Season 2 Episode 4: Why You Abandon Your Own System Under Pressure
Season 2, Episode 4
Knowing how you're wired tells you how you produce. It doesn't tell you what to do when something triggers you, and under pressure most writers revert to whatever kept them functional before — even when they know better. That's why a good system can be running well and still collapse: the missing half isn't process, it's regulation. Self-value for Heartweavers, self-trust for Wildscribes, belief in their own foundations for Mythmakers, trust in the process and the result for LoreKeepers.
Show notes:
Three days out from publishing my first book in five years, I woke up at three-thirty in the morning and realized I was doing everything I tell my authors not to do.
And then I kept doing it.
This episode is what I learned from that — including the thing I'd been deliberately deprioritizing as "soft science," which turned out to be the half of the system I was missing.
In this episode:
The 3:30 a.m. realization, and the three days after it
Fill, pour, recover meets binge and sprint, and what happens when you skip the fill
"I haven't earned the right to spend time with you"
Driving a car with pinholes in the fuel system
Failure triggers: assigning value to a success metric outside your control
Why regulation isn't soft science, and why I had it ranked last
What each House has to trust in order to keep going
The five-step pause I'm taking into the next book
Questions Authors Ask About This
Why do I abandon my own system the moment things get hard?
Because under pressure you revert to whatever kept you functional before, and muscle memory is faster than a new process. Knowing the new way is better doesn't stop the old one from firing. That's a regulation problem, not a knowledge problem.
Isn't managing your emotional state just soft science?
I thought so, and I ranked it last behind understanding the five departments. That was wrong. Understanding how you brainstorm, write, outline, edit and market is only half the puzzle. The other half is what you do once you're triggered, because a triggered writer doesn't run any process at all.
What does each author type need to trust?
Heartweavers need self-value, or the work stops mattering. Wildscribes need self-trust, especially in the middle of a book. Mythmakers need to believe they can build something foundational, or they build outward forever. LoreKeepers need to trust the process and the result they're aiming at.
How do I stop a trigger from costing me weeks?
Stop. Pause. Name what triggered you. Ask whether it's authentic and how much it's actually worth. Then react accordingly, instead of spiraling by giving it more value than it deserves.
Transcript — Season 2, Episode 4
I was three days away from finishing and publishing the first book I'd put out in five years.
And I woke up at three-thirty in the morning and realized I was doing everything I tell my authors not to do.
And then I kept doing it.
Brief backstory
Five years ago I stepped away from publishing because it had become too much. It was wearing me out. I felt like a dried-out husk of who I am.
So I went back into construction, thinking that would be safe and cozy. It wasn't. It isn't.
Am I good at it? Yes. Is it where I want to be? No.
So I came back into the authorverse — and I immediately went back to my old habits, and I was burnt out again within weeks.
And I thought: okay, there has got to be a better way.
So I dug in. And mind you, this was less than a year ago. I started figuring out how I needed to work to be aligned with what I was actually doing, and I developed a system.
And as I implemented it, things were working.
Then I went into a spiral. And instead of doing all the things that had been feeling good and keeping me on a sustainable path, I ran on muscle memory. I dug in. I got things done.
And it burned me out.
Why that happens to me specifically
I'm a Heartweaving Mythmaker, which means I struggle with my own self-worth — and that's part of my motivation, part of my inspiration, part of my energy cycle.
But the Mythmaker side can pull me out of it, because it fuels me in a way that's actually sustainable.
My Heartweaver energy cycle is fill, pour, recover. My Mythmaker cycle is binge and sprint. The binge is research and building and geeking out. The sprint is where I'm actually writing.
That's very similar to fill and pour. But the fill activities are different. Fill is time with friends and family. Long walks on the beach — or, since I'm in Alaska, short walks down my road, talking to the horses, watching the leaves, because it's fall now and it's gorgeous and the horses are very happy.
Time with my dog. Time with my cat. Cat cuddles are lovely. Time with my plants. Getting back into my witchiness, which I genuinely need to do, because it's one of the best ways I fill my cup.
And for whatever reason, I'm not valuing that. So I'm not investing time in it.
What I realized is that I'm not giving value to the process.
Because when I get into survival mode, I short-circuit. I say: okay, that's nice when things are going well and you have time. That's a luxury move. But we know what actually gets things done.
And for me, getting it done means digging in, being the workhorse, grinding through.
So when friends and family say, hey, do you want to do something together — I say no. I haven't earned the right to spend time with you. Because I haven't got these things done.
