Knowing How You Write Isn't Enough
Blog post is re-written from transcript of podcast Season 2 Episode 4.
Knowing how you're wired tells you how you produce. It does not tell you what to do when something knocks you sideways. That's a second system, it runs underneath the first one, and if you don't have it, the first one only works on good days. I spent a year building the production half and treating the regulation half as soft science I'd get to later. Then I got knocked sideways three days before a deadline and found out exactly how load-bearing "later" was.
Okay, so. Let me tell you what happened, because this is the part I'd normally leave out. I mean—hehe—I’m a coach. I should be an expert. Right? Oh, I am! I am… I’m just a super sexy expert.
I woke up at three-thirty in the morning, three days from publishing my first book in five years, and realized I was doing every single thing I tell my authors not to do.
And then I kept doing it.
I finished the book. The old way delivered, the way it always has, right up until the bill came.
What I'd actually built, and what I left out
Here's where I'd gotten to before all this.
I'd spent the better part of a year figuring out how the four Houses actually produce. How each of us brainstorms without draining the tank. What a good outline looks like for a Wildscribe versus a Mythmaker — because your outline probably looks nothing like mine, and mine looks nothing like most people's. How to manage the writing, the editing, the formatting, the publishing, the marketing.
Energy management. Doubt management. Decision fatigue management. Real tools, and they were working.
And the whole time, I had a second stack of tools sitting off to the side. The regulation ones. How to catch yourself mid-spiral. How to come back after you've been knocked off.
And I kept looking at that stack and thinking, “Meh. That's soft science. It's more important to understand how we run five departments by ourselves.”
That's wrong. I want to be really clear: that is just wrong, and I was the one who was wrong about it.
The thing I didn't account for
What I missed was failure triggers.
I had assigned value — real value, load-bearing value — to a success metric that was outside my control.
And when that metric got hit, it wasn't me who hit it. It was the authors I'm helping. Which should have been the best news of my year, and instead it put me into a spiral I had no tools to climb out of. Because I'd decided the tools for that weren't important enough to finish.
I'm a Heartweaving Mythmaker. My Heartweaver side already has a complicated relationship with self-worth, and my Mythmaker side responds to instability by working. So the spiral didn't look like collapse. It looked like productivity.
I ran on muscle memory. I dug in. I ground it out.
And I burned out doing the thing I built the system to prevent.
Why that costs more than it looks like it costs
Here's what nobody tells you about grinding through.
When you skip your fill activities — and mine are genuinely small; short walks down my road, talking to the horses, cat cuddles, my plants, getting back into my witchiness — you're not saving time. You're creating energy and spending it at the same time, and you're spending it faster than you're making it.
It's like driving with a leak in the fuel tank. Actually it's closer to pinholes all through the fuel system. You're still moving. You're just not going to get where you're going.
And if you'd asked me during those three days whether I had time for a walk, I'd have told you the same thing I always tell myself: that's lovely when things are going well. That's a luxury move. But we both know what actually gets things done.
When a friend asked if I wanted to do something, I said no. Not because I was busy.
Because I hadn't earned the right to spend downtime with her.
The half I was missing
So here's what I actually learned, and it's the thing I want you to take out of this:
Understanding how your wiring works with how you write is only half the puzzle.
The other half is knowing how to regulate yourself once you're triggered.
And I don't mean trauma responses. I'm not talking about CPTSD or autistic burnout — those absolutely feed into it, and they're bigger than what I'm describing. I mean ordinary, everyday things. A comment. A number. A comparison. Something that knocks you into non-productive time, which turns into a week of non-productive time, which in my case turned into a full body shutdown.
Your House tells you how to work. Regulation tells you whether you can work today.
Most advice, including mine, has only been teaching the first one.
What each House has to trust
This is the part I'm building out now, because each House's regulation problem is a different problem.
Heartweavers need self-value. I have not met a Heartweaver with solid self-value. I'm not saying she doesn't exist — I'm saying I haven't met her. The empathy that makes us good at this is the same thing that makes us hard on ourselves, and when self-value goes, the question that shows up is who are you to tell this story. You need self-value the way an engine needs oil. Not as a nice-to-have.
Wildscribes need self-trust. Everyone in their life has told them the way they think is wrong, the way they organize is wrong, the way they function is wrong. So self-doubt is one nudge away, always. That's why so many Wildscribes have dozens of unfinished manuscripts, and why they all stall in the same place — the murky middle, which is exactly where you have to trust yourself to keep going.
Mythmakers need to believe they can build something foundational. Which is funny, because it's the only thing we do. But when that belief goes, we don't stop building. We build out instead of up. Bigger foundation, wider footprint, nothing above ground. Ask my accountant how many domains I own. Actually don't.
LoreKeepers need to trust the process and the result. They're already good at trusting their own capability, because they've proven it. What breaks them is believing in an outcome that doesn't have enough behind it to hold their weight.
The pause I'm taking into the next book
Five steps. I'm still refining it, and it's already better than what I had, which was nothing.
Stop.
Pause.
Name what triggered you. Out loud if you can.
Validate it. Is this authentic? And how much is it actually worth?
React accordingly — instead of spiraling by giving it more value than it deserves.
That fourth step is the whole thing. Most of what knocks me off is real and worth about a tenth of what I hand it.
Where I actually am
I'm not writing this from the other side. I want to be honest about that, because the version of this story where I had a moment of clarity and came back fixed is a better story and it isn't mine.
I'm still in the drained part.
But I have another book, and it is going to be done on time. And I'm using this — not to kick myself, I already did that for about a week — as proof. Proof that the process was working, and that the reason it stopped was that I stopped running it.
Because I decided I was a special Muppet who didn't need to do the things I tell everybody else to do.
That backfired spectacularly, and now it's data.
Questions Authors Ask Me About This
Why do I abandon my own system the moment things get hard?
Because muscle memory is faster than a new process. Under pressure you revert to whatever kept you functional before, and knowing the new way is better doesn't stop the old one from firing. That's regulation, not knowledge.
Isn't managing your emotional state just soft science?
I thought so, and I ranked it below understanding the five departments. It was the wrong call. A triggered writer doesn't run any process, no matter how good the process is, so regulation isn't the soft layer on top — it's the layer everything else sits on.
What's a failure trigger?
Anything that knocks you into non-productive time. Often it's a metric you've attached your worth to, especially one you don't fully control. Mine got hit by other people and it still spiraled me, because the value I'd assigned it was never really about the number.
How do I know if this is my problem or something bigger?
If ordinary things — a comment, a comparison, a number — are costing you days or weeks, that's a regulation gap and it's workable. If what's happening is a trauma response, that's a different conversation and it deserves someone trained for it. I'm not, and I'll say so.
Not sure whether the thing that keeps stopping you is a process problem or a regulation problem? That's usually the whole diagnosis, and it's hard to run on yourself, because the pattern you're in is the one you can't see.
Book a free Unstuck Author Call. Bring the stalled book and the thing you can't make stop.
Or if you'd like the opportunity to learn this system and then ignore it, exactly the way I did — that option is also available.
