Episode 146 - Managing Writing with a Full-time Career with J.W. Judge
August 9, 2022
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J.W. Judge discusses MANAGING WRITING WITH A FULL-TIME CAREER. He talks about marketing for fiction versus non-fiction; creating the circumstances that will enable you to encounter your readers; the importance of not waiting for the time, but making it, and the discipline needed to do this; using a podcast to create a community; and giving yourself time to be bored.
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J.W. Judge is a lawyer by day and a novelist in the early morning hours before the sun wakes all the other creatures. His writing is fueled by vivid dreams and an overactive imagination. He is the author of the dark fantasy trilogy “The Zauberi Chronicles.” His most recent book is “Write Your Novel One Day at a Time: How to Write a Novel While Having a Career, a Family, and a Life.”
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"You've got to be really, really intentional about it. People would ask, how do you find the time to do that? And I would usually give just an offhand answer, because people aren't usually interested in the truth. But the answer is you have to make the time because if you're just waiting to find the time it's not going to happen." —J.W. Judge
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Links
From Intro:
Information on AWeber's automated content alert functionality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFjQwBsblQ
https://blog.aweber.com/updates/more-eyes-on-content-with-auto-newsletter.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSA0vt3o4Jc
Jeremy's Links:
https://jwjudge.com
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Other Episode Links:
Episode 011 - Making the Move to Full-Time Writer with Ken Lozito
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Information on AWeber's automated content alert functionality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFjQwBsblQ
https://blog.aweber.com/updates/more-eyes-on-content-with-auto-newsletter.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSA0vt3o4Jc
Jeremy's Links:
https://jwjudge.com
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Other Episode Links:
Episode 011 - Making the Move to Full-Time Writer with Ken Lozito
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is JW Judge. Hey Jeremy, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Jeremy: Hey, I'm great. How are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. I think this is something that a lot of our listeners and viewers are going to sympathize with. We're going to be talking about managing writing with a full-time career.
So before we dive into the details of that, or maybe as background to diving into the details of that, Jeremy, how much can you share with us about the day job that you're trying to juggle with your writing?
Jeremy's Day Job
[00:00:27] Jeremy: So I taught high school for six years, right out of college. And then I taught at this small private school. I live in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was getting ready to get married and realized that my job that I loved, it paid below poverty wages, and so I wasn't going to be able to raise a family kind of the way that I wanted to. And ended up going to law school, graduated law school in 2012, kind of in the tail end of the recession. So that was a lot of fun, trying to sort that out. And have been in a litigation practice where I am in civil defense litigation, representing companies that get sued and just handling lots of different things for corporations, and been doing that for the last 10 years.
[00:01:16] Matty: Great. So there are two things I wanted to talk about. One is your decision to be pretty separate about your day job and your working life.
Why a Pen Name?
[00:01:24] Matty: So can you talk a little bit about what led you to decide to have a different pen name than your actual name that you operate in your day job with?
[00:01:31] Jeremy: Sure. So my given name is Jeremy Richter, and back in 2016 I realized the necessity of marketing and branding as a part of my law practice, and that I needed to figure out a way that I could do that sustainably. Because the mentor who I was hired to work for was a very gregarious and outgoing person who loved going to events and conferences, and he was magnetic, and that was not me. I am a person who can do that on necessity but given the option of being in a group of people or reading a book, I'm going to be curled up in a chair every time. So I had to figure out a way to market in a sustainable way. And for me, that was writing.
So back in 2016, I started a law blog where I wrote about topics that were relevant to my clients. That evolved into writing about a lot of law practice related issues, and then that evolved into writing three nonfiction books about law practice.
So I already had this brand of who I was and what I wrote in relation to my law practice, so that when I started writing fiction or I guess, getting ready to publish fiction, because I'd been writing off and on, and then I had two novels that I didn't finish because I just wasn't ready. I didn't have enough information to make them good enough. So when I got ready to publish on the fiction side, I decided that I needed to have a layer between my nonfiction work and my fiction work. So I went with JW Judge, which is my first and middle initial, and then my last name Richter, is German, and it means Judge, so I went with Judge. And it's not a huge deviation from my real name, but it creates enough of a difference that if somebody's looking me up for my fiction work, or even the nonfiction work that I'm doing under that pen name, or if my clients in my law practices are looking me up, there's not going to be any confusion.
Legal Considerations for the Persona Separation
You had talked about the kind of branding positioning aspect of holding down the confusion level. Did you consider legal reasons that it was best to separate those personae?
[00:04:00] Jeremy: No, there wasn't a concern about that for me. It was really all about making sure my clients aren't confused when they go to look me up and that they're finding me for the right reasons. And then the same on the fiction side. I want a particular name to be associated with a particular kind of creative work or legal work or whatever. So that was really the catalyst for it.
Transfers Between Fiction and Nonfiction Writing
[00:04:23] Matty: Whenever I talk to somebody who has other interests or hobbies or professions or what have you, I always like to ask, you're obviously still switching between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. And I'm just curious for you to talk a little bit about what you're able to transfer between those two and what you have to be sure not to transfer between those two.
That has been really interesting in that there has not been a lot of crossover to this point. My first three novels are all fantasy novels, and I may be the only lawyer who didn't write a lawyer as their protagonist, but I didn't, and that was intentional. And those first three books, there wasn't a lot of crossover between my daily work and the fiction writing that I was doing. Externally there wasn't, but internally that motivation and the drive and being process-oriented about how I was going about researching and writing and making sure I get that daily work done, the internal things is where there's crossover and where my analytical thinking from my lawyer brain and process-oriented nature of things crosses over into how I execute writing my fiction as well.
[00:05:40] Jeremy: But I will say that in the fourth novel that I'm currently writing, the protagonist is a lawyer. It is a fantasy book, and his lawyering skills are going to, unless something changes because that keeps happening, have an effect on the turnout of the book.
[00:05:56] Matty: Is that the main character, the lawyer character?
[00:05:59] Jeremy: Yes.
[00:05:59] Matty: Did he just become a lawyer in Book 4?
[00:06:03] Jeremy: Book 4 is not related to the first three books. This is just the fourth book that I happen to be writing. And not the book I expected to be writing. Sometimes ideas come up, and your brain is like, do not turn this idea off, just start writing. And so here we are.
