In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, I am thrilled to speak with author Sandy Day, who just published her latest book, Odd Mom Out.
Sandy Day is a recovering chatterbox and writer of riveting slice-of-life poetry, memoir, and fiction. She has authored six books to date, with more in the works. A graduate of Glendon College, York University, Toronto, she studied creative writing under great Canadian writers Michael Ondaatje and bp nichol. Formerly a workshop facilitator for the Writers Collective of Canada, she is a lover of cheese, coffee shops, and illustrations. She lives on the shore of Lake Simcoe in Georgina, Ontario, Canada.
Odd Mom Out was planned during Sandy’s participation in my Story Plan Intensive program. She drafted the first draft of the manuscript as part of my First Draft program, and then graduated to my Final Draft program, where she revised and ultimately finished the book. As such, I was especially thrilled to get to talk to her not just about her writing history and her new book, but about what her experience was like going through my full customer journey.
We had a fantastic conversation, so listen to the episode now!
The Writing Coach Episode #188 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #188 Transcript
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Today on the podcast, I have author Sandy Day.
Sandy, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Kevin. Wonderful to be here.
I’ve been working with you for a couple of years now, but, as you know, we’re work-focused people. We’re always looking at what we’re working on, what we’re moving toward, and the goals we’re trying to achieve. I thought this would be a fun opportunity to get to talk to you a little bit about your past and hear what led you to the point where you and I started working together.
Okay, sounds good.
I know you live in Ontario like me. Is that where you grew up?
I grew up in the Toronto area. When I was about seven or eight—this is kind of like a big pivotal moment in my life—we moved from a suburb just outside of Toronto to the old part of Toronto called The Beaches. My dad had lived on the very street when he was a kid. That was in the 1960s and The Beaches was very different than how it is now and how it evolved. So I always have straddled this thing of not really knowing where I grew up because I grew up in the suburb, and I have memories of that, and then my schooling, I really remember once I moved to The Beaches. The other complication is that we spent every summer at our family cottage, which originally was a summer resort and hotel. I spent two and a half months every year there, so it was like, “You know, I don’t know where I’m from. I’m from around here.”
That’s kind of a Canadian thing, though, right? We’re never quite sure about our identity, our culture, and who we are.
I ended up about five or six years ago moving back here with my mom and my sister in the little town right near our cottage, so I’ve kind of come back to my childhood place.
It’s the hero’s journey. You’ve come full circle.
Yeah.
I did a year in High Park. I feel like it’s kind of a rite of passage. I think everyone in Ontario, at least, needs to live in Toronto for a little while. We should all have that little pocket of our lives that was living in Toronto.
Sure!
Let me ask you about some of your early interest in books and literature. Were books and writing always a part of your life?
Yeah, it’s funny. Margaret Atwood talks about a little book that she created when she was seven years old or so, and I did too. I don’t know at what age, but I had a camera, one of the little Instamatic, and I took pictures of all these cats. I guess I got them developed, or a sister had a boyfriend developed pictures or something, and I wrote a little book and I still have it. It’s like stationery-sized pieces of paper folded in half, and then there’s a ribbon around them that holds it all together with all these little poems I wrote about cats. So that was my first stuff.
I have memories of writing in grade two. I have a story on my website about the teacher and how I thought it was so funny that she was asking for us to write. We had to pull a topic out of a jar, and I pulled ‘my teacher’ or something, and at seven years old, I’m thinking, “Oh, she’s just fishing for compliments. I will write a story about how terrible she is,” you know? And yeah, she wrote on it “very interesting,” and then she told me to write it again. I was like, “Oh, I did something wrong. I told the truth,” and it wasn’t like it was the truth about her, but I didn’t hold back, and I kind of got in trouble for that.
But I was already writing at six or seven years old, and my first poems were published in the Fur and Feathers magazine from the Toronto Humane Society when I was in grade four or five. I kind of just thought I would be a writer right from the beginning.
A lot of people feel that way when they’re young, then life kind of gets in the way, and then they come back to it later in life. Was there ever a pause for you, or was it always a passion?
I was always writing, but my teenage years were very chaotic. Looking back, now it’s fantastic material to write about. I never abandoned the idea of writing, but I became an alcoholic, so that got in my way a lot. All through University, I was drinking a lot, but I still did well.
