How Ordinary Drafts Become Extraordinary Books. Revisionaries With Kristopher Jansma

Summary

The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers
Title: How Ordinary Drafts Become Extraordinary Books. Revisionaries With Kristopher Jansma
Host/Author: Joanna Penn
Release Date: March 24, 2025
Episode Number: 800

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Introduction

In the 800th episode of The Creative Penn Podcast For Writers, Joanna Penn celebrates a significant milestone by delving deep into the transformative journey from ordinary drafts to extraordinary books. The episode features a comprehensive interview with Christopher Jansma, author of Revisionaries, where they explore common writing pitfalls, the elusive concept of genius, and strategies to enhance manuscript quality.

Podcast Highlights

1. Unveiling the Main Themes

Joanna sets the stage by outlining the episode's focus areas:

• Comparing First Drafts to Finished Books: Highlighting the common mistake writers make in measuring their initial attempts against polished, published works.
• The Myth of Genius: Debunking the notion that successful authors are born with innate genius.
• Persistence in Writing: Emphasizing the importance of perseverance in the creative process.
• Balancing Writing and Business: Navigating the dual roles of crafting stories and managing the business aspects of authorship.
• Protecting Personal Boundaries: Maintaining a healthy separation between personal life and writing endeavors.

"If you love it and it nourishes you, it's worthwhile."
— Tiffany Yates Martin ([Transcript Timestamp: 13:35])

2. Insights from Other Segments

Joanna briefly touches upon various other segments, including:

• AI in Publishing: Discussing the implications of AI advancements on the writing industry, referencing controversies like Meta's use of pirated databases for training Llama models.
• Personal Updates: Sharing her ongoing projects, such as editing the Death Valley film script and launching a Kickstarter campaign.
• Listener Engagement: Highlighting positive feedback from listeners and encouraging the audience to share their experiences and thoughts.

3. Listener Comments and Community Love

Joanna shares heartfelt messages from listeners, showcasing the podcast's impact. Notable comments include:

• John S.: Praising the episode with Luke Richardson on travel and action adventure for inspiring him to overcome anxiety and explore new horizons.
• Lisa M.: Sharing an adorable story about her parakeet, who has become a fan of Joanna's voice from the podcast.

Main Interview: Christopher Jansma on Revisionaries

4. Christopher Jansma's Journey in Writing

At [17:38], Joanna introduces Christopher Jansma, an award-winning author and associate professor of creative writing at SUNY New Paltz College. Christopher shares his lifelong passion for writing, detailing his extensive experience with literary fiction, novels, short stories, and essays.

"I've been a writer pretty much my whole life. As a child, you couldn't put a book out of my hand."
— Christopher Jansma ([18:03])

5. The Common Mistake: Comparing Drafts to Masterpieces

Christopher delves into why writers often fall into the trap of comparing their first drafts to renowned finished books.

"We fall in love with books and reading, and naturally, we wonder if we could do it too. But there's a huge gap between our efforts and our heroes' masterpieces."
— Christopher Jansma ([19:22])

He emphasizes that legendary authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and J.D. Salinger underwent numerous failures and revisions before achieving their success, challenging the misconception that their success was purely due to inherent genius.

6. Dismantling the Myth of Genius

Each chapter of Christopher's book uses the concept of "genius" to deconstruct the flawed belief that successful writers are naturally gifted. He argues that persistence, practice, and constructive feedback play pivotal roles in a writer's success.

"What does it take? A lot of persistence, a lot of practice, a lot of stubbornness, and an ability to learn from your mistakes."
— Christopher Jansma ([23:33])

7. Strategies to Transform Manuscripts

Christopher shares actionable strategies to elevate a manuscript from ordinary to extraordinary:

• Persistence and Patience: Continuing to work on a manuscript even when it feels disorganized, trusting the process.
• Seeking Feedback: Engaging trusted readers or editors who can provide constructive criticism.
• Knowing When to Walk Away: Recognizing when a project isn't working and taking a step back to avoid burnout.