Process-orientation in Publishing Your answer made me think of another spin on that question, which is the crossover between the writing part, between your author career and your lawyer career might not be that great, but I can imagine there's a lot of, or at least some overlap on the publishing side. Like you had talked about process-orientation being valuable. Are you finding that's valuable in your publishing work?
[00:06:39] Jeremy: It is as far as the processes of getting the book completed, edited, proofread, which is my least favorite part of the entire thing. And then the acts of publishing had a great deal of carryover.
Marketing for Fiction versus Nonfiction
[00:06:55] Jeremy: Marketing the nonfiction work that I wrote for my law practice and marketing the fiction has been dramatically different, and I have not been nearly as successful in marketing the fiction as I have in marketing the nonfiction work for lawyers, because those are my people. And I knew what I needed to do there to get that done, but yes, as far as the publishing side of it and the processes of going from draft to finished product, absolutely.
[00:07:28] Matty: It's interesting that you call your fellow lawyers "your people." Are there steps that you're thinking about taking, or maybe we can talk about them here, to make your reader community more your people?
[00:07:39] Jeremy: I absolutely am attempting to do that. And it is a much harder thing to break into. For lawyers, there's only a million and a half lawyers in the United States, and maybe a million and a half seems like a lot but compared to 350 million as a whole. But I'm naturally networking with people as I build my law practice and not just lawyers, but people in companies who are my clients. And I've been building that network and that community of people for a long time and with a new pen name, I'm starting from scratch, because all the social media starts with zero followers. Unless somebody I know in my real life is carrying over and interested in the fiction that I'm writing, it's starting totally new, and it has not been easy.
And so that's something, I published my first novel in June of 2021. And so, the last 12, nope, 14 months now have been figuring that out. And it's a process, and I know it's going to be a slow process, and I'm going to keep writing and keep working at it. And I'm in it for the long game and I'm not expecting immediate, overnight success.
[00:09:00] Matty: It would be an interesting exercise, I think, and I was trying to think through this for myself, because I came from a career in the corporate world and think of all the things that make networking with your day job colleagues easy. You run into them all the time, there's a directory, you know, you can open the virtual yellow pages and find all the lawyers, their names are listed somewhere. But then think about how one could translate that into making your readers, your people.
How Can You Run into Readers?
[00:09:29] Matty: So I was thinking, for example, I think you said you would run into your lawyer colleagues all the time anyway, and one thing people could think about is where can they go to run into the readers that they want to reach? And I guess another learning could be that you don't walk up to a colleague and say, hi, I'm Jeremy Richter, and here are all my qualifications. Here's where I went to law school. Here is my GPA when I graduated. No, you would never do that. You get to know the person first and then if a moment becomes appropriate to introduce your professional credentials, you do that. But that's a really good lesson for authors to learn when they're thinking about readers.
Any other things like that, where you can say, oh yeah, if I think about it, my professional life, this way, here's how I can translate that learning.
[00:10:17] Jeremy: So yesterday on Twitter I saw a quote that was attributed to Neil Gaiman, in which he said, I'm going to have to paraphrase it because I don't remember it exactly, but if you have a blog, it should just be about you. And I had a writing blog for my law practice for a long time. And so I also started that even before I finished my first novel. I had a writing blog where I wrote what I was learning about the craft of writing and the business of writing and things of that nature. Because even before fiction writing, I was publishing two of my three nonfiction books through a publishing imprint that I created.
And I have a website at ExpectantWriter.com, that's all about the writing process. And I try to write daily on there, whether it's a hundred words or sometimes a couple hundred words about just what I'm experiencing, and there's good writing days and bad writing days, so that I want as much information out there with my name attached to it as possible to give people an opportunity to discover me. And when they do, hopefully they'll be interested in what they're seeing and be interested in the work that I'm doing and pick that up.
And so that's a part of what I'm doing to go out of my way to try to give people an opportunity to run into me because they're not going to run into me on the street, like my colleagues, but where are places on the internet that they can run into me?
And in business, you mentioned being from the corporate world, you're going to do business with people that you like and that you trust. And so I want to give potential readers, other authors, an opportunity to do the same thing, because it's probably not going to be in person. But if you could find me on the internet and learn more about me and decide whether you like me and trust what I'm doing, then maybe you're going to go buy my material. And that daily writing blog actually was the catalyst for the nonfiction book that I have written and that's coming out in a couple months, "How to Write Your Novel One Day at a Time."
Don't Wait for the Time – Make it!
[00:12:19] Matty: Well, that's a great segue, because that is the other category of information that we wanted to talk about today, which is, how are you finding time to be creative for your fiction work among what you need to do for your nonfiction and professional life?
[00:12:30] Jeremy: You've got to be really, really intentional about it. Because people would ask, how do you find the time to do that? And I would usually give just an offhand answer, because people aren't really usually interested in the truth, but the answer is, you have to make the time, because if you're just waiting to find the time it's not going to happen. And so what I have done, going all the way back to 2016 when I was doing my law blog, was I get up at five o'clock every weekday, and at this point it's on the weekends too, because that's just what my body does. And that's when I make the time for the creative work. Most days, that's writing. Some days it's researching. I have a law podcast, so some days it's editing that and I'm going to be launching a writing podcast soon as another means of marketing, with Barbara Hinske, who's a bestselling mystery and romance author that we're going to do a writing podcast together.
And so that's the time of day that basically an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, when I set aside the time to do it. Now sometimes, life intervenes, and kids get up early or I've got a trial coming up or depositions or something with work and that interferes. And those things are going to happen, but that block of time is set aside for the creative work. And the other things are the exception to the rule when they break in.
And the other part is sometimes, it's writing 50 or a hundred words here and there in car line waiting to pick up a kid from school or when the little one is in the bath or whenever. There are just these small increments of time. And I really picked that up from Michael La Ronn, who's somebody that I had on my podcast, and I had heard him on other podcasts and learned from him that value of those small increments of time that can really add up over the course of time to pay off. And yeah, that's how I do that.
[00:14:40] Matty: Yeah, Michael La Ronn has been a guest several times on The Indy Author, and we're all busy, but God bless him.
[00:14:47] Jeremy: Yeah, I don't know how he does it.
