Two writer friends, Marty Vee and Kate Prior, catch up every couple of weeks, checking in on our personal lives, our writing goals, and where we are in our current novels. Marty and Kate can tangent with the best of them, often braiding several ideas together at once, so if you’re lost listening, don’t worry, we are too. It’s a sneak-peak into the scattered processes and methods that go into storytelling and running a small business, two authors’ foray into the world of self-publishing: covering book covers, marketing, newsletters, and just writing the damn book.
Oversharing? Never heard of her.
You can find the entirety of the podcast on all those other podcast hosting places — but here are a handful of my favorite episodes.
Back in 2020, both Marty (left) and I (with the perennial millennial peace sign) were hanging out on a Facebook fanpage for the podcast Heaving Bosoms, and we both joined a romance novel writing discord (now lovingly named The Smut Coven). That’s where we met, right before the world as we knew it ended, and The Smut Coven became our social lifeline during the pandemic shutdown.
Romance Writer’s Therapy started from the two of us calling over discord to talk out our writing problems, where we were getting snagged in plot holes. At some point we thought, ‘Hey, at least once an hour we say something smart, we should like, write it down.’
Reader, we did not write it down.
Trope Battles: The Kidnapped, the Forbidden Brother and the Grumpy
Marty: loves winning, hates clapping. That’s all you need to know.
Kate: makes a lot of references to romcoms she barely remembers watching or hasn’t seen.
The duo sling tropes at one another in the weirdest game of not-rock-paper-scissors you’ve ever heard. In fact, it looks nothing like RPS. They make up stories on the fly and it doesn’t seem like there’s any points in this game.
Marty and Kate Talk Book Release Budgets without Ever Using Numbers
This episode, Marty and Kate tell you they’re on a time crunch. Don’t believe their lies– buckle in for an hour and a half of them talking about the nitty gritty of Things You Could Theoretically Spend Money on, as An Author, mostly in terms of planning your release. Real technical stuff, y’know.
The ‘Meh, Fuck It’ Method
This episodes starts out being about editing while you’re writing, things that slow you down, and somehow becomes about saying “meh, fuck it” about things that have become hurdles in your mind.
Half of the podcast is also about roombas, and it’s only sort of a tangent.
Sometimes You Just Have to Describe Things, Unfortunately
This week, Marty and Kate talk about something they each think the other has a strength in, imagery and character voice. Which really just boils down to various ways to focus on describing your characters (settings are a character, supposedly) in direct and indirect ways, whether you want to or not.
Maybe Your Neuroses Affect Your Writing Process
This episode, we talk about:
- When the ADHD Hyperfixation Wears Off / Burnout
- Is Self Publishing Actually Democratizing the Industry? Or Are we Creating Micro-Class Barriers
- You Should Strong Arm Your Way Into Situations
- 16 Minutes In And Kate Still Hasn’t Explained Episode’s Conceit
- When It’s Ok To Not Accept Criticism
- TikToks Take FOREVER to Make
- Quizilla and LinkedIn are the Only Valid Social Medias
- Kate Realizes In Real Time The Thing She Wanted To Talk About Is Possibly Not That Relatable
- This Episode Was About Receiving Edits, It’s Now About Cleaning
- Our Conversation Circumnavigates A Really Great Point About Pay-to-Win Video Game Dynamics and the Earlier Point About Micro-Class Barriers BUT IT’S FINE
- Picking Up Hobbies And Immediately Dropping Them
- Learning To Enjoy Not Being Good At A Thing
Kate Prior 