Season 2 Episode 2: Why Your Writing System Only Works on Good Weeks
Season 2, Episode 2
A writing system that only works when you're rested, healthy, focused and uninterrupted isn't sustainable — it's a good-week system. Real sustainability has to run on high days, plateau days and low days. Most systems fail because they measure production only: word counts, streaks, launches. They don't count brainstorming, recovery, research, maintenance, or what re-entry looks like after an absence. And because an indie author runs five departments alone, a plan built for ideal capacity breaks the moment capacity changes.
Show notes:
You bought the system. It worked for nine days. You hit the word counts, checked the boxes, started to believe you'd finally found it — and then someone got sick, or a scene stopped making sense, or something caught you sideways, and it was over.
And instead of concluding the system was broken, you concluded you were.
This episode is the argument against that, including the part of my own story I don't always tell: what four and a half years back in construction did to me, and what happened six weeks after I came back to writing.
In this episode:
Good-week systems versus systems that survive a low day
What the book mill counts as consistency, and everything it leaves out
The five departments every indie author runs alone
Why plans built on ideal capacity fail, and what "catch up" really means
My own version: construction, fifty pounds, and burning out again in six weeks
A system that doesn't allow failure guarantees systemic failure
The four energy cycles: Fill/Pour/Recover, Burst and Disappear, Sprint and Binge, and Ritual
Questions Authors Ask About Sustainable Systems
Why do writing systems stop working after a week or two?
Because most of them are built for ideal capacity — rested, focused, uninterrupted. They work beautifully while conditions hold. The moment something changes, the only instruction they offer is to catch up or push harder, and neither one accounts for the fact that your capacity actually changed.
Isn't this a discipline problem?
Rarely. Most indie authors are highly disciplined. It's a five-department management problem: creation, development, production, distribution and promotion, all run by one person alongside the writing itself.
What are the five departments an indie author runs?
Creation, development, production, distribution and promotion. In a normal publishing business each has a department head and a staff, because each needs a different mentality and a different kind of energy. Indies do all five, usually while drafting.
How do I start writing again after something traumatic?
For a ritual-driven writer: once things are genuinely back under control, reinstate the ritual. Set the alarms, honor them, go through the motions. The first few days won't produce results. If it feels debilitating rather than slow, that's a sign you're still in it and need more time.
Transcript — Season 2, Episode 2
If your writing system only works on good weeks, it isn't sustainable.
So let's talk about sustainability and what it actually looks like.
Sustainability is not doing the same thing every day until forever. We are human beings, not machines — and even machines aren't built to run daily without maintenance and sometimes breaks.
If you have a writing system that only works when you're rested, focused, healthy, inspired, and nobody needs anything from you, you don't have something you can maintain for the long haul. You have a good-week system.
A sustainable process is one you can run on high days, medium plateau days, and low days.
The nine-day pattern
How many of you have bought a system or a process, and it actually worked?
It worked for nine days. You hit the word counts. You checked all the boxes. You started thinking you could really make this happen, and you got excited — yes, finally, I found it.
And then something happens. You get sick. Your dog gets sick, your kid gets sick, your husband gets sick. Drama happens. Somebody comes in and demands your attention.
Or you hit a scene that just doesn't make sense. It made complete sense walking in, and somewhere inside it, it stopped, and now you can't write it.
Or you saw a color, heard a sound, smelled something, felt something. Something triggered you, and now you're in a trauma response and you can't get back to the page.
So the system you paid for isn't producing words anymore.
And instead of looking at it and saying that system is broken, we say: there are all these important, successful people who made this work. So if the system works, there must be something wrong with me.
I want to challenge that.
What the book mill counts
What's the book mill's definition of consistency?
It uses metrics based in production, because we're producing books. Word counts. Books. Launches. Unbroken streaks.
It doesn't take into account brainstorming. Recovery. Research. Maintenance. Or what re-entry has to look like after an absence.
And I say that because we're indie authors, which means we run the entire business — while everybody tells us how terrible we are for not being real authors. Well, maybe someday you'll be a real author.
They don't understand that we are the real authors, and we're manning five departments ourselves.
When we look at producing a book, we're not just looking at writing it. We're looking at the creation department. The development department. The production department. The distribution department. And the promotion department.
In a normal business, each of those has a department head and a staff, all set up to do one specific job — because each requires a specific mentality and a specific kind of energy.
You have to do all five. And per the book mill, you have to fulfill all five while writing a book.
For a lot of us, there's a finite amount of time for that. Even when I was a full-time author I had a finite amount of time, because the things I did to fill my cup took time I never actually budgeted into a true and complete schedule.