And so I put the time into the work, even though that choice makes the whole process take longer. Now I'm having to create energy while expending it, and I'm in a deficit the entire time, because I'm not building it fast enough.
I am, however, spending it very quickly.
It's a lot like driving a car with a leak in the fuel tank. A lot of us have experience driving cars with oil leaks everywhere — similar, except with fuel you run out a lot faster. Actually it's probably closer to pinholes throughout the whole fuel system.
What it cost the book
Here's the thing. If I'd just stayed focused, using the process I was building, I might have been a little behind on my schedule — but not nearly as far behind as I ended up.
And the book I just released would probably have been a higher caliber. It's still good. But I'm shooting for better.
Before, I had good books at lower quality. And the reason for that is my old process exhausted me. I'd run and run and run, then fall on my face for weeks — which pushed me to the point where I was doing my edits with no time to do them well.
So when I came back, the one thing I said I'd do differently was buy myself time to edit properly.
Now, for those of you going I already do that, oh my God, what a loser you are for not figuring that out — this podcast is not for you. Go take your prettiness somewhere else.
I'm talking to those of us who are great creators and are still figuring out what our process needs to be. If you've got it handled, go listen to some other guru who can tell you how wonderful you are and make six figures.
We are trying to make four figures, and then five figures, and maybe at some point six. Right now we'd just like to finish a freaking book.
What I was building, and what I missed
As I was building the tools, I was doing really well.
I was figuring out how I and other authors brainstorm, and how to make that work so we still have energy left to write the books. How do you keep a Wildscribe excited? How do you keep a Mythmaker — how do you keep us — interested through an entire book? There are ways, and a lot of it is energy management.
Then outlining. We've got a whole crowd of authors saying they can't outline. I'm sorry, but you produce better books when you have one. So how about we figure out what makes a good outline for you, because yours probably looks nothing like mine. Most people's do not.
Having one helps in so many ways. Energy management. Doubt management. Decision fatigue management. And that's three things — it does plenty more.
Then how do we manage the writing process, the editing process, the formatting, the publishing, the marketing.
I was doing really well.
What I didn't take into consideration was failure triggers.
I'm a Heartweaver. I already have problems with self-value statements. I'm working on it, and the things I'm working on do work — but only when I use them.
What I hadn't noticed was that I'd assigned value to a success metric outside my control. And when that metric got hit, it wasn't me who hit it. It was other people I'm helping who hit it.
That sent me into a spiral, and I had no tools to get out.
I mean, I was developing some tools. But I'd decided they weren't that important. It was more important to understand how we work across the five departments we're trying to manage. Being able to regulate your emotional state and your mental state was less important, because that's soft science.
That's wrong.
What I discovered is that it's just wrong.
Understanding how your wiring works with how you write and create is only half the puzzle. The other half is figuring out how to regulate yourself once you're triggered.
And there are a lot of things that can trigger us.
I'm not talking about trauma responses. I'm not talking about CPTSD or autistic burnout — those can absolutely feed into it. I'm talking about normal, everyday things that trigger us into non-productive creating time, which can escalate into weeks of non-productivity, or in some cases into full body shutdown.
Which is what happened to me.
What each House has to trust
Heartweavers struggle with self-value. I wish that weren't true. I wish it were something I pulled out of my butt, where the dart landed once and therefore it's right.
This dart lands almost every time. Have I met a single Heartweaver with solid self-value? No. This person has not met that Heartweaver. I'm not saying she isn't out there. I'm saying I haven't met her.
The way we function and interact with the world makes us caretakers. Empaths. We can walk into a room and gauge how everyone's feeling. If somebody's in a bad mood, if someone just had a difficult conversation — we know.
And half the time we're not even consciously aware of it. We feel it in our bodies. In our skin. In our ears — sometimes as pressure, sometimes as pitch. In our chest. In our gut. In our lower back, our hips, our knees.
There are all these ways we register it without ever looking around and thinking oh, he looks grumpy, I won't go talk to him. She looks like she needs a hug — do I do that, or am I going to get punched for it? I think I'd get punched, so I'll give her space and smile instead.
And somewhere in that process, something makes it hard to value ourselves.
What I've found is that when you're a creative, you need that self-value to stay motivated. Because otherwise, why would you write a book nobody wants to read? Who are you to tell this particular story?
How many times did that exact conversation happen in this head while I was producing the book that launched a couple of days ago?
A lot. A lot.
Wildscribes are similar, but they struggle with self-trust.