After university, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I applied to go to the Creative Writing Masters of Fine Arts at York. I was accepted, but I was too anxious to go. I couldn’t get on the TTC. I couldn’t get on the subway. I was too frightened. My therapist suggested that I defer for a year on my enrollment, so I did. And then, during that time, my sister and I bought a business, with my dad as a silent partner, and then that was it. I just dove into that. That’s what I did for the next 20 years. No writing.
Was that business related to working with animals?
No, it was a store in The Beaches. We bought it from the original owner. I’d worked there since I was a teenager, so I just dove into it. It was a gift and ladies’ clothing store, and then it became a home furnishing store. Small Town, small business, working on a main street with a business community, all that stuff that ends up in Odd Mom Out. That’s all real for me.
That’s what made me ask the pet question; you mentioned some of your earliest writings were about cats, and then there’s a cat character In Odd Mom Out. I know you did work at least a little bit in the pet industry, right?
Yeah, but that never factored into my writing. I’ve always been a big pet person. We’ve always had pets. I don’t have one right now, but cats and dogs and their personalities have always meant a lot to me. There’s probably a cat or a dog in everything I write. I can’t help it; they just come in.
You mentioned alcoholism got in the way of your writing for a while. Was that something you struggled with for a long time, or were you able to get clean earlier on in life?
I think that in the early part of it, I just romanticized all that drunkenness. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, they were like my heroes, you know? You’re supposed to be a real sad poet and be killing yourself somehow. It didn’t really feel like it was getting in my way, except that it caused so many problems with relationships. Eventually, I wanted to stop drinking so that I could straighten out my relationships, and then. Eventually, I did end up quitting altogether and having a good life.
Obviously, we know so many artists who struggle with both mental health issues and addictions. Having worked with so many writers, and having these struggles myself, I feel like being emotionally sensitive is either what draws us to being an author or a writer, or it’s part of what lends itself to being an artist. As you and I have talked about before, emotions are really the medium in which we’re working as writers. But being emotionally available or emotionally sensitive is also really painful. I think a lot of the addiction issues that we see with artists are people trying to self-medicate that raw nerve that is our sensitivity to emotions. I feel like sensitivity is a blessing in that it allows us to tell stories and be authors, but I think it is also a curse that leads to things like addiction really easily.
It’s almost like a chicken or egg situation for me. I don’t know what came first, my impulse to write or this existential angst I was always feeling. But I am glad for it all because a lot of people will say that I’m personal in my writing. Some people have found it too personal that can’t even read it, but I just try to find that honest emotion. And sometimes I find that I’m holding myself back because, maybe it’s that thing about that teacher, you know, who said, “Okay, you wrote it the funny way with all the truth in it and now write it better, so it doesn’t offend anybody.” And I find myself doing that. And then I think, what am I doing? You know, it’s hard. You’re always walking a tightrope.
Looking at your website, you’ve got at least half a dozen books out there. Do you remember which one was the first one, or is there one where it really felt like it was a breakthrough for you?
The first one was Chatterbox. I wrote at a time when my marriage was breaking up. I just seemed to tap into this another-worldly thing. You often hear writers talking about channelling a certain amount of material. I definitely was channelling poetry for about a year. That’s Chatterbox, and after that, it felt like I just had that nudge from the universe: “You haven’t written in 20 years. This is what you can do if you just get up every morning and open your little notebook and start writing.”
This happened almost daily: I would look back on what I’ve written the day before and go, “Oh, I don’t remember writing that. But it’s all my handwriting and my books, so I guess I wrote it.”
If anything had broken through during the twenty years when I was running a business and raising two kids, it was this experience I had in the 80s when my grandfather’s brother died, and we went to the funeral. At the funeral, I was informed of some information about my Great Uncle Fred, who I had just thought had shell stock from World War One. I found information about him at his funeral that made me just want to know more. I just became fixated and focused on that, and it kept coming up over and over. I had written these little bits about Fred’s funeral. So then, after I had published Chatterbox, I just thought, okay, it’s time to write Fred’s Funeral.