[00:14:48] Matty: He's insanely busy. And he's also one of my sort of poster people for being supportive and available. Because as an example, when I was putting up my AI-narrated Google Play book, he had already done one and I with a little trepidation, send him a couple of questions and he was super, super helpful. It all spills over into the networking thing.
What is the Early Morning Time Spent On?
[00:15:10] Matty: So I think what I'm hearing is that the five o'clock time is writing time specifically, am I understanding that correctly, as opposed to marketing or promotion or any of those other things?
[00:15:21] Jeremy: Most days it's writing time, but a lot of days, those other, the marketing and promotion, have to come in that window as well. And so there are days when that takes the place of writing because once the day gets started and the kids are up and work has started, those things don't relent until the kids are in bed. And by then, my brain is mushy and it's time for me and my wife to relax and watch a show before we fall asleep. So generally, all of the writing craft and writing business things have got to happen in that small window. Now, there are other times when I can fit it in other times, but I can't count on that. All I can count on is that time that I've specifically curated for it.
When Does the Morning Creative Window End?
[00:16:09] Matty: And that's 5 to, what is the end time of that period?
[00:16:13] Jeremy: 5 to 6, maybe 6:30, so really an hour and a half on a good day.
[00:16:19] Matty: It's very interesting to think about how small you can chunk increments of time before it's no longer productive. And this is going to be wildly different depending on each person, and also depending on their circumstances. I don't know that I would ever have been that person who could get something done in 15 minutes, especially creative writing. Like tasks, yes. But creative writing, no, like by the time I was in the mood to start writing the time would be over.
But I did realize one of the messages that I felt like resurrecting all my work colleague management level people's emails and sending this news flash is, I think a lot of the lack of efficiency in corporate America is because of task switching. And I've talked about the dangers of task switching before on the podcast. And I won't go into all the details that I like to share again. But I find that the bigger I can chunk my time out, the more I can get done.
So I really strive to have a day when, other than clean up admin stuff I do first thing in the morning to get it out of the way, I'm pretty much just writing. And to achieve that, I have another day where I just know like Mondays. Mondays are just podcasts. I'm never going to get any writing done. I'm either recording a podcast or I'm preparing a podcast for the Tuesday airing.
Are there specific approaches you use in order to make your time in those smaller chunks, as productive as possible?
The Discipline of Making Time to Create
[00:17:44] Jeremy: There's really not any mental exercises or anything I do. It's just, I know that this is the time that I've got. And I wake up, take a shower, get my coffee, sit down, and that's the time that I've got. So if it's going to get done, that's when. So I guess there is a system in that it's more or less the same thing every day. But then there's this weekend. You mentioned not being able to do things in very small increments of time, which I think is interesting how different people are wired. Because at one point this weekend, I had this idea about several lines of dialogue that I needed to get down before they escaped my brain and never came back. And so I looked at the clock and was like, okay, I have eight minutes: go. And wrote I don't remember how many words, not that many, but it got down what I needed to get down so that I didn't lose it.
And so sometimes it's big chunks of time and sometimes it's little chunks of time, maybe not even a chunk, a sliver at that point for eight minutes. But yeah, I just think it's interesting how we're all wired so differently that the most important part is knowing your own limitations.
And you mentioned Mondays are podcast days. Sometimes that limitation is administrative stuff that has to get done. And knowing that today's not the day, and that's okay. But that doesn't give you an opportunity to say, I'm going to just let it slide for the next couple of days, because then two and three and you lose the habit.
You're going to have off days. I started writing this fourth novel that I'm working on about a month ago. And I had a really productive three weeks. And then I hit a snag, and for three days in a row, it was basically 120 to 160 words. And it was like, okay, I know that this can't last or else I'm not going to get the book done by Thanksgiving, like I want to. I have to get back to writing this 300 to 500 words on average every day so that I can get the book done in the time that I want and move on to the next thing and get everything done. Yeah, it's not a mental process of, I have any exercises, it's more, I guess I think of it as a discipline.
Disciplined with Time and Energy
[00:19:58] Matty: Yeah, and you're having to be disciplined not only about your time, which I think we've talked about, but also your energy. So you're spreading your energy, not only across your day job, but your family as well. So is there a different set of rules that you apply in order to marshal the energy you need for your creative work?
[00:20:15] Jeremy: No, I think that I'm really fortunate in that I'm a high-energy person. Not like I'm bouncing off the walls, because that's not me. I had a roommate in college that I was great friends with, and he was just hyperactive, bouncing-off-the-walls kind of person. And that's not me, but I have a high, sustainable energy level. I need seven hours of sleep a night on average. And I know that, so I get that sleep. I can do six hours for a pretty long period of time, but I know what I need sleep wise. The writing time, the family, which is the highest priority, work. I've been doing this for six years now and I've just over that time, figured out how to be able to manage all of those things.
Giving Yourself Time to be Bored
[00:20:59] Matty: Do you have an explicit prioritization? So for me, I use Trello and I have a list of the time-specific things, a list of what I need to do, and I've started, the list of things I have to do but I haven't started, and some other things. But I also have a list that I call the "Macro View." And so it has the big, chunky stuff, like podcasting or my fictional work in progress and a couple of other things, I think there are like five things on that list. And II have a line so that I can move the thing I'm working on that day to the top, which I'm doing because I'm hoping it keeps me from wandering off into other unplanned activities that shouldn't be my priority at the moment. Anything like that, that you're applying in your situation?
[00:21:44] Jeremy: There's really not. Although I think those are awesome tools and super-helpful, and I use to-do lists and spreadsheets for work to keep myself organized. But I have not carried that over. I have spreadsheets that I use for like frameworks for the novels that I'm writing, but not for a to-do list kind of function. I don't have anything like that. I think it would probably be beneficial if I did. I think that the downside for me of those kinds of lists is that it's easy to go back to them. If I've switched my fiction and I'm working on that and I've hit a little snag and rather than just sitting there and letting it percolate, I'll think, oh, I'll just go over to my to-do list and knock a couple items off. And now I'm in a different frame of mind, which is why I had that chunky, no, this afternoon it's fiction. And if you can't do fiction, then you get to sweep the floor or something, but you can't go switch back and make another Facebook ad or whatever.