Most of the gurus preaching the book mill — because it works — build plans on ideal capacity. And when capacity changes, the only instruction they give you is that you need to catch up. Push harder. Or start over and do a better job.
What I really want to drive home is that this isn't a discipline problem. Most of us are highly disciplined.
It's a managing-five-departments problem.
My version of this
Let me tell you a story so you understand where I'm coming from.
I stepped away from my author business about four and a half years ago. So if sustainability means never stopping, that should be the end of it.
I'd decided to go back to construction project management, because it seemed like the safe thing. Even doing this full time, I wasn't always earning a full-time income — there were lean months where I'd readjust the marketing, readjust alignment, a whole lot of things. But for the most part I maintained a full-time income from my books.
I wanted some of that weight off. I wanted less stress, because it was very stressful. And I was starting to lose the fun in writing, because it had become a job. So I went back to something I thought was more reliable.
Four and a half years later I realized that while it might be more reliable, it was definitely not less stressful.
I'd gained fifty pounds. I was losing my hair. Every joint ached. I was having anxiety attacks and I couldn't sleep.
And I realized I needed to do something I felt good about. Which meant getting back to writing.
It helped that I got fired, so coming back was a no-brainer at that point.
And a month and a half into being back, I was already burned out again.
So I had to stop, drop, and assess whether maybe I was the problem — because I'd already been forced to quit once.
The question became: am I a good enough author?
And the answer is yes. I sustained a decent living from my writing, so obviously the writing was good enough. Is it great? No. Can it be better? Absolutely, and I'm working on that, and I'm learning as I grow into the writer I want to be.
But what I had to assess was this: if I were in a construction environment managing a project and I saw this situation, would I say the person was the problem? Or would I say the system was?
I'm LEED trained. My first instinct is to look at the system and find where it starts to bog down, because that's the first place to look for solutions.
And what I found is that we have a system that doesn't allow failure.
What happens when you have to produce at a hundred percent, a hundred percent of the time, with no failure permitted?
It's impossible. It's improbable. And it leads to systemic failure.
So we needed a system that actually works with people. I took it back to basics and started looking at personalities and personality Houses, using studies that smarter people than me already built — just applying those lenses to creativity, and specifically to how authors produce.
Heartweavers: Fill, Pour, Recover
Heartweavers are emotion-fueled and emotion-led. Any interruption usually involves a lot of work that has nothing to do with writing — they have to invest themselves in the interruption in order to buy the time to sit in the chair.
And in a lot of cases, myself and others I coach have found that the people we serve, the people we care for, experience the writing as a challenge to them. Instead of focusing on them, we're focusing on something else we care about.
So there's jealousy. And loved ones put the author into a defense ecosystem — which is not good — where every time she sits down to do something she deeply enjoys, she goes into a guilt spiral.
That empties the cup faster than she can fill it. So when she does sit down, she can't write, because there's no sustainable fuel left in the tank.
A Heartweaver's energy cycle is Fill, Pour, Recover.
I see it that way because Heartweavers overpour. They overcommit, overproduce, overfulfill, overserve, and they don't spend enough time filling their own cups.
So the cup drains. Sometimes it fills with holes. Sometimes it warps. Sometimes it breaks. And then she's completely spent — she can't even carry the cup to be filled, because now she and the cup are in a desolate desert, sitting on the couch. Lights off. No sound. Or the exact opposite: one single light and one single sound, just to hold focus.
A drained Heartweaver has to reset and recalibrate before the cup can refill. Because when she overgives, she takes the bountiful forest she normally creates and puts herself in a barren wasteland.
And that is literally what it feels like. Sitting on the couch, unable to do anything. You can't think. You can't feel. Nothing is moving inside you or outside you. And the only thing that exists is demands on more of your time than you're capable of giving.
That's a Heartweaver.
So the way to get a Heartweaver producing again isn't writing. It isn't challenges, or happy little boards, or goals. It's finding a way to take that cup out of the desert and bring it closer to water so it can be filled.
That's how we support our Heartweavers.
Wildscribes: Burst and Disappear
Everyone gives Wildscribes a hard time for the disappear phase.
But if they don't honor themselves — and if we don't honor them by allowing the disappear phase — the only thing we're telling them is that they're not allowed to be themselves and need to be machines. Which they are one hundred percent not.
Can they produce a lot? Absolutely. They can be animals in a burst cycle. But as soon as it disconnects, as soon as they've lost the connections, they need the disappear cycle. Because they're doing a lot of work.