There was one year in Toronto when the book fair was ending, and they came up with another one, and it was called Imagine. I had just left my job that was attached to publishing and I went to this conference, and I was at this workshop about writing a novella. I found out that a lot of those little novellas like A Christmas Carol and The Metamorphosis and all these kinds of books that have been my favourite books were novellas. I thought I could make Fred’s Funeral a novella because I could give it this supernatural element that he’s a ghost at his own funeral. So I wrote that, and I sent it to the publisher who had given this workshop, and after ten months, it was rejected without any kind of feedback or anything.
By then, I was in my 50s, and I just thought, when I was a kid, I would send stuff out to journals and magazines and stuff, and you know, I had a whole system for, okay, those five poems there sent to those publishers… like I had a whole system getting published. So I was in my 50s, still looking after teenagers and all that family stuff, and I thought, I don’t have time to try to find a publisher. I’m just going to self-publish this.
So I self-published Fred’s Funeral, and it did really well. It still sells to this day. I’m really glad I did that. It was the next step in my publishing journey.
Another book in your canon of publications has just one of the best titles I’ve ever heard: Head on Backwards, Chest Full of Sand. I just absolutely love that title for a book.
Yeah, that one; when I think about it, I think I started writing it when it was happening when I was about 17. It’s loosely based on reality, but, honestly, I like it still, but now that I’ve learned so much from you, I realize I’ve got to go back through that book and and fix it up a little. But, yeah, it’s about a 17-year-old girl who’s pretty angsty, and she’s a she’s a writer.
You mentioned one of your big turning points was when you said to yourself, “I think I could get up and do some writing every day.” What I find is that my most successful students or clients are the ones who write the most. Sounds obvious, but the people like yourself, like Phil Way, who I’ve interviewed on this show, you’re the people who produce, produce, produce. It seems obvious that the more you write, the better you get at it and the more success you have, yet so many people spend so much time agonizing over writing rather than just getting up and doing it every day.
I remember I was working at the University bookstore, and I was in marketing and promotion. So into our office, always daily, would come new books that people were looking to have reviewed, and maybe they could do a book launch or anything that could connect them with the university. And I always just had this playing inside, this, “but I’m a writer.”
I knew I was a writer, but I wasn’t writing. Once I could connect those two things: if you want to be a writer, you better start writing, things changed. Then, a little while after that, I had the opportunity to become a writing facilitator for the Toronto Writers Collective. We were taught a writer is somebody who writes. Okay, perfect. All I’ve got to do is write, and then I’m a writer.
Obviously, you’re very productive. Do you have any special techniques to share with listeners in terms of how you get up and get that work done every day?
I don’t remember if I was already doing this when I started working with you, but I write in the morning first thing before I do anything else because if I let that, I’ll just say an hour, if I let that hour go for something else, it never comes back later in the afternoon. I never think okay, now I’m going sit down and write for an hour. But if I start in the morning for my hour, now that I’m retired and everything, it can go for three hours, it can go longer. But yeah, writing every day in the morning, you are very productive if you do that.
Do you remember how you and I originally connected?
Well, I know I was a listener of your podcast for a while.
And now you’re on it, Sandy! You are on the podcast today.
Yeah, that’s hilarious. I remember reaching out to you in response to something that you mentioned on your podcast because I knew we lived close together, and then you answered right away, and I was so impressed with that. Then you did that summit, and I loved it. I listened to all those interviews. I guess I must have got an email from you or something about Story Plan Intensive. I already had a draft of the book I’m working on right now, so I thought, “Well, I’ll just go to Story Plan and check it out.” And, of course, the rest is history, Kevin!
The interesting thing about Story Plan is that I provide this framework for developing an outline. But then everyone takes it and runs with it, which is what I want. I want people to develop a tool that works for them. But I remember your outline for Odd Mom Out was one of the most unique in terms of it being a spreadsheet, and then you broke down the different subplots, or not even subplots, but different elements of the book, into different columns, which I had not seen before. That’s kind of my earliest memories with you, where I was like, “Sandy’s really doing some interesting stuff here with this outline.” Tell me a little bit about that.
