The Final Episode

Hello, and welcome to the StoryGrid podcast. My name is Tim Grall. I'm the CEO of StoryGrid and I'm a writer. This is going to be the last episode for a while. It's episode 292. Sean and I published the very first episode of the StoryGrid podcast way back in 2015, on October 14th. This came after a really big life change for me and my family. I had sold a business, started a new one, and we had moved from Virginia, which is the only home my wife had ever known and the only home my family had ever known, and we moved to Nashville, Tennessee. Soon after moving is when I realized I really wanted to figure out this whole fiction writing thing. And so that's when I ended up finding the book, the story grid, reaching out to Sean, and we started the podcast together. And we started on this journey that was much longer and harder than I ever thought it would be. Just about every episode, I started by saying that I was a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. I'm happy to report that I am now a writer that knows how to tell a story that works. I'm just about finished with the book that we're going to publish at StoryGrid Publishing sometime in the next year. It's a book I'm very proud of. It's the book that I think I've been trying to write all along. So in this episode, I'm going to share with you what's been going on with my writing over the last couple years, the stuff I've learned along the way, the things that I think you can take away from it as well, and then give you an update on where I'm at now and what's happening next. Back at the beginning of 2019, we were all still blessedly pre pandemic. Covid was popping up in the news here and there, but none of us really thought it was going to turn into anything. And about that time, I released my first novel, the threshing through StoryGrid publishing. If you've been following along with the podcast, you heard all about that and you went through the entire process with me as I wrote it. Once I was done with that book, I got to work on the second book, the series. It was supposed to be a series, maybe a trilogy, and I had an idea for the next book. We talked about this on the podcast as well. I ended up writing an entire draft of the book, turned it into Sean, and with the help of Leslie Watts, our editor in chief, of Storygrid Publishing and Danielle Kielski, the chief academic officer of Storygrid University. They went through it and realized pretty quickly that it was not ready for prime time. It had a lot of problems. So we went through it, did a lot of talking about it, spent a week going through it, tearing it apart, trying to put it back together. And then I got sent home to write the next draft. I finished that draft, turned it in, and I didn't hear much from the three of them, which made me a little nervous. Around this time, we were doing a story grid event, so we happened to all be in the same place together and come to find out that at that event, the three of them had a meeting without me. And they all basically had to admit that this book was worse than the last one. And so we all got together for a meeting. Now, remember, we sat down at a table. Sean sat across from me, and he asked me. He's like, tim, how bad do you want this? I'm like, pretty bad. He's like, okay. He goes, do you want to keep going? I remember saying, if I ever answer that question, if I ever say no to that question, I want you to just drag me out in the street and put me down.