"Sometimes you need to know how to walk away from a project that just isn't working."
— Christopher Jansma ([35:41])

He recounts historical examples, such as Harper Lee’s journey with To Kill a Mockingbird and its initially rejected drafts, illustrating how perseverance led to literary greatness.

8. Balancing the Creative and Business Sides of Writing

The discussion shifts to managing the dual aspects of writing: the creative process and the business obligations of being an author. Christopher advises setting clear boundaries and establishing dedicated time for writing separate from promotional activities.

"Eventually, you have to be able to log off and actually sit down and write without distractions."
— Christopher Jansma ([40:09])

He suggests practical tips like setting modest writing goals and creating a structured schedule to maintain productivity while handling the business facets of authorship.

9. Protecting Personal Boundaries in Writing

Christopher addresses the challenge of maintaining personal privacy while engaging with the public as an author. He advocates for clear boundaries regarding what personal experiences are shared through writing and public interactions.

"We should be able to appreciate the beauty of a piece of fiction without having to be reassured that it came from a true story first."
— Christopher Jansma ([50:22])

He emphasizes the importance of separating the writer's personal life from their creative work to preserve authenticity and personal well-being.

Conclusion and Future Episodes

Joanna wraps up the episode by reflecting on the invaluable insights shared by Christopher Jansma. She reiterates the importance of persistence, embracing the revision process, and maintaining a healthy balance between the creative and business aspects of writing.

She also previews the next episode featuring Hollywood screenwriter and first-time novelist TD Donnelly, promising discussions on the nuances between book and screenplay writing, character development, and industry trends.

"Remember, if you get depressed that your first drafts aren't as good as the books you read, don't worry. Keep writing, keep editing, and you will make it."
— Joanna Penn ([55:34])

Key Takeaways

• Embrace the Revision Process: Understand that initial drafts are starting points, and substantial improvement comes through persistent editing and feedback.
• Debunk the Genius Myth: Recognize that success in writing stems from hard work, resilience, and continuous learning rather than innate talent alone.
• Seek Constructive Feedback: Engage with trusted readers or editors to gain objective perspectives that can enhance your manuscript.
• Balance Creativity with Business: Establish a structured routine that allocates time for both writing and managing the business aspects of being an author.
• Maintain Personal Boundaries: Protect your personal experiences and privacy, ensuring that sharing does not compromise your well-being or creative integrity.

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For more insights and resources, visit thecreativepenn.com and explore the vast array of episodes, articles, and the free Author Blueprint to support your writing journey.

Transcript

[Joanna Penn]