Well, I’ve always been really good with spreadsheets. I’ve always been really good at software, and I don’t know where that came from, but that was a real natural talent I had,w so it only makes sense to me to use spreadsheets for absolutely everything. And I’m still to this day using spreadsheets for absolutely everything. But I remember you giving us in the class the example of how JK Rowling outlined when I don’t know if it was a book or a chapter or whatever, but it is just this big, chaotic mess she does in handwriting. And so it’s the same kind of thing. It helps me organize my thoughts and just where the books going to go. I’m like a half-discovery writer. I don’t really know where the books are going to go, so I can plan some scenes, and I know where some scenes are going to be, and I vaguely know where I want it to go, and I know what I want it to be about, but I have no idea how any of that’s going happen. I do find that as I write, ideas pop up for the story. And I think, oh, what if I added this?
I really think that is how it works. I think the misconception is you sit around waiting for an idea to come to you, and then you write it, but the reality is you get up and write every day, and it’s in the process of doing the work that the ideas actually emerge.
I find it really amazing to do the original Story Plan work, where the first thing you do is figure out what genre you’re writing and then what’s the iconography for that genre. And then, what are the obligatory scenes and conventions? And now, with chat GPT (I’m a huge chat GPT fan), I love just putting into it something about some genre maybe that I don’t even write in, but I ask him a bunch of questions, and then it inspires me. I find it inspiring.
It’s so interesting. Whenever you talk about Chat GPT, you always talk like it’s a partner you’re working with. You’re always saying, “Oh, I had a great conversation with Chad TPT about the Byronic hero last night.” I think that’s probably the best way to use it: as this kind of sounding board and research partner that you can have a conversation with about the things that you’re researching or thinking about for your book.
An old client of yours, Lorraine Johnson, has written a book about chat GPT for writers, and I’m also taking a little course in AI for writers. There’s just so much you can do if you learn how to write the prompts, and that’s what Lorraine’s book is great for: learning to write the prompts.
Lorraine’s forthcoming book. It’s not out yet. You were an early reader. So, everyone listening who is rushing over to Amazon to get Lorraine’s book, it’s not out yet. We’ll certainly let you folks know about it as soon as it’s published!
Yeah, I think it should be soon.
But they’re now they are adding in new layers of chat GPT all the time. There’s one called Creative Writing Coach. All I have to do is click my mode over to creative writing coach, and then I can ask all these questions without having to tell it, ‘I want you to act like an editor here. I want you to act like a brainstorming person.’ It knows I’m writing a book. Because if you go into chat GPT and ask, you know, what’s a great way to murder somebody with a pair of scissors? It will tell you, I don’t give information like that. But you tell it that, I’m a writer, then it’s like, okay, well, here’s how you do it. That’s always hilarious to me. But you can just go into the creative writing coach mode, and then it knows you’re writing a book and it really is fantastic the ideas it gives. It’s amazing.
I looked at your previous publications in prep for this interview, and they’re all very sombre, literary-looking covers. Birds Don’t Cry has this grey sky. Fred’s Funeral has a kind of very literary historical fiction look and feel to it. And then we get to Odd Mom Out, which is this beautiful, colourful, airy, light cover (and obviously story). Where did Odd Mom Out come from in terms of tone and vibe? It seems like a bit of an outlier within the other things that you’ve published.
I know it came out of the pandemic. I was writing this book that I’m writing now that would be perfectly in line with all those other books, you know, the gray covers, but I didn’t want to work on it during Story Plan. I figured it was already half-written, I’ll just go over it with Kevin and get all fixed up. It’ll be fine. And so I’m going to do Story Plan, why not outline something new?
I remember thinking I wanted to write… Oh, I know what it was! I was writing with my writing group on Sundays, and I kept writing these funny stories about entrepreneurs who lived in the fictional town of Lakeside. And so that’s where Trudy came out of. I basically was just writing pieces that were making my writing group laugh, and that’s what I wanted to do. I kind of wanted to extrapolate on that.
I don’t remember when the idea of having her daughter in the book, I don’t even remember, it just sort of grew. And it was fun. I just wanted to have fun that year, after all of the lockdown and everything.
Odd Mom Out seems like an outlier, but just reading it, it seems so your voice. Even the early drafts were so readable and so fun, and so distinct in terms of their tone and voice. Do you feel like this style of book was just in there waiting to come out?
I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that this morning because one of the members of our group suggested a writer to me, and now I’m on their second book. This writer, Barbara Pam, I’m blown away at how her voice comes across immediately, and you just fall in love with the characterization. She’s so good. And I think, Oh, how does she do that? Like, I don’t know even how to do that.