I totally appreciate what you're saying there, because I am very bad about just giving myself time to think or to be bored. And I'm always trying to, if I'm out for a walk or doing yard work or doing sweeping, cleaning the bathrooms, whatever, I either have a podcast in or an audio book in, and I don't give myself that time to let ideas percolate, would be beneficial.
Allow Time to Consume Content and be Inspired
I just want to be consuming and learning or being entertained, because listening to audio books is the time I have to read, is listening to audiobooks. And I don't have a lot of other time just to read, which I enjoy so much. I try and read at the end of the night, but doing that on my Kindle, I've been reading the same book since March, because it's a page at a time before I fall asleep.
[00:23:34] Jeremy: And that time that I could be just letting my brain melt and percolate and think about things, I'm generally consuming new ideas for other books. And so I would generally probably benefit from doing some of that. But that's one of those things, that's the decision that I've made, and so far, it's working, and until we hit a crisis point, then I guess we'll keep it the way it is.
[00:24:00] Matty: Yeah, there are a couple of podcast episodes that I think really support the idea of just needing some quiet time. And one is an older one with Zach Bohannon about "Digital Minimalism." And then there's one that hasn't aired at the time of this recording but will have aired by the time our episode airs with John Gaspard, who talked about going for a walk with his dog and not having a podcast or audiobook or anything in his earbud. And I was like, really? And he said, yeah, that's the time for me and my dog. And I was like, that's quite a concept. I'm going to try that. I have tried doing that, like not packing a podcast in when I take the dogs for a walk. It is very pleasant and makes it more likely that I'm going to have a good idea for my fiction.
[00:24:42] Jeremy: Well, when I go for runs, which isn't as much as it needs to be, but trying, I will almost always be listening to a podcast. But there will be times when I find that I haven't listened to anything that's been said for the last five minutes, because my brain of its own started going down that winding path of what's coming up next in the book or needs to happen or in my own work that you know, that I'm doing.
So there's sometimes when your brain's just going to take over. Being out and running or walking and being outside, there is something about that, it kicks in some creative thing. And I remember several years ago, I read a book called "Bandersnatch," and it was about CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and the Inklings, and how they would go on these long walks and just talk about ideas and come up with story ideas. And I think there is a real connection there.
[00:25:37] Jeremy: It's such a good book. The author is Diana Glyer, and as much as it's about those things, it is more about all those guys didn't see the world the same way, but they were able to have discourse and disagreements and have strong relationships, because of, or in spite of that, however, you want to look at it. But they were also to help years of working together, helping each other with their own projects. And so much of the writing that we see from Tolkien and Lewis was influenced directly by this group of writers that met together for decades.
JW's Podcast
So I wanted kind of selfishly, but I think that this will be generalizable too. I wanted to ask you about your podcast. Because not all of our listeners are going to be podcasters, but I think everybody probably has this idea of, there's something else I want to do in the writing publishing world, it could be a podcast, it could be a blog, it could be writing articles. It could be all sorts of things. But in this case, I want to talk about in terms of the podcast. You're already so booked up. This is actually interesting also with an interview I did with Michael La Ronn called, "Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End," because he decided to wrap up one of the many things he's been doing creatively, and how he made that decision.
[00:26:54] Matty: So here we are in a situation where you're in the early stages of launching this effort. So what thought went into you deciding that was another thing that you wanted to invest your time and energy in?
[00:27:05] Jeremy: So I currently have a podcast called "Lawyerpreneur" that is about lawyers who are doing interesting and creative work. And I started it on a whim in March of 2020, about two weeks after the pandemic set in and everything got locked down. And the reason I started that podcast was, I had a book idea that would be interview-based, just interviews with lawyers about things that they were doing, either creatively within their law practices or outside of them or having left law practice and do something else. Because there are a lot of lawyers who do that.
But I'm an introvert, so I never actually did those interviews, and that book just sat there undone for a couple of years. So then the pandemic kicks in, everybody's at home and I'm like, okay, we're just going to do this.
Using a Podcast to Build Community
[00:27:58] Jeremy: And so without a significant amount of forethought, I just started the podcast. And I had people that I knew that I could interview and did, and now we're 60-something episodes in and two and a half years later almost.
But I'm ready to bring that one to an end. It was not a podcast that I ever intended to go on indefinitely. It had an expiration date. I didn't know what that would be, but it turns out that it's going to be July or August because it's run its course. But I really enjoy the medium of podcasting and have created such an unexpected network and community of just really impressive people, that I didn't expect out of that podcast, that so many of those relationships would go on to be collaborations in other projects or people who have become acquaintances and friends.
And in fact, Barbara Hinske who I'm starting the new podcast with, came to my attention because she was on The Self-publishing Show podcast. I reached out to her about being on mine, because she was a retired lawyer who was writing these books, and we just had a kinship that we developed and had stayed in touch. And so now we're going to start this new project together, because I want the same things. I want those relationships with other writers that I don't know for me, other people are going to be like, the relationships are way easier than you're making it out to be, but for me they're not. And so this is a way to meet other writers within a specific constraint and format and grow my network and community of writers. Maybe we'll collaborate, maybe we will never talk again, but I'm learning about the craft of writing and the business of writing.
And mostly, I think our podcast is going to focus on the craft of writing, but I want to learn from all of these other people who've been doing it well and doing it for years. And I learn a lot by having these conversations, by asking questions and getting answers. And you have somebody who's captive for you for 30 or 45 minutes where you can ask whatever you want about writing. And they're getting a benefit from it too. And I just really enjoyed the medium and the conversations.
[00:30:26] Jeremy: And one of the things I'm looking forward to is that it is going to be much more topical than the podcast about lawyers, which has been profiling individuals and the work they're doing. But this new podcast is that we're going to call "The Write Approach," is going to be topical. And I'm really excited about the change in format and direction and having a co-host, after doing everything on my own for two and a half years.
[00:30:55] Matty: Very cool. I think that's a great way to wrap up because it's a nice loopback to what we were talking about earlier about creating a community, like running onto people in the hallway or at the water cooler, in your day job, being able to do that. And I also really the theme about the intentionality of planning your time in your work that, I don't think that there's any right answer, but the idea of being intentional and thoughtful and yeah, I think intentional is the best word, which I know is one that comes up a lot in your own work.