Welcome to the Creative Pen podcast. I'm Joanna Penn, thriller author and creative entrepreneur, bringing you interviews, inspiration and information on writing, craft and creative business. You can find the episode show notes, your free author blueprint and lots [e-mail] and that's Pen with a double N. And here's the show. Hello creatives, I'm Johanna Penn and this is episode number 800 of the podcast and it is Sunday 23rd March 2025. As I record this in today's writing craft focused show, I'm talking to Christopher Jansmar about how to turn ordinary drafts into extraordinary books. We go through the mistake of comparing first drafts to finished books, which we all do. We dismantle the idea of genius and talk about how our manuscripts knowing when to walk away or when to persist, balancing the writing and the author business side and drawing a line to protect your personal boundaries. So that's coming up in the interview section in Writing and Publishing Things. I wanted to point you at an interview on Ink in your veins podcast with Rachel Heron and it's an interview with Tiffany Yates Martin on finding your deepest reason to write. Now Tiffany's been on this show a number of times and is very encouraging and of course Rachel is wonderful and it's good to come back to this basic question. When things get a little fraught, they discuss the drive inside us that makes us want to create. And for me and you, that manifests as writing. And I love this because I feel like for everybody in my family, everyone has a different way. A lot of my family are visual artists. I'm the only writer, but lots of visual art and of course people make music, they dance like there's loads so many ways that people express creativity. But you and I, we primarily at least write and all the external stuff matters a lot less than this intrinsic desire. And I was thinking about this the other day, you know, I write because it's how I figure things out. A lot of stuff like that I guess is in my journal, but it's also in my non fiction and then for the fiction, how I get the stories out of my head and those of, well, we all, we all have imagination but when you start sort of streaming that imagination and you just can't stop it and everywhere you look there's more and more stories and you're like, I have to get this out of my head. And I love turning ideas into physical things in the world. I E. Books like this was an idea I had and now it's a book And I would write even if I had no readers and even if I made no money. It's what I do. And it's presumably what you do to now, of course there are better writers than me. There's always going to be better people at things, and there are higher paid writers than me. But I don't write to become the best in the world or the highest paid. And I was thinking about this, to be honest, I don't even write for readers. I write for me because I have to write. Now, of course, needing to write doesn't mean needing to publish those words or needing to market your books. You never need to publish anything. That's a whole different game. But writing well, that can be your anchor throughout life. And that kind of comes back to last week's episode with Karen Wyatt about grief and change and writing through these difficult times. And a quote from the interview, if you love it and it nourishes you, it's worthwhile. And that also applies to genre as well and what you're writing. Don't let anyone tell you that what you're writing is somehow less than something someone else is wr because that's just silly. Writing is wonderful. And if you love it and it nourishes you, it's worthwhile. So that is ink in your veins. Keep all these things in mind when various things might drag you off course. So ink in your veins, episode 488 and that interview with Tiffany was a few weeks ago. If you're in the mood for listening. I'm on the Self Publishing with Ally podcast with Orna Ross this week and we talk about insights from London Book Fair. So Orna was there, gives an update because I wasn't there for the first time in a in a long time. And it's always interesting to hear what the publishing industry is thinking about. We also talk about the expansion of AI in audio through Find your Way Voices and elevenlabs and also the Amazon AVV and how that's expanding. I also talk about the author equivalent of vibe coding. Now if you haven't heard this term, coders are using this term to kind of how it feels to collaborate and co write code code with AI and what that means for those of us who are already AI assisted artisan authors. And I certainly feel like I do some sort of vibe creation these days. But yes, we talk about all of that and that is on the Self Publishing with Ally all I podcast. So on AI this week there's a lot of noise about an article on the Atlantic on A pirated database of books used by Meta to train the llama models, which are at least open weight, if not open source. Now, lots of authors are angry about this, so I just wanted to acknowledge it and to try and put some context around it while trying to take the emotion out of the situation. To be clear, piracy is illegal and whoever originally pirated the books broke the law. But for Meta or any AI company, training models on data and copyright under fair use has not been ruled as illegal. And you could say as yet, or it may not be. There are lots of court cases underway and at the same same time a lot of companies are signing licensing