I know this from teaching people to write; you always think your own writing is terrible and boring and sounds flat and all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t, but you can’t hear your own voice, so it’s hard when you’re writing and revising and all that kind of stuff. I’m afraid I’m losing my voice. I’m afraid I’m editing it right out.
So that’s something I wonder about all the time: do I have a voice?
I find so many writers contextualize voice as being a specific style of writing, whereas my belief is that voice is something that emerges over multiple books. You look at six books from Sandy Day, and you start to get a sense of what her view on the world is, what topics interest her, and what her voice is. What amateur writers think of as voice is really just point-of-view. It’s the narrative voice of the book. Odd Mom Out’s voice is really the protagonist Trudy’s voice, but it’s the larger issues at play that are Sandy Day author’s voice.
Hmm, yeah. I’m looking forward to continuing that first-person narration and just working on it.
Odd Mom Out has many different storylines, but one of them is about weight loss. I believe you and I both come from the low-carb world, which, strangely, is a sensitive issue. If you want to upset people and divide people, talk about religion, talk about politics, or talk about diets. How did you feel about working the idea of a low-carb diet into this book, and was there any fear of setting people off or sensitivities and all those things?
Yeah, there’s definitely a fear of that because I know for myself that eating a low-carb diet, I’ve lost 50 pounds that way, but I’ve had so much backlash and people telling me it’s not healthy and I’m going clog my arteries. The more I research into that—because I’m a researcher, like I know everything there is to know about these things that I’m really into‚— so much of it is misinformation and nonsense. The fast food industry, the big food industry, the processed food industry, I mean, there couldn’t be a more powerful industry in our world, and it’s just full of so much misinformation. So yeah, I’m terrified of taking on that big thing because all they need to do is pay somebody to write terrible reviews about my book, and you know, I’m in that huge controversy. Everybody’s got to find their own way with health. Unfortunately, we seem to have lost public health in every country in this world right now. I’m really sad about that. That’s a huge thing for me, but you know, diet is just one part of that.
Working that idea of diet into the book, was it just a natural emergence of the story, or did you see it as sort of a statement, you putting your stake in the sand in terms of healthy eating?
Well, I wondered what would happen to somebody who had a business where they were making high-carb stuff, and then they wanted to lose weight, and they found that this low-carb thing was working for them. How would they navigate that working in that business? That really interested me: how was Trudy going to keep on working? It would be torture to work in a bakery. I have worked in a bakery, and I knew that would be torture. You always say, “Torture your character,” so I wanted to torture her.
I love it!
A big chunk of the book takes place in Croatia. What drew you to that location?
When my daughter was about 18 or so, she took herself to Croatia for a week on a yacht. And the following year, she had a job on a yacht in Croatia. She continued to do that until just before the pandemic, working on these yachts. There is a whole world of people that I never had heard of, you know? There’s a show right now, Below Decks, as sort of a reality TV show, and that thing actually exists. There are people going on these expensive week-long cruises on these boats on the vessel, and my daughter works in that industry. I hadn’t been able to connect with her all through the pandemic because she was stuck on a yacht in the Caribbean for the entire pandemic, the poor thing. I wanted to I wanted to write about that world because it intrigued me. And why it was Croatia was just because she went there, and that’s where I was picturing it all.
That leads to the other main theme or plot thread in the book, which is about relationships between mothers and daughters. What drew you to writing about that topic?
I think maybe it started in Chatterbox, this examination of my relationship with my mother. I still live with my mother. She’s 92. You know, untangling that whole relationship with this other person. As a kid, you don’t really think of your mother as a separate person. She’s my mom, you know, she doesn’t have a life. She’s my mom. But my mom was a watercolour painter and she did have her own life. She wrote children’s books, and she published them and all that kind of stuff. Then I had a daughter, and my daughter and I are very much not alike, but I just have been absolutely fascinated by her as a person for her whole life. I just wanted to explore the relationship between a mother and a daughter. Maybe they get along sometimes. Maybe they don’t. Everybody is their own person, but because you’re related, it’s so complicated and complex.