So Jeremy, thank you so much. Please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:31:29] Jeremy: All right. Well, thanks so much for the time, the opportunity to be here. I have an author website at JWJudge.com. I have my writing blog at ExpectantWriter.com. On social media you can find me on Twitter, it's @ J_W_Judge, and the same thing on Instagram. And books, my novels and my new nonfiction book, "Write Your Novel One Day at a Time," can all be found wherever it is you like to buy your books.
[00:32:00] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
[00:32:02] Jeremy: Thank you.
[00:00:05] Jeremy: Hey, I'm great. How are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. I think this is something that a lot of our listeners and viewers are going to sympathize with. We're going to be talking about managing writing with a full-time career.
So before we dive into the details of that, or maybe as background to diving into the details of that, Jeremy, how much can you share with us about the day job that you're trying to juggle with your writing?
Jeremy's Day Job
[00:00:27] Jeremy: So I taught high school for six years, right out of college. And then I taught at this small private school. I live in Birmingham, Alabama, and I was getting ready to get married and realized that my job that I loved, it paid below poverty wages, and so I wasn't going to be able to raise a family kind of the way that I wanted to. And ended up going to law school, graduated law school in 2012, kind of in the tail end of the recession. So that was a lot of fun, trying to sort that out. And have been in a litigation practice where I am in civil defense litigation, representing companies that get sued and just handling lots of different things for corporations, and been doing that for the last 10 years.
[00:01:16] Matty: Great. So there are two things I wanted to talk about. One is your decision to be pretty separate about your day job and your working life.
Why a Pen Name?
[00:01:24] Matty: So can you talk a little bit about what led you to decide to have a different pen name than your actual name that you operate in your day job with?
[00:01:31] Jeremy: Sure. So my given name is Jeremy Richter, and back in 2016 I realized the necessity of marketing and branding as a part of my law practice, and that I needed to figure out a way that I could do that sustainably. Because the mentor who I was hired to work for was a very gregarious and outgoing person who loved going to events and conferences, and he was magnetic, and that was not me. I am a person who can do that on necessity but given the option of being in a group of people or reading a book, I'm going to be curled up in a chair every time. So I had to figure out a way to market in a sustainable way. And for me, that was writing.
So back in 2016, I started a law blog where I wrote about topics that were relevant to my clients. That evolved into writing about a lot of law practice related issues, and then that evolved into writing three nonfiction books about law practice.
So I already had this brand of who I was and what I wrote in relation to my law practice, so that when I started writing fiction or I guess, getting ready to publish fiction, because I'd been writing off and on, and then I had two novels that I didn't finish because I just wasn't ready. I didn't have enough information to make them good enough. So when I got ready to publish on the fiction side, I decided that I needed to have a layer between my nonfiction work and my fiction work. So I went with JW Judge, which is my first and middle initial, and then my last name Richter, is German, and it means Judge, so I went with Judge. And it's not a huge deviation from my real name, but it creates enough of a difference that if somebody's looking me up for my fiction work, or even the nonfiction work that I'm doing under that pen name, or if my clients in my law practices are looking me up, there's not going to be any confusion.
Legal Considerations for the Persona Separation
You had talked about the kind of branding positioning aspect of holding down the confusion level. Did you consider legal reasons that it was best to separate those personae?
[00:04:00] Jeremy: No, there wasn't a concern about that for me. It was really all about making sure my clients aren't confused when they go to look me up and that they're finding me for the right reasons. And then the same on the fiction side. I want a particular name to be associated with a particular kind of creative work or legal work or whatever. So that was really the catalyst for it.
Transfers Between Fiction and Nonfiction Writing
[00:04:23] Matty: Whenever I talk to somebody who has other interests or hobbies or professions or what have you, I always like to ask, you're obviously still switching between writing fiction and writing nonfiction. And I'm just curious for you to talk a little bit about what you're able to transfer between those two and what you have to be sure not to transfer between those two.
That has been really interesting in that there has not been a lot of crossover to this point. My first three novels are all fantasy novels, and I may be the only lawyer who didn't write a lawyer as their protagonist, but I didn't, and that was intentional. And those first three books, there wasn't a lot of crossover between my daily work and the fiction writing that I was doing. Externally there wasn't, but internally that motivation and the drive and being process-oriented about how I was going about researching and writing and making sure I get that daily work done, the internal things is where there's crossover and where my analytical thinking from my lawyer brain and process-oriented nature of things crosses over into how I execute writing my fiction as well.
[00:05:40] Jeremy: But I will say that in the fourth novel that I'm currently writing, the protagonist is a lawyer. It is a fantasy book, and his lawyering skills are going to, unless something changes because that keeps happening, have an effect on the turnout of the book.
[00:05:56] Matty: Is that the main character, the lawyer character?
[00:05:59] Jeremy: Yes.
[00:05:59] Matty: Did he just become a lawyer in Book 4?
[00:06:03] Jeremy: Book 4 is not related to the first three books. This is just the fourth book that I happen to be writing. And not the book I expected to be writing. Sometimes ideas come up, and your brain is like, do not turn this idea off, just start writing. And so here we are.
Process-orientation in Publishing Your answer made me think of another spin on that question, which is the crossover between the writing part, between your author career and your lawyer career might not be that great, but I can imagine there's a lot of, or at least some overlap on the publishing side. Like you had talked about process-orientation being valuable. Are you finding that's valuable in your publishing work?
[00:06:39] Jeremy: It is as far as the processes of getting the book completed, edited, proofread, which is my least favorite part of the entire thing. And then the acts of publishing had a great deal of carryover.
Marketing for Fiction versus Nonfiction
[00:06:55] Jeremy: Marketing the nonfiction work that I wrote for my law practice and marketing the fiction has been dramatically different, and I have not been nearly as successful in marketing the fiction as I have in marketing the nonfiction work for lawyers, because those are my people. And I knew what I needed to do there to get that done, but yes, as far as the publishing side of it and the processes of going from draft to finished product, absolutely.
[00:07:28] Matty: It's interesting that you call your fellow lawyers "your people." Are there steps that you're thinking about taking, or maybe we can talk about them here, to make your reader community more your people?
