In today’s episode, we go into the scientific and health benefits of friendships with journalists and science writer Lydia Denworth. Her new book, Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond, is well written, fascinating and very informative.

(Spoiler: She says it’s okay to focus your time on the friends you feel most positive about.)

Check out the show notes and episode here.

Episode 79 is up, and we’re talking about our hopes for 2020 (well, those related to creativity, anyway). Listen and check out the full show notes here, or in your favorite podcast app.

Meghan’s in grad school — for the second time — and has put together a short guide to keeping up with your personal writing while also churning out term papers. This guide is useful (we hope!) for anyone on an academic calendar, from grad students to teachers.

The show notes and episode are here.

Send us your comments, any other writing tips you have, or anything you’d like to hear a writing guide from us on.

Happy New Year!

Olivia’s spent years with a lot of work travel, and has developed a short guide to writing if your travel means you have less control over your schedule than usual. This is particularly useful if it’s travel for your day job.

This is the first of something we’re calling situation guides, where we gather some tips and tricks we’ve picked up.

The show notes and episode are here.

We hope it’s useful! Send us your comments, any other writing tips you have, or anything you’d like to hear tips from us on.

And happy holidays!

In this episode, we touch base on our challenge to submit something every other month. We also chat about our recent month or so of writing, including coming to terms with challenging schedules (hello, November, nice to see you again) and how to move ahead. Also: what to do when you’re almost ready for other people to read your draft and it’s scary!

Finally, we’ll putting out a guide to writing while you travel in our last episode this year. We’re looking to put together a few more guides, so if you have anything you’d like a guide on, let us know!

Full show notes are here.

Episode 75 was one of the most fun conversations to record (we say that every time, but seriously, y’all, we mean it). Kate Newburg and Tasha L. Harrison like to say that they are a lot, and we think that’s perfect. In this episode, they have so much energy and so many projects, and we loved chatting with them about writing friendship and collaboration.

We’ve had Tasha Harrison on before, way back in episode 59, and are happy to have her back with her podcasting and writing BFF, Kate Newburg. Kate and Tasha are in the middle of season 2 of their fantastic Lady Books podcast. Kate describes their approach as a concept album, where each season is self-contained and totally different, and definitely worth adding to your listening line-up.

Check out the episode and full show notes here.

This week we have two new pep talks from some of our earlier episodes. You can check them out on our pep talk page, or in your favorite app.

Pep Talk 16 is from Episode 51 with Paul Jarvis, when he talked to us about what to do with fear – what you can use and what you have to push past.

Pep Talk 17 is from Episode 61 with Jessica Abel. We totally endorse her nap-on-the-spot plan but especially like her approach to using self-care techniques as part of the writing process.

If you like these, go back and check out the full episodes as well!

Before we even get started, let’s just say up front: if you’re doing National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo), we are totally rooting for you!

But NaNo isn’t for us, and this is something we’ve been coming to terms with over the past couple of years – if you don’t believe us, check out our previous episodes on this topic.

For us, focusing just on one month, when we (as writers with day jobs and other responsibilities) have so much going on, isn’t very sustainable and can make us really anxious/stressed/feel bad.

So this episode is about saying “no” in a gracious way – including how to set goals for your project that are longer-term, and also dealing with your feelings when so many other people are talking about NaNo.

The full episode and show note are here. We hope you enjoy it!

Episode 73 is up, and we’re talking to Marlena author Julie Buntin about friendship. Listen and check out the full show notes here, or in your favorite podcast app.

In episode 73

In episode 72, we talk about our friendship origin story, and then we basically have a very excellent book club, talking about books and some movies about (female) friendship. (Check out Meghan’s great and recently published syllabus on the topic here!)

Meghan’s been really into this topic lately, so she has a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of books – but we’d love to hear from you about other friendship books you love! Write us on here, or podcast@marginallypodcast.com or on Instagram.

Full show notes here.