deals and just getting on with using the tools. Even the Guardian in the uk, the most anti technology paper you could possibly imagine, has signed a strategic partnership with OpenAI and is rolling out ChatGPT Enterprise. That happened back in February. Also, this database is only a tiny scrap of training data. Anything digital that could be scraped has been scraped. And most of the time you've probably given your consent just by using the platforms. Everything you've ever put on Facebook or Instagram or any social media platform, unless you have managed your security settings well over the years, which many of us haven't. Every blog post, every podcast, every tweet, every YouTube video, every TikTok video, every comment on Reddit, Reddit, I could go on, but since it has not been decided yet whether fair use means that AI companies can train legally on copyright data right now, it is also not illegal. So I think people have obviously being upset about piracy is one thing, being upset about AI training data is another thing. And this whole story is kind of blown up as people put the two in the same box. But lots of people are doing this and of course the Chinese models all have it too. Are you going to protest the ccp? And on that, keep an eye out for the Trump administration's AI Action plan coming in July, and the submissions to that have basically said we need to be able to train on copyright data under fair use or we will lose the AI race to China. And the phrase national security is being used. So you can imagine what the likely outcome is here. Have a listen to my interview with Alicia Wright, who is both a lawyer and also has a computer science degree and is just brilliant on AI. So that's back in January, episode number 792, Alicia Wright. And we talk about fair use, copyright, licensing, AI, all of that with Alicia. But even if you consider that we take the very unlikely position that there will be some kind of settlement for all data used to train models. I want you to think about all the grains of sand on every beach in the world that might represent the data that the models have trained on and consider that your book is just one of those grains of sand and it is not even stored as a grain of sand. So it's not like a load of sand in a vault because it's not stored at all. AI models are not databases. Your book is not sitting there waiting to be retrieved. But even if they did decide to pay out on training data, you might get, consider what your grain of sand is in all of that mountain of sand, let's say 01 cent per book or something like that. So I feel like people think, oh, there's a couple of thousand books and theirs is one of them, so there should be a million dollars paid out. But that's just not realistic. All that said, I completely understand people's feelings and it's strange for me because I feel like I went through a lot of these feelings back in. I don't know, when I started looking at this in 2016, I had a lot of these feelings and over time they've completely changed as I use the tools. And so it's very interesting looking at this from another perspective now. I would love you to take all the energy and the time you might spend being angry at the news and use it to read a book. The book I recommend is brand new. It's called how to Think About A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard Suskind. Now, I'm not perplexed, but I've started reading this book anyway and it is great. It's both a good start for people who are perplexed or angry or upset or still just puzzled or curious. And it's also great for people like me. It's really interesting if you can't see ahead, if you can't figure out what the hell's going on. This is a really good book because, as Richard says, this is not going away. And these are but the faltering first infant steps of what is coming. And there is no apparent finishing line. So that is how to think about AI A Guide for the Perplexed by Richard Suskind. And when I finished it, I'll probably talk a bit about it some more. I'm only about five chapters in. I've started reading it yesterday, but it's. It's very good. You can also listen to it, obviously, so in personal news, yes, it is episode 800 of the show and I was originally going to do something like find some, you know, various quotes and stuff from the interviews the last hundred episodes. But it turns out we're just gonna blast through and head towards episode 900. So it takes about about two years to do another hundred episodes. But at the moment I feel like there's a lot going on. So thanks for listening and hope you'll continue along with me. In the meantime, I've been editing the Death Valley film script. I'm really pleased with it actually, and I will pitch it at London Screenwriters Festival in April. I'm entering into a competition. I'm also finishing up the Death Valley Kickstarter which launches a week today, 31st of March 2025 jfpenn.com Death Valley depending on when you' listening to that or it will forward onto buying the book elsewhere, I still have to record the video. If you've done a Kickstarter, you'll know that video is like the thing that you you do. You have to do it. And you can have a listen to the interview with Orianna Lecker a couple of months ago now and we talked about this and it's like this is what the authors hate doing the most, which is the video. But I have done a book trailer and so I'm going to incorporate that into my