[00:07:39] Jeremy: I absolutely am attempting to do that. And it is a much harder thing to break into. For lawyers, there's only a million and a half lawyers in the United States, and maybe a million and a half seems like a lot but compared to 350 million as a whole. But I'm naturally networking with people as I build my law practice and not just lawyers, but people in companies who are my clients. And I've been building that network and that community of people for a long time and with a new pen name, I'm starting from scratch, because all the social media starts with zero followers. Unless somebody I know in my real life is carrying over and interested in the fiction that I'm writing, it's starting totally new, and it has not been easy.
And so that's something, I published my first novel in June of 2021. And so, the last 12, nope, 14 months now have been figuring that out. And it's a process, and I know it's going to be a slow process, and I'm going to keep writing and keep working at it. And I'm in it for the long game and I'm not expecting immediate, overnight success.
[00:09:00] Matty: It would be an interesting exercise, I think, and I was trying to think through this for myself, because I came from a career in the corporate world and think of all the things that make networking with your day job colleagues easy. You run into them all the time, there's a directory, you know, you can open the virtual yellow pages and find all the lawyers, their names are listed somewhere. But then think about how one could translate that into making your readers, your people.
How Can You Run into Readers?
[00:09:29] Matty: So I was thinking, for example, I think you said you would run into your lawyer colleagues all the time anyway, and one thing people could think about is where can they go to run into the readers that they want to reach? And I guess another learning could be that you don't walk up to a colleague and say, hi, I'm Jeremy Richter, and here are all my qualifications. Here's where I went to law school. Here is my GPA when I graduated. No, you would never do that. You get to know the person first and then if a moment becomes appropriate to introduce your professional credentials, you do that. But that's a really good lesson for authors to learn when they're thinking about readers.
Any other things like that, where you can say, oh yeah, if I think about it, my professional life, this way, here's how I can translate that learning.
[00:10:17] Jeremy: So yesterday on Twitter I saw a quote that was attributed to Neil Gaiman, in which he said, I'm going to have to paraphrase it because I don't remember it exactly, but if you have a blog, it should just be about you. And I had a writing blog for my law practice for a long time. And so I also started that even before I finished my first novel. I had a writing blog where I wrote what I was learning about the craft of writing and the business of writing and things of that nature. Because even before fiction writing, I was publishing two of my three nonfiction books through a publishing imprint that I created.
And I have a website at ExpectantWriter.com, that's all about the writing process. And I try to write daily on there, whether it's a hundred words or sometimes a couple hundred words about just what I'm experiencing, and there's good writing days and bad writing days, so that I want as much information out there with my name attached to it as possible to give people an opportunity to discover me. And when they do, hopefully they'll be interested in what they're seeing and be interested in the work that I'm doing and pick that up.
And so that's a part of what I'm doing to go out of my way to try to give people an opportunity to run into me because they're not going to run into me on the street, like my colleagues, but where are places on the internet that they can run into me?
And in business, you mentioned being from the corporate world, you're going to do business with people that you like and that you trust. And so I want to give potential readers, other authors, an opportunity to do the same thing, because it's probably not going to be in person. But if you could find me on the internet and learn more about me and decide whether you like me and trust what I'm doing, then maybe you're going to go buy my material. And that daily writing blog actually was the catalyst for the nonfiction book that I have written and that's coming out in a couple months, "How to Write Your Novel One Day at a Time."
Don't Wait for the Time – Make it!
[00:12:19] Matty: Well, that's a great segue, because that is the other category of information that we wanted to talk about today, which is, how are you finding time to be creative for your fiction work among what you need to do for your nonfiction and professional life?
[00:12:30] Jeremy: You've got to be really, really intentional about it. Because people would ask, how do you find the time to do that? And I would usually give just an offhand answer, because people aren't really usually interested in the truth, but the answer is, you have to make the time, because if you're just waiting to find the time it's not going to happen. And so what I have done, going all the way back to 2016 when I was doing my law blog, was I get up at five o'clock every weekday, and at this point it's on the weekends too, because that's just what my body does. And that's when I make the time for the creative work. Most days, that's writing. Some days it's researching. I have a law podcast, so some days it's editing that and I'm going to be launching a writing podcast soon as another means of marketing, with Barbara Hinske, who's a bestselling mystery and romance author that we're going to do a writing podcast together.
And so that's the time of day that basically an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, when I set aside the time to do it. Now sometimes, life intervenes, and kids get up early or I've got a trial coming up or depositions or something with work and that interferes. And those things are going to happen, but that block of time is set aside for the creative work. And the other things are the exception to the rule when they break in.
And the other part is sometimes, it's writing 50 or a hundred words here and there in car line waiting to pick up a kid from school or when the little one is in the bath or whenever. There are just these small increments of time. And I really picked that up from Michael La Ronn, who's somebody that I had on my podcast, and I had heard him on other podcasts and learned from him that value of those small increments of time that can really add up over the course of time to pay off. And yeah, that's how I do that.
[00:14:40] Matty: Yeah, Michael La Ronn has been a guest several times on The Indy Author, and we're all busy, but God bless him.
[00:14:47] Jeremy: Yeah, I don't know how he does it.
[00:14:48] Matty: He's insanely busy. And he's also one of my sort of poster people for being supportive and available. Because as an example, when I was putting up my AI-narrated Google Play book, he had already done one and I with a little trepidation, send him a couple of questions and he was super, super helpful. It all spills over into the networking thing.
What is the Early Morning Time Spent On?
[00:15:10] Matty: So I think what I'm hearing is that the five o'clock time is writing time specifically, am I understanding that correctly, as opposed to marketing or promotion or any of those other things?
[00:15:21] Jeremy: Most days it's writing time, but a lot of days, those other, the marketing and promotion, have to come in that window as well. And so there are days when that takes the place of writing because once the day gets started and the kids are up and work has started, those things don't relent until the kids are in bed. And by then, my brain is mushy and it's time for me and my wife to relax and watch a show before we fall asleep. So generally, all of the writing craft and writing business things have got to happen in that small window. Now, there are other times when I can fit it in other times, but I can't count on that. All I can count on is that time that I've specifically curated for it.
When Does the Morning Creative Window End?