And so he's like, all right. He goes, you can't write a fucking sentence. And we've got to do some work on this. That didn't feel great to hear, but I was like, all right, I've learned a lot already. I can go back into this. And so we started the process of learning how to write a sentence and how to write a beat and how to write a trope and how to write a scene, what was happening? Is that the macro part of my story, that big kind of macro level that we've talked about a lot at Story grid was working in the story, but my line by line and scene writing was suffering mightily. The problem is there's really no way to teach this, and Sean had not developed one. And so we started working on it. We started meeting every week, the four of us, on a zoom call. They would give me homework, I would turn in the homework, and then they would give me feedback on it. Now, for those of you that have been listening to the StoryGrid podcast for a long time, you know that Sean has always given me pretty brutal feedback, and that started really early on. I remember whatever the first episode was, when he gave me feedback, like episode five or six or something, before we got on the call to actually record the podcast, he said, well, how do you want to do this, Tim. And I remember telling him, like, hey, just pretend you're my editor. We're just having a call, and then give me feedback. And he was like, are you sure? And I said, yeah, it'll be fine. And then of course, we get on it and it's like his notes on my scene were three times longer than the scene. So you know how brutal it can be. And I will tell you that these zoom calls we were having were way worse. We would spend just hours talking through, like, word by word through my sentences, trying to get me to understand how to craft a scene and craft a sentence in a way that made it compelling and exciting to read. And we learned a lot in this. But I'll tell you, it was brutal. There was one point where we spent an entire hour talking about the second word in the first sentence of the scene that I wrote. We went through all kinds of stuff. We've talked about this on the podcast before. We started learning about input and output. We started learning about the relevance filters, figuring out who Sam is and who the author is, and the double factor problems. We started learning about camera shifting and writing, great dialog and all kinds of other things around that really focused in on this sentence by sentence writing. And the rule at this point was I was not allowed to work on a manuscript. I was not allowed to work on a book. I had to figure this part out. So we did that for a good year and a half, meeting every week and doing that kind of things. We did different types of exercises to figure it out. And this is basically where our masterwork scene writing class came from, was this kind of work. We figured out how to teach this in a way that it made sense. We turned it into a pilot program, and then we turned it into what we were calling the Story Grid Guild. And it's what our masterwork scene writing class is now. If you go to our website, look at the training page. But again, this was a brutal process for me because it's going to be a hard process for anybody. Like, anybody going that's gone through our masterwork scene writing class knows it's a hard process. It's hard to wrap your head around all this stuff. You have to go through it several times. But I was going through it when they didn't even have a system. They didn't even know how to teach it yet. Like, they knew where we were going, but they didn't know how to get us there. And we got so many amazing things out of that. But it was really hard. There were two times where I got so angry I just logged off the Zoom call. I was so mad at what was going on. But then I started seeing that my writing was getting better. It was leveling up. I could tell. I would go look at my first draft and then look at the last draft and just see what a difference it was. So I kept working on this. Like I said, it was at least a year and a half of just working on line by line, scene by scene writing. I wasn't allowed to work on anything longer than a scene. Then the fateful day arrived. Last September, I was dropping my son off at school, and I drop him off at school and then I have about a 25 minute drive into my office. And on the way there, we were listening to the band twenty one Pilots. And there's this one song that always makes me cry. It's this song called the Run and Go. You should go look it up and have a listen. And that song happened to come on just as my son was getting out of the car. He closed the door. I start listening to the song, it starts making me cry. And I, for some reason, I just reached over to my phone and I hit repeat. And so I set that song to just play over and over and over. And it's only a couple minutes long. So the whole drive into my office, this song's playing, I'm crying. And I had one of those just kind of mystical moments where I felt a book download into my brain. Now, over the summer, I'd written just a couple, like one scene, one short story, 15002000 words. And I'd done a few of these over the summer about some, you know, some story ideas that were floating around in my head. And something in this moment just crystallized several of those into one story, dropped it into my head. I was a mess, I was crying. I was one of those where, like on the highway, I was all the way over in the slow lane, just trying not to wreck on the way into my office. So I get to the office and I'm like, okay, I want to write this book. But Sean has not wanted me to write anything longer than a scene for a year and a half. So I call Sean and I just kind of. I'm like a mess, you know, I'm like telling him about this book and I'm like, I want to write this. I think this is it. I have this idea. It just came to me and I really feel like this is the thing I want to write. And we talked about it for a few Minutes. He gave me a little bit of feedback, and then he's like, all right, Tim, write a draft as fast as you possibly can. Just get it down as fast as you can. So I got to work, and over the next six weeks, I wrote the first draft of a novel. It was only about 40,000 words. And I finished it right at the beginning of November. And I happened to finish it the night before our narrative path workshop started back in November. And so again, here we are, all four of us, Danielle, Leslie, Sean and I, all together here in Nashville, and I tell them, hey, I finished. I finished the book. He's like, all right, well, why don't you think about that as we go through the narrative path? So I went through the narrative path workshop, thinking about my book, using that as the example, making tons and tons and tons of notes and telling Sean about it as we went. And now at this point, Sean hasn't read anything of the book, right? He has. He hasn't seen anything of it. It's just what I'm telling him.

So at the end of the workshop, I was like, all right, Sean, what do I do now? Like, what's next for me in this manuscript? Do I throw it away? Do you want to read it? Like, what do we do? He's like, look, Tim, I think you've got a really good ball of clay here. Like, you've went and you've dug it up and you've got it on the wheel, and it's a good ball of clay, but it doesn't have enough shape yet. We don't really know. We haven't been able to figure out what story is in that clay yet. And so he's like, I want you to work with Leslie and go through the narrative path.