A lot of that comes from the fact that everybody on their small planet — everyone who knows them — tells them the way they operate is wrong. The way they think is wrong. The way they organize is wrong. The way they function is wrong.
Much of that traces back to the energy cycle, because they're burst and disappear. They can get an enormous amount done, sometimes in a short window. Not always short — they get distracted. But they produce.
And then the switch flips, and they're gone. Off doing other things, and to everyone else it looks like goofing off.
When in fact they're connection thinkers, and what they're doing is finding the connections they need to finish that project. Plus the connections for the fifty other projects they have going.
So in order to focus and actually finish the creative project in front of them — a book, in this case — they need to be able to trust themselves for the duration.
And their self-doubt is so easily triggered. I think the biggest thing with the Wildscribes I work with is that they're being pummeled by everyone around them, especially the people who support them.
It's a fight to trust themselves. It is a fight. And it's very easy to doubt, and very easy to get pulled away from the book.
That's why a lot of my Wildscribes have dozens to hundreds of unfinished manuscripts. And they all stop in the same place — the murky middle. Which is exactly where you need to trust yourself in order to continue.
The Wildscribes who make it through that middle write amazing books, because the connections they make feel natural and they make for fantastic storytelling.
Mythmakers look like workhorses. They're not.
Their cycle is binge and sprint. In the binge they're researching, and building things that aren't necessarily needed — languages, histories, worlds, spreadsheets, websites.
I cannot tell you how many websites I have. It's an embarrassing number. My accountant said, Frankie, I think you have a problem, and I'm going to step in and help you. I collect domains. So now she asks: do you have a plan for this domain? Well, not immediately. Well, then you don't get to keep this one.
It's been helpful, honestly.
But Mythmakers look like they're doing a lot of work when they're actually distracting themselves. And for them it's a lack of self-trust in a different form. They lack belief in their ability to build something foundational.
Which is interesting to me, because building foundational things is the only thing they do.
When they lose that belief, they fail to build up from the foundation. They build out instead. They make the foundation bigger, and they struggle to build up.
To stay motivated, a Mythmaker needs to be challenged. They need the excitement of a challenge and the puzzle pieces of discovery. Without belief in themselves, they really struggle to get any book written.
LoreKeepers are the actual workhorse. Their whole cycle is built around the ritual of doing the work. They have a schedule, the schedule works, and it empowers and motivates and energizes them.
When it doesn't, they lose focus on the horizon.
They need to trust the process and the result. They're pretty good at trusting their own capabilities, because they've proven to themselves and everyone else that they have what it takes.
What leads them astray is believing in an end result that doesn't have enough behind it to support the belief.
What I discovered through my own failure
Regulation — understanding how to regulate according to your wiring — is just as important as understanding how you brainstorm and write and outline and market and format and publish. If not more so.
Because that really is the energy management system underneath everything else.
I started doing it the right way. And then I completely derailed myself and decided I'm such a special Muppet that I don't need to do the things I tell everybody else to do.
That backfired.
I was still editing that book past the point where I needed to upload it. And that's a ball fumble I never wanted to make again. When I came back into publishing I told myself: you're an expert. You've been doing this since 2002. You know what to do. Do it the right way.
And then I fumbled the ball, because I did it the way I'd done it in the past instead of the way I knew I needed to.
What I'm doing next
I have another book. And it is going to be done on time.
I'm using this experience — not to kick myself while I'm down, I already did that for about a week. Now it's time to get back up.
I'm using it as proof. Proof to stay the course and do the things I know I need to do, because they're right, and because this is something I want to be doing until I'm old. I love telling stories. I love publishing. I love reading and sharing stories and talking to readers.
So to make sure I maintain my energy, I need to do this correctly. That's what I intend to do.
And I'm going to take these regulation tools and tweak them, so that when I'm triggered next week, I can stop. Pause. Name what triggered me. Validate whether it's authentic and what it's actually worth. And then react accordingly — instead of spiraling by giving it more value than it deserves.
That's what I'm doing with the next book. And I'm going to do it, because it was working. It was working, and I want it really badly.
So if any of this registered with you, and you'd like help with it — or if you'd like the opportunity to learn this system and then ignore it, the same way I did — let me know.
Go to realindieauthor.com and click Unstuck Author Call. Because here's the thing: I can listen to what you say, look you in the eye, and tell you what you need to do to get unstuck. And the things I come up with are helpful, they're easy to implement, and people are using them and producing words within days.
The system works. And I can help.
Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to reading your stories as you finish them. Happy writing.