[00:16:09] Matty: And that's 5 to, what is the end time of that period?
[00:16:13] Jeremy: 5 to 6, maybe 6:30, so really an hour and a half on a good day.
[00:16:19] Matty: It's very interesting to think about how small you can chunk increments of time before it's no longer productive. And this is going to be wildly different depending on each person, and also depending on their circumstances. I don't know that I would ever have been that person who could get something done in 15 minutes, especially creative writing. Like tasks, yes. But creative writing, no, like by the time I was in the mood to start writing the time would be over.
But I did realize one of the messages that I felt like resurrecting all my work colleague management level people's emails and sending this news flash is, I think a lot of the lack of efficiency in corporate America is because of task switching. And I've talked about the dangers of task switching before on the podcast. And I won't go into all the details that I like to share again. But I find that the bigger I can chunk my time out, the more I can get done.
So I really strive to have a day when, other than clean up admin stuff I do first thing in the morning to get it out of the way, I'm pretty much just writing. And to achieve that, I have another day where I just know like Mondays. Mondays are just podcasts. I'm never going to get any writing done. I'm either recording a podcast or I'm preparing a podcast for the Tuesday airing.
Are there specific approaches you use in order to make your time in those smaller chunks, as productive as possible?
The Discipline of Making Time to Create
[00:17:44] Jeremy: There's really not any mental exercises or anything I do. It's just, I know that this is the time that I've got. And I wake up, take a shower, get my coffee, sit down, and that's the time that I've got. So if it's going to get done, that's when. So I guess there is a system in that it's more or less the same thing every day. But then there's this weekend. You mentioned not being able to do things in very small increments of time, which I think is interesting how different people are wired. Because at one point this weekend, I had this idea about several lines of dialogue that I needed to get down before they escaped my brain and never came back. And so I looked at the clock and was like, okay, I have eight minutes: go. And wrote I don't remember how many words, not that many, but it got down what I needed to get down so that I didn't lose it.
And so sometimes it's big chunks of time and sometimes it's little chunks of time, maybe not even a chunk, a sliver at that point for eight minutes. But yeah, I just think it's interesting how we're all wired so differently that the most important part is knowing your own limitations.
And you mentioned Mondays are podcast days. Sometimes that limitation is administrative stuff that has to get done. And knowing that today's not the day, and that's okay. But that doesn't give you an opportunity to say, I'm going to just let it slide for the next couple of days, because then two and three and you lose the habit.
You're going to have off days. I started writing this fourth novel that I'm working on about a month ago. And I had a really productive three weeks. And then I hit a snag, and for three days in a row, it was basically 120 to 160 words. And it was like, okay, I know that this can't last or else I'm not going to get the book done by Thanksgiving, like I want to. I have to get back to writing this 300 to 500 words on average every day so that I can get the book done in the time that I want and move on to the next thing and get everything done. Yeah, it's not a mental process of, I have any exercises, it's more, I guess I think of it as a discipline.
Disciplined with Time and Energy
[00:19:58] Matty: Yeah, and you're having to be disciplined not only about your time, which I think we've talked about, but also your energy. So you're spreading your energy, not only across your day job, but your family as well. So is there a different set of rules that you apply in order to marshal the energy you need for your creative work?
[00:20:15] Jeremy: No, I think that I'm really fortunate in that I'm a high-energy person. Not like I'm bouncing off the walls, because that's not me. I had a roommate in college that I was great friends with, and he was just hyperactive, bouncing-off-the-walls kind of person. And that's not me, but I have a high, sustainable energy level. I need seven hours of sleep a night on average. And I know that, so I get that sleep. I can do six hours for a pretty long period of time, but I know what I need sleep wise. The writing time, the family, which is the highest priority, work. I've been doing this for six years now and I've just over that time, figured out how to be able to manage all of those things.
Giving Yourself Time to be Bored
[00:20:59] Matty: Do you have an explicit prioritization? So for me, I use Trello and I have a list of the time-specific things, a list of what I need to do, and I've started, the list of things I have to do but I haven't started, and some other things. But I also have a list that I call the "Macro View." And so it has the big, chunky stuff, like podcasting or my fictional work in progress and a couple of other things, I think there are like five things on that list. And II have a line so that I can move the thing I'm working on that day to the top, which I'm doing because I'm hoping it keeps me from wandering off into other unplanned activities that shouldn't be my priority at the moment. Anything like that, that you're applying in your situation?
[00:21:44] Jeremy: There's really not. Although I think those are awesome tools and super-helpful, and I use to-do lists and spreadsheets for work to keep myself organized. But I have not carried that over. I have spreadsheets that I use for like frameworks for the novels that I'm writing, but not for a to-do list kind of function. I don't have anything like that. I think it would probably be beneficial if I did. I think that the downside for me of those kinds of lists is that it's easy to go back to them. If I've switched my fiction and I'm working on that and I've hit a little snag and rather than just sitting there and letting it percolate, I'll think, oh, I'll just go over to my to-do list and knock a couple items off. And now I'm in a different frame of mind, which is why I had that chunky, no, this afternoon it's fiction. And if you can't do fiction, then you get to sweep the floor or something, but you can't go switch back and make another Facebook ad or whatever.
I totally appreciate what you're saying there, because I am very bad about just giving myself time to think or to be bored. And I'm always trying to, if I'm out for a walk or doing yard work or doing sweeping, cleaning the bathrooms, whatever, I either have a podcast in or an audio book in, and I don't give myself that time to let ideas percolate, would be beneficial.
Allow Time to Consume Content and be Inspired
I just want to be consuming and learning or being entertained, because listening to audio books is the time I have to read, is listening to audiobooks. And I don't have a lot of other time just to read, which I enjoy so much. I try and read at the end of the night, but doing that on my Kindle, I've been reading the same book since March, because it's a page at a time before I fall asleep.
[00:23:34] Jeremy: And that time that I could be just letting my brain melt and percolate and think about things, I'm generally consuming new ideas for other books. And so I would generally probably benefit from doing some of that. But that's one of those things, that's the decision that I've made, and so far, it's working, and until we hit a crisis point, then I guess we'll keep it the way it is.