So I did. We spent 13 weeks meeting every week building out the narrative path. Ended up the final version was like 22 pages long. And the narrative path, if you're not familiar with it, it's basically a step by step way to figure out everything about your story. The big. The best analog to, like, what's out there is, you know, it's how to plot your novel, right? And. But there's all kinds of things about how to plot your novel. This is so much different than that, so much better than that. And this is a lot of the tools that came out of the work that the three of them, Sean, Leslie, and Danielle, had been doing through that year and a half. Not just at the scene level, but they were working through stuff like this as well. Coming up with this this system we call the narrative path. And it's really, really interesting. You're figuring out your characters, you're figuring out their tactics. You're figuring out the narrative device, the premise, the global five commandments. You're just figuring out all of this stuff. The double factor problem, the non negotiable, and how all these things work together. And so every week, Leslie and I would meet for at least an hour. It usually went hour and a half, two hours. There was a couple calls that went three hours to start building out this narrative path and figuring out this story. And it was. It was an interesting process. Like, it wasn't. It wasn't as hard as the other stuff, like, emotionally, but it was definitely.

Definitely tough to kind of figure it out because every time you change one thing, it affected everything else. It was like every little piece that we were figuring out was tied to everything else by a string. And so every time you moved it, it would, like, you know, fuck up everything else. And you had to go back and fix it.

The only, like, real metaphor I can think of of what it felt like is it's like imagine you're building a 3D puzzle, and the only way that you can see if it actually fits is you can push it in from the outside. Like, say you're putting together a puzzle that's supposed to be like a cube, like a 3D cube. So you put all these pieces in where you think they should go, and then you try to push it together, and it's like, clunk, clunk. It doesn't actually go together, so you have to pull it back and start moving all the pieces around and then push it in from the outside again. I know that probably isn't a helpful metaphor, but that's what it feels like. It feels like you have to get in there and fix some things, and then you have to kind of step out and see if the whole thing works right. And you have to do that over and over because every time you make a change, you have to go back and check everything else to make sure everything still fits together. And so we worked on that, and we got towards the end of that, and we checked in with Sean, and we're like, all right, what do we do now? He's like, all right, you gotta come up with the 20 core scenes. And so this is based on the work that he's done in the genre blueprint. He did a version for the Hobbit. He's doing one right now for the Matrix. And you have to figure out the 20 core scenes. And you have to focus on the green level of storytelling. So back at it, Leslie and I went going through it and mapping out these 20 scenes, taking into account everything else that we had already done in the narrative path. And we mapped them out. We worked on that for a while. That took a while to do. We got that all done. I want to back up at this point and give a little context to what we were doing here. Again, if you've been following along, you know that several years ago when we started Storygrid Publishing, we opened up for submissions. And so anybody could submit their manuscript to StoryGrid. They had to submit along with it the StoryGrid spreadsheet, the full scap, and several other tools that we use here at StoryGrid. And what we've realized now looking back, is we were trying to take the old system of doing things of traditional publishing, where people submit manuscripts and then they get feedback on whether or not it's going to be published. And we were trying to make it slightly better. And lo and behold, that didn't work. We got lots of manuscripts. A couple of them were pretty good. Most of them were not very good. And what we were finding was a couple things, one we don't really take responsibility for. One was people would take our tools and change the tools to match their book instead of changing their book to match the tool. So whenever they would find a problem in the tool, they would not assume it was their manuscript, they would assume it was the tool and they would just change the tool. So, you know, that doesn't work. But the other is this whole line by line writing thing just wasn't working. So that's when we shut down for submissions and we started thinking, like, what are we going to do? We have to figure out a way. The goal here is to publish world class, masterwork level fiction, and we're not going to get to it this way. And so this is when we really started thinking through, like, okay, what's the writer's job and what's the editor's job? And when we look at, you know, writing a manuscript, it's really seven levels. Okay? And I've talked about this before, but I'll mention it here again, where you have the manuscript level, which is the full book. And then you can break that down into quadrants. Four quadrants each about 25% long. That's, you know, the beginning hook, middle build one, middle build two, ending payoff. And then you, you look at the 20 core scenes, right? The five commandments in each of those quadrants, that's level three, level four sequences. Level five is scene. Level six is trope, and level seven is beats. And beats are usually, you know, usually a couple sentences up to five, six sentences each. They can be longer, but that's about what they are. So we have all these levels, these seven levels from the manuscript all the way down to a single beat. And we started thinking, like, well, which of those parts belong to who? Like, whose job is each of those parts? And we realized, okay, the writer's job is the beat trope, scene level. Like, we need writers that can consistently write fantastic scenes, right, that work that are valence, that are compelling, that are exciting to read, that move quickly through the five commandments and get to where we want to be. We need writers that can write great scenes, and then we need editors that can keep track of the macro, that really understand the 20 core scenes, the macro movements of story, the quadrants and the full manuscript and how that's supposed to work together. And, you know, you kind of meet at that sequence, that middle sequence layer. And we started thinking of this as, like, you know, this is our theory, right? This was our theory at the time, was, okay, it's like driving a car. This is before gps, all right? So it's like driving a car, and I'm in LA and I need to get to New York, okay? So the rider is the driver of the car. They're the ones sitting there with their hands on the wheel, and sitting next to them in the passenger seat is the editor. And they've got the map, okay? So the editor knows the full scope of how we're going to get from point A to point B. And it's the rider's job to keep their eyes on the road, stay between the lines, don't hit any other cars, and just know, like, the next turn, maybe the next couple turns. And then as you do those turns, it's the editor's job to tell you what to do next so that eventually you get where you're going. Okay? Now, what's important about this is the editor can't do the driving for you. This is where we as writers sometimes get caught up, is we want our editor to, like, fix our scenes and fix our sentences. And they can't really do that. Like, they can help you think through it, but you're the writer. You've got to be able to write a compelling scene. And a great editor is going to help you figure out what scenes to write and in what order so they make a working manuscript. So our theory became that an editor and a writer should be much more tightly coupled throughout the entire writing process. This idea that writers should just churn and churn and churn on manuscripts until they're magically, quote, good enough, that an editor should actually get involved. We don't like that. We don't think that's the best way to do it. The writer should work really, really hard on their craft of line by line writing up to the scene level. And then they need to work with an editor to plan out their book using the narrative path and then work with them as they write the book.