You mentioned working in the business on the street in The Beaches, very similar to the street in the opening act of Odd Mom Out. The character in the book’s daughter works on yachts in Croatia, as did your daughter. Trudy discovers a low-carb diet, something you have had success losing weight through . . . this book seems so personal. Were you aware when you were writing of how much of yourself was in this book?
Oh yeah, I think so. I don’t even know how a person can write a book that’s not about themselves. I just finished reading Tom Lake by Anne Patchett and I’m thinking, did all this happen to her? It just feels so real. I don’t know how she wrote it if none of it happened.
Mind you, you can always extrapolate from an experience you had and turn it into a fictional thing.
But the closer you are to what actually happened to you, the more real I think it feels. I don’t know. I don’t know other ways to write, so that’s what I have to do.
You joined my Story Plan Intensive program. You went through the First Draft program, and you graduated to Final Draft, which is really my full customer journey. When I sat down and asked myself, “How can I help people?” I thought of these three phases of the book development process. I’m not a book launch expert. I’m not a book marketer. What I do is help people write books and teach them writer’s craft. Story Plan, First Draft, and Final Draft are my way to help people along that journey. You’ve talked about how much you enjoy AI and that AI now has a writing coach component . . .I’m curious, as someone who gets so much out of working with the technology, what did you get out of your experience going through my full customer journey?
I know that the accountability part really helps because I have to come up with a piece to exchange with a partner over the course of a week. Being in both First Draft and Final Draft, that’s two I have to come up with and then I have to read their work and I have to give feedback. That kind of accountability just keeps the engine going because I can imagine if I didn’t do that, I could just say I’m going take a couple of weeks off this, I’m not going to do it, and then I just would never come back to it. So that part is really helpful.
And then I have met really great people over the course of this, other writers. Just seeing what other people are doing and where they’re at in their process, it’s fun. I know we have a ton of laughs, and I’m always in for the laughs, so that part is really fun.
That’s what I’ve been using in my marketing for the last couple of years. I say, “It’s fun and focused writing.” We take this stuff seriously, very seriously. We’re passionate about it. We are goal-driven, but none of that is at the sacrifice of fun. If it’s not enjoyable, it’s not worth doing. That’s certainly something I’m always thinking about, and trying to find that balance. My programs are not for hobbyists, right? This is not really, ‘Oh, you like writing in your journal, so come to Kevin’s programs.’ No, my programs are for people who want to be professional writers. But all the same, you’re not going to get there if you’re not having fun along the way.
Yeah, absolutely.
Odd Mom Out came out a month and a half ago now. You’ve had a successful launch. Congratulations. Where would you prefer folks pick up the book?
They can get it on Amazon. It’s in digital and it’s also in paperback.
You’re on the campaign trail, and you’re appearing on podcasts like this one; let us know what’s in the future for the promotion of Odd Mom Out and the work that you’re doing now.
I’m working on the promotion of Odd Mom Out. I want to create a little trailer video trailer. I’m working on that. There are just always a million little tasks to do when bringing out the book, like getting the reviews. Just organizing the reviews is something that I’m working on. It’s on my to-do list to reach out to other podcasters and pitch going on the show for various reasons.
One of the reasons I wanted to organize the reviews and read them over is to see what common threads are in them. What seems to be what people are really interested in in the book, so that I can use that to raise interest and if anybody wanted to interview me.
That’s such a great idea, from a copywriting perspective. As copywriters—which is anyone writing a blurb for their book or any sort of cold outreach for their book marketing or myself, you know, my programs and things. We get locked into this kind of certain marketing language. We feel like we’ve got to use this marketing language, and one of the great things you could do is look at your reviews (or, in my case, look at those testimonials”) and say, “What type of language are the people who are actually enjoying this book or enjoying this program, what are they saying?” Because most of the time, it’s not really “This program helped me take my writing to the next level,” which is the language we tend to fall into when we’re selling writing stuff. Instead, people are like, “You know, I thought my book was done. But it turned out I was missing an entire act. Kevin really helped me to figure that out.” Right? It’s like, okay, maybe “figure out” is a phrase I could use as opposed to “next level” or whatnot. I love that you’re thinking in that same way in terms of outreach for Odd Mom Out.
