Hello everyone! After much consideration, I’ve decided to shut down my Writer Therapy Skool. I’m going to keep the podcast/interview series going, but I’m not able to give this Skool the time/effort it needs to grow. Most importantly, my precious writing time has suffered. It has been great meeting you all and I thank those who participated! Please stay in touch, I’ll still be on Skool, so let’s stay connected. Hopefully I’ll be able to give your Skools some attention too! Love you all! Find me and future episodes on instagram @timothycolombawrites or @writertherapysessions or on YouTube at Writer Theraoy Sessions.

One thing I'm finding to be a great challenge is pinning down the genre of my book. It might be Upmarket Dystopian Fiction? Dystopian Thriller? Speculative Fiction? How about you? What's your genre and how do you nail it down?

Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me at least once a week... Today I'm editing a chapter with this passage in it... **** As a kid, my grandfather never asked about academics or talent. Work ethic was his measure of success. My father shared those values, and with each birthday, he found a new way to measure them. “Okay, Marty, you’re ten now,” he said on my birthday. “If you want a toy, you go buy it. Okay?” For 10-year-old me, that was a bummer. Now, I credit my ability to suffer in silence to those Gnoble men—your grandfather and great-grandfather. Truth is, I’ve always enjoyed a hard day’s work. **** This is fiction, but also inspired by my own experience. I wrote this over a year ago and happen to be editing it today. Then today, I looked at my Facebook memories and saw a post I made 13 years ago, the day after my grandfather passed away. [see attached] Crazy right? This happens to me once a week. Like the exact thing I'm working on (no matter when I wrote it) comes up quite specifically. Just wondering if this happens to anyone in your writing? Is it because our work is so all-encompassing? Either way, it's so fun!

As founding members, I'd love to get your ideas on how to best approach critique. Exposure Therapy is my cheeky name for it, but it's sort of accurate too. It's a place to put a vulnerability out there. Let me know in the comments if you have any ideas on how best to approach it. Here's my current vision... One thing I want to avoid is the barrage of passages that get ignored because there are so many spamming the feed. I want critique to be a bit more focused and clean so no one feels they're being ignored, if that makes sense? On the other end, if someone keeps getting feedback over three weeks, that's not helpful either because most likely they've already addressed the changes they want to make. I also want to open it up to not just chapter critiques, but concepts, pitch lines, full outlines, marketing/covers, and the parts we really need focused, human help with. What I imagine is that each week – or biweekly – there are one or two new submissions for critique, and then when the time expires, I will remove the those posts and add the new ones in the Critique tab. Down the line, I imagine live critique sessions where, as a group, we present something, others can give their immediate feedback, and it becomes a useful discussion. I imagine this could be super helpful for fleshing out ideas or even full book concepts. Whattaya think? Let me know in the comments!

In my freelance business (video/photo), we often say "we can fix that in post" when there's something that's better left finished than reshot. I find I have that approach in writing. Get it all out and then fix it in post. How about you? What's your approach? When writing your first draft, do you edit-as-you-go or get everything out in one shot?