So this is what this looked like is that Leslie and I were working together to plan out my book. We had this clay. We had this idea for a book, but we needed to map it out and figure out what it should be. And so the way we set this up was that Leslie and I were going to work on this until we felt like it was ready, and then we had to pitch it to Sean. And Sean had to approve or not approve the narrative path before I was allowed to actually go work and write the manuscript. Right. Again, in this, I think, 13 weeks we spent doing the narrative path in the 20 core scenes. I hadn't actually written anything on this book. This was all just the planning phase. This is where Leslie and I found ourselves. We had the narrative path, we had the 20 course scenes. We both were really happy with it. So we reached out to Sean and we're like, hey, we've got this. What do you want to do? He's like, all right, let's get on a zoom call. So we get on the call, and I went into that call thinking, okay, we're going to go over the narrative path. I've got this 22 page document. We're going to go over it. He's going to look at it. He's going to, you know, find out whether or not it's working or not, maybe give some feedback, maybe tear the whole thing apart and have us start over. All of those are possibilities, as you know. And so we get on the call and I got the document ready, and he's like, really? All I need is your 20 core scenes. Those are the only thing I really need to know, because that will indicate everything else you've done on the narrative path, whether or not it's working or not. I'm like, okay, great. And I scroll down to the 20 core scenes. I'm ready to just go through them. And he's like, no, no, no, no. He's like, Tim, just tell me the story. And I was like, what? He's like, just tell me the story. Pretend we're at a coffee shop. You invited me to coffee, and you're just going to tell me this story that you want to write? Just tell me the story. And so I looked at Leslie. You know, I mean, we're all on zoom here, but I kind of, like, looked at Leslie, and she kind of shrugged at me. Neither of us knew this was coming. And so I was like, okay, all right. And, you know, this was the first time I'd said the story out loud. I had the draft I wrote that I knew wasn't working back in the fall. And then we've worked through it on the narrative path, but I haven't just told the story to anybody.

So I did. Took about 20, 25 minutes, and I just told him the story as if I was telling somebody this story I was going to write. I had my 20 core scenes up. I knew everything in the narrative path. That was all in my head, and I just told him the story. And I got a little emotional. Leslie got a little emotional. I think Sean even got a little bit emotional. And we got to the end, and I just. I just stopped, and there was some silence. And then Sean was like, it's great. He's like, this is great. He's like, you. You've got a story here that works, and it's going to be an amazing story. I forgot exactly what he said somewhere in there. I kind of blacked out because I was like, wait a second. He's just approving it. And he did have one change. There was one change he thought I need to make to a character. Literally change one character in one specific way. The rest of it, he just approved.