video. So hopefully I only need to record about two minutes. But still doing two minutes of video is quite hard. But yes, that is going to come and will be happening this week. There are books in all the formats as well as my how to Write a Thriller webinar and some consulting sessions available. I am pretty excited to get this book out there. I, I love it and it's, it's, yeah, it's quite different actually to a lot of my thrillers and I'm, I'm enjoying the process. So thanks for your emails and comments and photos this week. John Said. I just wanted to say that I love the episode with Luke Richardson on travel and action adventure. How you and Luke described getting real, tangible experiences from traveling was eye opening. I've struggled with severe anxiety for the last 10 years and haven't done much in the way of travel. This episode made me realize what I've been missing out on for the last decade. Thank you so much. And I love that because I completely get that travel is difficult. You have to push your comfort zone. But like so much of pushing your comfort zone, it is worthwhile and whatever is uncomfortable can really help you achieve things. I mean, writing I guess is another thing. It's uncomfortable to write, to go deep to edit, to do all this stuff, to put our books in the world, to get criticized, to get, you know, bad reviews, which is just inevitable. But it's all worthwhile as growing, growing as a person, expanding your experiences. And also if you'd like some virtual travel, of course my books and travel podcast is back and Luke is going to come on that in I'm actually interviewing him this week about Egypt and we geek out about Egypt and how we're both inspired by ancient Egyptian stuff and it's very, very cool. So that will be coming up on my books and travel podcast, which is already got like 93 episodes now, so have a listen to that. Sean McLaughlin sent me pictures from Pere Lachaise, one of the most famous cemeteries in the world. In Paris of course. Such a photogenic place. And yeah, beautiful. Thank you Sean. And possibly the cutest comment ever from Lisa M. Lily on X sent a picture of a little parakeet with blue and white feathers. Really lovely and said:9 years ago I bought a scared little parakeet home. He calmed down when I started listening to the Creative Pen podcast. He still loves to hear Joanna's voice after all these years. Hasn't written a novel yet though. I love him Lisa. He's so, so cute. So thank you. I think you win comments this week so you can leave a comment on the show notes@the creativepen.com or on the YouTube channel. Message me on X at the Creative Pen or email me, send me pictures of where you're listening joannathecreativepenn.com or of course your favourite cemetery or churchyar. I love to hear from you. It makes this more of a conversation. Today's show is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, Kobo's free, fast and easy self publishing platform favoured by independent authors all over the world. KWL was built by Authors for Authors and their mission is to help you reach digital readers and listeners wherever they are, however they want to read. Are you an indie author looking to boost your book's visibility? With Kobo Writing Life, you can access a suite of powerful promotional tools designed to help you reach more readers from percent off promotions and buy more save more sales to featured spots on Kobo's homepage, you can tailor your marketing efforts to suit your needs. Plus, with real time sales tracking, you can see the impact of your promotions instantly. Sign up with Kobo Writing Life [e-mail] kwl and take your book marketing to the next level. And just on a personal note here I have a recurring reminder in my calendar. Every three weeks I go back into Kobo and I submit as many books as I can for as many promotions as I can. This is how you sell books on Kobo. Seriously, if you are trying to sell books wide and you're not doing these promotions, a lot of them are free, some of them are paid. But this is definitely the way to sell books on Kobo. So you can find that if you go direct at Kobo Writing Life and my link and there's a landing page, the podcast is there and all that kind of thing. The Kobo Writing Life podcast, I should say. Thecreativepenn.com KWL so this type of corporate sponsorship pays for the hosting, transcription and editing, but my time in creating the show is sponsored by my [e-mail] TheCreativePen thanks to the 10 new patrons who've joined this week and thanks to everyone who's been supporting for months and years. If you join the community, you get access to all the backlist videos, audio and posts and articles covering topics on writing, craft and author business, as well as tutorials and demos on AI tools. And my Patron only Q and A solo episodes, which I did this week. It's about an hour of me answering questions and this week we're doing live office hours where I will demo things, answer questions live, and we hang out as a community. The Patreon is a monthly subscription, subscription, even the equivalent of buying me a black coffee a month or a couple of coffees if you're feeling generous. You get access to everything, all the backlist content, Q&As, office hours and more. So if you get value from the show and you want more, come on over and join us at patreon.com P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com TheCreativePen Right, let's get into the interview.