It looks like goofing off. It looks like building random things nobody needs. Do we want those things? Yeah, we really do, because what a Wildscribe builds with her hands in that phase is beautiful and we all love it.
But while they're building, they're taking every conversation, every video they've watched, every book they've read, everything they've felt and heard and seen, and making the connections with the story they're trying to tell.
They can't do that inside an active burst cycle, because burst cycles are focused. To make those connections they have to let the focus go, so the connections can arrive in whatever direction they arrive from. Which is why they do it with their hands. They're a very grounded personality type.
They need that, and they need the grace to have it.
Now — what if they go into a disappear phase and can't get out? Can't come back to the book, again and again?
That's usually doubt in themselves.
And the way back isn't writing challenges or vision boards. It's micro goals. Not big ones. Little ones. Sometimes stupidly small.
I'm going to sit down and pull out my notebook. Okay. Notebook is out. Goal met.
I'm going to write down "Chapter One." Okay. Goal met.
It seems silly. But when you've lost trust in yourself, you have to rebuild the foundation, and micro-actions are often the best way. A beach looks beautiful, but a beach can't exist without the grains of sand.
...Okay, I just realized sand is a terrible analogy for a foundation. Ignore it. I'll do better next time.
The point is you're building something you can build on. So set the micro goals, and when you hit one, acknowledge it. Write it down. Check it off. Give yourself a sticker — I love stickers, I give myself stickers for all kinds of things. Then at some point you stretch a little further.
And if you miss a goal, don't stop and tell yourself what a terrible human being you are. Assess. How close did I get? Did I miss because I forgot to account for something? Or because there was a goal I needed to hit first before I could hit that one?
Then do that one next time. Don't just stop.
Mythmakers: Sprint and Binge
Both of those can produce energy. Mythmakers are builders.
So we have two connection types — Heartweavers and Wildscribes — and two builder types, Mythmakers and LoreKeepers.
In the sprint, a Mythmaker builds energy through discovery while writing. In the binge, they're also building energy, because they're bingeing and discovering and learning and building all kinds of crazy things.
Which means it often doesn't look like they've stepped away from their books at all. They've just stepped away from writing, because they're building everything else book-adjacent. World-building. Developing an entire race. Creating a language. Writing a bunch of songs — I don't want to talk about it, they're terrible. Websites. Newsletter onboarding pages.
A whole lot of things. Just not a book.
To re-engage a Mythmaker, remind them why they wanted to write this book in the first place.
Heartweavers too — but a Heartweaver gets reminded on the emotional wound level. A Mythmaker gets reminded on the justice-betrayal line.
And they will be fired up. This was the entire reason they built the world the way they did. Remind them of that and they're pulled back toward the story. Then remind them of the characters they chose to showcase it, and they're pulled a little further.
What you're doing is taking them out of the big, godlike view and back into the individual view. Yes — this is what the story feels like. Where am I going next?
For a Mythmaker, writing challenges can actually help.
LoreKeepers: the ritual
LoreKeepers are the other builder, and their energy cycle is built around ritual. Getting up at a certain time, sitting down, doing the things on schedule.
It sounds boring. They're also the reason the book mill exists and works at all, because they've proven it can be successful. It is.
But even LoreKeepers run into things, because they're still human beings. Traumatic events happen. They're probably better than most of us at mitigating — me included — and they still struggle.
So two things for my LoreKeepers.
First: you matter in your own life, as an individual. You don't have to do what everybody tells you. You don't have to follow the script, or the rules, or the path. You're allowed to stop, drop, and look around to see whether this is still the path you want. If it is, keep going. If it isn't, change course. Find the rules, find the map, and follow that one instead.
Second: after a traumatic experience, once you're at a point where things are actually in control — reinstate the ritual. Set the alarms again. Honor the alarms again. Go through the motions.
The first few days probably won't produce results. But as you get back into the rhythm of it, it starts filling the cup again so you can do the work.
If you do it too soon, it'll feel debilitating, because the ritual won't be working. That's a sign you're still in the trauma and you still need time to heal. Honor that. You're a human freaking being. You're not a machine, and you're allowed time to rest.
The thing I want you to take away
You have proven in the past that you are capable.
Even if it wasn't about writing. Maybe you haven't written three books, or twenty, or fifty. Maybe you're still on your first. There are other areas of your life where you've already proven it.
What you need to understand is that if you're struggling to create right now, the problem probably isn't that you're a terrible writer.
It's that you're trying to implement a system your body and your personality don't support.
If any of this resonated, book an Unstuck Author Call and let's talk about it. I'd love to help, because I know the world needs your stories.
Happy writing.