And I was just. I was just flabbergasted. I could not believe that he approved this on our. Basically our first pitch, Right. I kind of assumed we'd have maybe some of it, right? But he would find all these holes and send us back to work. I mean, that's what we've done for basically eight years. And. And no, he approved it. He's like, all right, it's time to get writing. So we spent a few more minutes going over a couple specifics. He logged off, and Leslie and I stayed on. And then we looked at each other. I was. And I asked Leslie, I said, okay. Did I hear him wrong? Did he approve. Approve it? And he's like. She's like, yeah, he did. I guess so. I was like, so I guess that means I'm going to start writing it now. And she's like, yeah. And so I started working on it, and Leslie and I would meet. We kept meeting every week, and we got into this really good groove where each week I would go over what I had written and actually what I did, because we didn't think it was the right move for her to read the book as I was writing it. Like, read the whole thing. But, you know, I had thrown away two manuscripts. Two fully written manuscripts got tossed out just, you know, two years ago. And so I was terrified that I wasn't going to be. I wasn't getting the voice right. And so I asked Leslie. I was like, can I just write the first four or five scenes? You look at those. If the voice isn't right, I'll go back into the lab, I'll go back into the gym. I'll keep working on this. I was like, but I can't take finishing another manuscript that gets thrown away because the line by line writing isn't any good.

I sent her the first few scenes, and she's like, you're locked in. She said. She said at one point, she said, whatever you're eating for breakfast, keep eating it because it's working. And so.

So I kept writing, and we, you know, it took various forms because we had never really done this before where, you know, she was working with me as I'm writing it. But towards about the middle of middle build one, I feel like we hit this groove and we kind of figured it out. And so what it looks like is each week I go over what I wrote. So I'm like, here's the scenes I wrote. I'll read her certain passages. I'll kind of summarize some, tell her what happened. I'll read certain passages and. And then she'll give me any feedback.

She's. It's honestly been really little feedback. It's been very nitpicky, which is like the best kind of feedback, because the only time you get to the nitpicky feedback is when most of it's working. And so there was little things she would have me tweak, but otherwise she was really happy with what I was producing. And then we would talk about what the next next few scenes should be. So this is how we've been doing it is every week we get together every Friday. I go over what I've written. We talk through it, and then I talk usually what's happened, because I've been doing a lot more of going for walks without any like headphones in or anything, listening to anything, or when I drive, keeping any music or podcasts or anything off and just thinking and letting my mind wander and think about the story. And so usually I've had some sort of insight about what I think should happen next. And we talked through that, we figured out and it's just, it's just amazing to have this ongoing dialogue to help you kind of work through, because we have the map that's not going to change, that's the same. And now we're just filling it in, figuring out all the little twists and turns in between. And it's been amazing. I mean, working with Leslie has been amazing. Figuring out this narrative path has been amazing. Writing it has been amazing.

And it's just been, it's just been wonderful. And at this point, I'm four scenes away from finishing it and we've already mapped out the scenes. I just have to write them. So I'll be done in the next week with the manuscript. I'll probably spend another week going back and setting up some payoffs we did towards the end of the book. But otherwise it's going to, it's going to move over to Leslie and I'll go over that in a second. But I want to just point out some things that I've learned in this process about writing a book like this. First of all, having the story set like this both reduces anxiety and increases creativity. And this is so much better than just like other kind of plotting things I've done before where you kind of just figure out the characters or you figure out, you know, a few scenes or, you know, there's all kinds of systems out there, this is like creating a full three dimensional understanding of your story. And because Sean has seen that full three dimensional understanding of the story, and he says it is a story that works and works really well. I never had one of those, like Dark Night of the Souls. I'm wasting my time. This book is going to be a complete failure. There's no way it's going to work. I knew the story worked. I knew the story worked. And all I had to do is focus on this scene and make it the best I can. And that's the other thing I notice is that while I'm writing scenes, it allows me to hyper focus on them and make them as best as I can, push them as far as I can. One of the things I realized is a lot of times when you're writing a draft, or at least when I do it, I'm like shaving off the edges because I don't want to take the story in a direction that. That becomes like a waste of time or doesn't work later or whatever. But because I knew none of that was going to be a problem, I could push this scene as hard as I possibly can.