[00:24:00] Matty: Yeah, there are a couple of podcast episodes that I think really support the idea of just needing some quiet time. And one is an older one with Zach Bohannon about "Digital Minimalism." And then there's one that hasn't aired at the time of this recording but will have aired by the time our episode airs with John Gaspard, who talked about going for a walk with his dog and not having a podcast or audiobook or anything in his earbud. And I was like, really? And he said, yeah, that's the time for me and my dog. And I was like, that's quite a concept. I'm going to try that. I have tried doing that, like not packing a podcast in when I take the dogs for a walk. It is very pleasant and makes it more likely that I'm going to have a good idea for my fiction.
[00:24:42] Jeremy: Well, when I go for runs, which isn't as much as it needs to be, but trying, I will almost always be listening to a podcast. But there will be times when I find that I haven't listened to anything that's been said for the last five minutes, because my brain of its own started going down that winding path of what's coming up next in the book or needs to happen or in my own work that you know, that I'm doing.
So there's sometimes when your brain's just going to take over. Being out and running or walking and being outside, there is something about that, it kicks in some creative thing. And I remember several years ago, I read a book called "Bandersnatch," and it was about CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien and the Inklings, and how they would go on these long walks and just talk about ideas and come up with story ideas. And I think there is a real connection there.
[00:25:37] Jeremy: It's such a good book. The author is Diana Glyer, and as much as it's about those things, it is more about all those guys didn't see the world the same way, but they were able to have discourse and disagreements and have strong relationships, because of, or in spite of that, however, you want to look at it. But they were also to help years of working together, helping each other with their own projects. And so much of the writing that we see from Tolkien and Lewis was influenced directly by this group of writers that met together for decades.
JW's Podcast
So I wanted kind of selfishly, but I think that this will be generalizable too. I wanted to ask you about your podcast. Because not all of our listeners are going to be podcasters, but I think everybody probably has this idea of, there's something else I want to do in the writing publishing world, it could be a podcast, it could be a blog, it could be writing articles. It could be all sorts of things. But in this case, I want to talk about in terms of the podcast. You're already so booked up. This is actually interesting also with an interview I did with Michael La Ronn called, "Bringing a Creative Endeavor to an End," because he decided to wrap up one of the many things he's been doing creatively, and how he made that decision.
[00:26:54] Matty: So here we are in a situation where you're in the early stages of launching this effort. So what thought went into you deciding that was another thing that you wanted to invest your time and energy in?
[00:27:05] Jeremy: So I currently have a podcast called "Lawyerpreneur" that is about lawyers who are doing interesting and creative work. And I started it on a whim in March of 2020, about two weeks after the pandemic set in and everything got locked down. And the reason I started that podcast was, I had a book idea that would be interview-based, just interviews with lawyers about things that they were doing, either creatively within their law practices or outside of them or having left law practice and do something else. Because there are a lot of lawyers who do that.
But I'm an introvert, so I never actually did those interviews, and that book just sat there undone for a couple of years. So then the pandemic kicks in, everybody's at home and I'm like, okay, we're just going to do this.
Using a Podcast to Build Community
[00:27:58] Jeremy: And so without a significant amount of forethought, I just started the podcast. And I had people that I knew that I could interview and did, and now we're 60-something episodes in and two and a half years later almost.
But I'm ready to bring that one to an end. It was not a podcast that I ever intended to go on indefinitely. It had an expiration date. I didn't know what that would be, but it turns out that it's going to be July or August because it's run its course. But I really enjoy the medium of podcasting and have created such an unexpected network and community of just really impressive people, that I didn't expect out of that podcast, that so many of those relationships would go on to be collaborations in other projects or people who have become acquaintances and friends.
And in fact, Barbara Hinske who I'm starting the new podcast with, came to my attention because she was on The Self-publishing Show podcast. I reached out to her about being on mine, because she was a retired lawyer who was writing these books, and we just had a kinship that we developed and had stayed in touch. And so now we're going to start this new project together, because I want the same things. I want those relationships with other writers that I don't know for me, other people are going to be like, the relationships are way easier than you're making it out to be, but for me they're not. And so this is a way to meet other writers within a specific constraint and format and grow my network and community of writers. Maybe we'll collaborate, maybe we will never talk again, but I'm learning about the craft of writing and the business of writing.
And mostly, I think our podcast is going to focus on the craft of writing, but I want to learn from all of these other people who've been doing it well and doing it for years. And I learn a lot by having these conversations, by asking questions and getting answers. And you have somebody who's captive for you for 30 or 45 minutes where you can ask whatever you want about writing. And they're getting a benefit from it too. And I just really enjoyed the medium and the conversations.
[00:30:26] Jeremy: And one of the things I'm looking forward to is that it is going to be much more topical than the podcast about lawyers, which has been profiling individuals and the work they're doing. But this new podcast is that we're going to call "The Write Approach," is going to be topical. And I'm really excited about the change in format and direction and having a co-host, after doing everything on my own for two and a half years.
[00:30:55] Matty: Very cool. I think that's a great way to wrap up because it's a nice loopback to what we were talking about earlier about creating a community, like running onto people in the hallway or at the water cooler, in your day job, being able to do that. And I also really the theme about the intentionality of planning your time in your work that, I don't think that there's any right answer, but the idea of being intentional and thoughtful and yeah, I think intentional is the best word, which I know is one that comes up a lot in your own work.
So Jeremy, thank you so much. Please let the listeners and the viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:31:29] Jeremy: All right. Well, thanks so much for the time, the opportunity to be here. I have an author website at JWJudge.com. I have my writing blog at ExpectantWriter.com. On social media you can find me on Twitter, it's @ J_W_Judge, and the same thing on Instagram. And books, my novels and my new nonfiction book, "Write Your Novel One Day at a Time," can all be found wherever it is you like to buy your books.
[00:32:00] Matty: Perfect. Thank you so much.
[00:32:02] Jeremy: Thank you.
A question for you ...
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jeremy! Are you juggling your writing with a full-time career and if yes, where are you fitting in your writing? If you’ve made the transition to being a full-time author, is the experience what you expected?
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
However, I don’t get notifications of comments posted here, which means I may miss some, and my website builder doesn’t enable commenters to respond to a specific comment, which makes it hard to engage in any kind of dialogue. So I’m recommending that you post any comments on YouTube.
