily Nussbaum KJ: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein Joshilyn: Gretchen, Shannon Kirk The Better Liar: A Novel, Tanen Jones Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman #FaveIndieBookstore Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA Our guest for this episode is Joshilyn Jackson. She is the author of: Never Have I Ever The Almost Sisters The Opposite of Everyone Someone Else’s Love Story A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty Backseat Saints The Girl Who Stopped Swimming Between, Georgia, Gods in Alabama My Own Miraculous Don’t Quit Your Day Job Wedding Cake for Breakfast This episode was sponsored by Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps you get your work DONE. Visit https://www.authoraccelerator.com/amwritingfor details, special offers and Jennie Nash’s Inside-Outline template. Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here. If you enjoyed this episode, we suggest you check out Marginally, a podcast about writing, work and friendship. The image in our podcast illustration is by TK Transcript (We use an AI service for transcription, and while we do clean it up a bit, some errors are the price of admission here. We hope it’s still helpful.) KJ: 00:01 Hey all. As you likely know, the one and only sponsor of the #AmWriting podcast is Author Accelerator, the book coaching program that helps writers all the way through their projects to the very end. Usually Author Accelerator offers only longterm coaching and they're great at it, but they've just launched something new inside outline coaching, a four week long program for novelists and memoir writers that can help you find just the right amount of structure so that you can plot or pants your way to an actual draft. I love the inside outline and I think you will too. I come back to mine again and again, whether I'm writing or revising. Working through it with someone else helps keep you honest and helps you deliver a story structure that works. Find out more at www.authoraccelerator.com/insideoutline. Jess: 00:57 Go ahead. KJ: 00:57 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone like I don't remember what I was supposed to be doing. Jess: 00:57 All right, let's start over. KJ: 00:57 Awkward pause, I'm going to rustle some papers. Jess: 00:57 Okay. KJ: 00:57 Now one, two, three. KJ: 00:57 Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia, Jess: 00:57 and I'm Jess Lahey. KJ: 00:57 And this is #AmWriting, Jess: 00:57 with Jess and KJ. KJ: 00:57 #AmWriting is our podcast about all things writing. Long things, short things, book proposals, entire books, short articles, blog posts, YA, pitches, whatever we can think of. And as I think most of you know, #AmWriting is really the podcast about sitting down and getting the work done. Jess: 01:43 I'm Jess Lahey, I'm the author of the Gift of Failure and an upcoming book about preventing substance abuse in kids. And I write for the Washington Post and the New York Times and various other outlets. KJ: 01:53 And I am KJ Dell'Antonia, author of a novel forthcoming next year and also a parent-y type book How to Be a Happier Parent, former lead editor and writer for the New York Times Motherlode blog But I saw someone in one of our reviews accusing us of having a nonfiction focus on parenting writing. To which I was like, 'What?' I mean that has certainly been our professional writing, I guess our guests probably see it that way. But not today. Jess: 02:27 Not today. I'm so excited. Can I introduce? Cause I'm super excited. Today our guest is Joshilyn Jackson. She is a New York Times and USA Today best selling author of nine novels, including one that I am (spoiler) not finished with, so be careful - called Never Have I Ever, it is so good. But one of the big reasons we wanted to have Joshilyn on today is that she does something that almost no one really does, which is narrate. She narrates her own fiction audio. And we know a lot of people, including ourselves who narrated our own nonfiction, but fiction is a whole other game. Not only does she narrate her own fiction, she's really, really good at it. She's won a bunch of awards. She was nominated for an Audi award, she was on Audio File Magazine's best of the year list, she was an Audible All Star for the highest listener ranks and reviews. I mean that's huge. And then I also have to add, because near and dear to my heart, she also works with an organization called Reforming Arts. And she has taught writing and literature inside Georgia's maximum security facility for women. So we have that in common as well. Welcome so much to the show, Joshilyn. We're so excited to talk to you. Joshilyn: 03:56 Oh, thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Jess: 03:59 We love talking to authors, but one of the topics that has come up a lot for us is narrating audio books. Not only because Sarina Bowen (one of our frequent guests and sort of almost another host) has a podcast about audio books. Specifically, I'm a huge audio book fan and we've been talking a lot lately about people who choose to narrate their own fiction cause it's really hard. So we would love to talk to you about that today, but we'd love to start with sort of just how you got started with writing. What's your story? Joshilyn: 04:40 Oh, I've always wanted to be a writer. When I was three, I published my first novel using the Crayola stapler method. My mom helped, and to be fair, it wasn't a very good book. Yeah, I'm dating myself, but when Walden Books came out with Blank Books, I was in middle school and I would buy a Blank Book and write a novel into it and the novel would be just however many pages the Blank Book was. And I was a huge Stephen King fan. I would write these books, I remember one was called Don't Go Into the Woods and all these girls who looked a lot like girls who were kind of mean to me in middle school, one by one went into the woods and never came back. It's terrible, but really derivative Stephen King novel. Jess: … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amwriting.substack.com/subscribe