A friend of mine gate another writer who you should go look up. She's amazing. Is kj, Dilla, Tonya. We were talking about this and she's like, yeah, you know, you just always focus not on complicating, making the story more complicated. You just, just keep making it worse and worse for your protagonist. And we're, we're laughing about that, but it feels good. I know what that scene has to accomplish. I know where it has to get by the end. I have a vague understanding at least of the five commandments. And I write it putting all the tools in that I've been doing. And it just, it just comes out and it's just the. I mean, 10 times better. Each scene is 10 times better than anything I've written before this book. It's just, it's just amazing.

It's been really fun to figure out how to build in progressive complications into the story. It's just wonderful. And so it's also just shown me how important all of these things we, we talk about as story grid is knowing your narrative device, who the author is, who the Sam is, who what the double factor problem is clearly understanding the relevance filter, clearly understanding when to valence language and why to valence language. And all of these things come into play. And like I've heard Leslie say it and Danielle and Sean that, you know, all of these things come into play in every single line of writing. I didn't understand it. I now understand it. I know what that means. That every single line of writing has to have a reason for being there and it has to be associated to the controlling idea and the double factor problem. It's true.

Okay, so what's next? I'm going to finish the book in the next week. Right. I've got four scenes left.

I'm finishing like two scenes every three days is about my average.

And so I'll definitely have it done in a week. Leslie and I will meet again. We'll talk about what changes need to happen before it goes to the editor, before it hits her desk. I'll make those changes. And then it goes to her is she's now on deck to actually do her work. And this is where we get into doing a story grid diagnostic. That's what we'll start with. Or she'll start with. I sent these out to the email list a couple months ago, but they're on the website if you're interested. But it's the whole series we did on what a story grid editor does. So she'll start with a diagnostic where she goes through the manuscript, does a story grid spreadsheet, a full scap, and then we'll make any changes based on that. And then she'll do an intensive. A story grid intensive will make those changes. Then she'll do a story grid extensive will make those changes, and then the book will be locked and it will go to a copy editor. So I feel really good about it. I'm really excited about it. And like I said at the beginning, I feel like I've reached this point now where I know how to tell a story that works. And so we feel like this is a good place to pause the podcast. I feel like ever since we haven't known how to interact with my writing on the podcast, we've struggled with the kind of content that needs to be put on it. If you go back and just look through the archives, you can see over the last couple years, we've been kind of all over the place. And I just realized recently, I think it's time to just put it. Put it on a hiatus. I feel like we started the podcast, Sean and I started the podcast to teach me how to write a story that works. And we've accomplished that. And so we're going to pause it for now.

I do recommend you stay subscribed. I'll probably going to give updates as we go along. I want to keep sharing this with those of you that are interested, and we may do something with it in the future. But for now, we're just going to pause it and let it sit here. If you. If this is one of the first episodes or you haven't gone back and listened to the episodes, I highly recommend you do. I hear from people on a weekly basis that have found the podcast for the first time. They're going back through the archive and they're learning so much. So I just can't recommend that enough. I also want to thank you as a listener of the podcast. StoryGrid is now my job. Like, this is what I do. I run Story Grid. I do all the operations and the marketing. I'm the CEO and I love my job. And I feel like getting Storygrid out to the world is. Is my vision, is my mission. And I plan on dying at my desk working on Storygrid or my next book. And so I just love it so much and it wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you all listening to the podcast and letting this actually grow into something. And also I appreciate you just coming along for the ride with me.

You know, when I think back over everything I've learned through Storygrid, I just, I just am so thankful for, for all of it and for Sean for putting his work out there, for taking me on and working with such a horrible writer to try to teach me a few things. And then as Leslie and Danielle came on to help as well, they both just had a huge impact on my writing and I can't wait to keep writing and keep putting work out into the world. So, as always, thank you so much for being a part of the community. If you're not subscribed to the email list, make sure you go to storygrid.com and subscribe. That's where you're going to get all the new stuff. We're going to keep rolling at Story Grid. We have our class again, the masterwork scene writing class, the narrative path class, our genre blueprint class, and of course our editor certification. We're going to keep running those. It is all four of those are just life changing trainings that you should absolutely take advantage of. You are you're going to be learning this stuff that I have learned that have helped me become the writer that I want to be. So highly recommend those and yeah, so stick around, make sure you're paying attention to what we're doing. We've got a lot of fun stuff planned, but for now this podcast is going on hiatus and so I'm not going to see you next week. I'm going to see you down the road. Thanks so much.