I remember what I was going to say before about your programs is that I’ve been doing them for a while now, a couple of years, and it’s very dynamic. It’s not like it stays the same. It’s not like I think now, boy, here Kevin’s going give his little spiel about such and such. I’ve already heard that. It’s not like that at all. It keeps changing, and the examples that we come up with during our sessions, somebody will say did you see the latest such and such and then there’s a big discussion about that, and it just feels so dynamic.
And with AI, I mean, you’re not somebody who’s shied away from it. You’re not saying, well, I’m never going to use that. You haven’t, you know, taken a big stance on it or anything. And that’s how it feels like, it feels like you’re on your journey as a coach, and we’re on our journeys as writers, and it’s all happening at the same time. And that feels really authentic to me.
And I like working with other writers. I’ve been doing that for a long time. I’ve always found that to be really inspiring, and you start egging each other on.
I have a friendm I don’t think she’s written much prior to doing a little writing group together once a week. We don’t give each other too much feedback except just our immediate responses as the audience, us laughing or telling each other what our favourite parts are. Yet her writing is just growing in leaps and bounds. She never used to put dialogue in and narrative dialogue and all those kinds of things, and that’s with no instruction; just that’s just sitting down with some other people and writing every single week.
I think it’s a bit of we’re learning from each other. It’s osmosis; I see somebody doing something and one of their books, and I say, “Oh, I can do that in mine.” It’s the feeding off each other in the groups. I find it just like the little motor underneath everything.
It’s a great point. When I’m pitching my one-on-one coaching, I generally say I provide three buckets of support: writer’s craft support, project management support, and emotional support. But this point you bring up about community with the group stuff, there’s absolutely another bucket in terms of roles I play in our community. That’s this idea of kind of “community organizer.” It’s the same for, like, grassroots political movements and stuff. It’s like, “How can I, as a leader, bring a group of people together and provide the kind of cohesion they need so that they can support one another and, as a collective, move forward?” That is such a big element of these group programs, right? As a coach and as an instructor, I am a part of it, but the other huge part of it is you guys and what you bring to it. And as we get new folks coming in and old folks leaving, it’s constantly dynamic and changing, and I see my role as trying to build a community with certain values and certain beliefs and then kind of let it dynamically support itself, and hopefully, we all rise from it, myself included. I’m always learning and growing from what you folks have to share.
I always wonder about the people who were in the course before, and they’re not in the course right now, but I still pals with them on Instagram or something; I keep wondering when’s the day someone’s always going have their book out or be saying they’re all done or something like that. I like being on that journey with other people.
I am also in another group that is a marketing group, and it’s the same sort of thing with meeting these other writers who are on the same journey trying to get their book in front of a lot of readers. That part is really fun. And talk about dynamic, oh my god, every time you turn around, Amazon changes something else, and to stay on top of all that, technology is a whole other world and something I really enjoy just the same.
Well, it has been such a pleasure working with you. One of the great things about you is your wide interest in all aspects of writing and publishing. You’re not scared of any part of it. You’re so enthusiastic in terms of learning, growing, exploring, and trying things. I mean, as a coach, that’s the perfect client, right? The person who’s receptive and curious and a go-getter and works hard and experiments and is willing to make a mistake and pick themselves back up and try something different. And so, as I said, it’s just been such a delight working with you these last few years, and I was thrilled to see Odd Mom Out launch. People don’t know how much heart and soul and effort and tears and work goes on behind the scenes to take something from an idea to a published book, and being able to be on that entire journey with you on this book was a real honour. I feel really proud of what you accomplished with that book.
Thanks, Kevin. Something that you’ve often said recently is that we never know when our time is up, because you had that experience in the last year. That always keeps me going. We don’t know, so you may as well publish it today because why the heck not? You never know how long you’re going to be here.
The book is out now. It’s called Odd Mom Out. It’s available on Amazon. Sandy, do you want folks to pop by your website? I know you have a great Substack newsletter; is that where can folks get signed up for that?
Yeah, you can sign up for the substack on my website, which is www.sandyday.ca. I always say, “It rhymes so you can remember it.” And yeah, sign up for the substack. I send out a little story every Sunday.
Sandy, thank you so much for being on The Writing Coach podcast today. You went from a listener to starring on the show. I hope you had a good time during today’s interview.
Absolutely. This is great.
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