[Christopher Jansma]

Christopher Jansmar is the award winning author of literary fiction, novels, short fiction and essays, as well as what we can learn from the lost, unfinished and just plain bad work of great writers. So welcome to the show.

[Chris]

Chris thanks for having me on.

[Christopher Jansma]

Jo yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. First up, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

[Chris]

Well, I have been a writer pretty much my whole life. I'm one of those writers who as a child you couldn't put a book out of my hand and I have a whole storage unit somewhere full of school journals that are full of little stories and things and it was just something that I took to really early and always really wanted to do. As I got older, I started taking it a little more seriously and I went to school eventually and sort of studied writing. But yeah, it's always been a lifelong love of mine.

[Christopher Jansma]

And so are you a full time writer? So we're always interested in how people make a living writing on this show.

[Chris]

Yeah, I don't know very many full time writers, sadly. So I'm an associate professor of creative writing at SUNY New Paltz College here in New York State. And so I'm teaching creative writing, which is wonderful because I get to talk about what I love all the time and help students with their writing. And I'm the director of our creative writing program up there right now, so.

[Joanna Penn]

Mm. Well, that's fantastic.

[Christopher Jansma]

Well, then I. It makes me understand a lot more why you wrote this book. Revisionaries. Yeah, so. So let's get into that. Why is it sort of just a number one mistake of writers, which is comparing our first draft efforts to the finished books we read? Like, why is that a mistake?

[Chris]

I think, I think it's natural, but I think it's a mistake. We, you know, I mentioned before, I was a big reader as a child and all through my life, and I think that's how most writers get started. We fall love with books as at some point and reading. And I think it's pretty natural at some point to start to wonder if we could do it too, you know, how much fun it would be to do or, you know, give somebody else the great experience that we've just gotten. So we model our efforts on the things that we've read before and the things that we admire, of course. But then a funny thing starts to happen. Of course, as we get more serious about it, we start to realize there's a huge gap between what we're able to do and what our heroes have done in the past. And then I think a lot of people after some, you know, sort of having a lot of fun with it at first, start to get really frustrated because they feel like, okay, well, what's the point if I'm never going to be as good as someone? Like F. Scott Fitzgerald in my case was sort of like my hero growing up, or J.D. salinger or somebody like that, you know, And I think what we miss, what most, most of us don't really learn much about, is that those writers only achieve these kind of great masterpieces after tons of failure, rejection, screw ups, mistakes. A lot of them had a lot of help from other people, like editors and family. And you know all of that. And so I think then, you know, we just have this, this sort of misconception, I guess about what, how it works. And what I think we tend to believe is that there are just certain people who luck out in the genetic lottery or something and they're just naturally gifted, talented writers, they're geniuses from day one. And that was really what I wanted to try to dismantle in, in this book was, you know, this idea that these great writers, not that they're not geniuses, not that they're not so great, but just that they, they didn't get there. It's not all natural. They didn't get there on their own and it didn't come without a lot of failure along the way.

[Christopher Jansma]

As you were talking there, I was thinking about also the difference. I mean as an associate professor in creative writing, I mean you, you naturally teach well, you maybe you have to teach specific books, things that are considered classic. There are books that are considered classics. And I almost feel problem is that we, we compare ourselves to the classics. Whereas take someone like Isaac Asimov who wrote over 400 books, people always compare themselves to the ones that were most successful, whereas most books are not those classics, are they? Like, how could we compare ourselves to.

[Joanna Penn]

Normal books instead of these classics?

[Chris]

Yeah, absolutely. I, I, I talk about this a little bit in the introduction to Revisionaries, but I took a class when I was in college, but I sort of snuck into a graduate class and we read, it was called Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. And it was all these sort of amazing works by, you know, amazing American writers. And if I talked about in the book covering this sort of lesser known work of Fitzgerald's that he didn't finish before he died called the Love of the Last Tycoon, and realizing it was actually pretty bad and finding it kind of depressing at the time, but then realizing later in life that actually, that is something, that actually was something good. And in my mind I was able to realize, ok, this shows that even, even somebody that could write the Great Gatsby might write another book that's not so wonderful. And then of course, and I didn't mention this in the introduction, but I think of this a lot. You know, with Faulkner we started with the Sound and the Fury and I didn't know for years and years after that that wasn't his first novel. I thought it was his debut book. And, and a friend of mine said, oh yeah, if you're ever feeling intimidated, go read one of Faulkner's first two novels. I think it's mosquitoes and soldiers pay or something. And he said, you'll feel a lot better about your own writing. And he was right.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, I think that's important. Now, you did mention the word genius, and you use it in the book to anchor each chapter. But genius is a really hard word. I mean, it's a word many people are uncomfortable with, and I think it's interesting. So why did you choose that word genius? And how did your definition change over the process of writing?

[Chris]

Yeah, thanks. I'm glad you mentioned that. Each chapter has a little section called Fail like a genius at the end that kind of helps you. Gives you some tips on writing or exercises you can do that are inspired by the chapter. And the word genius was floating around for me in the very beginning because what I was wanting to do, I realized, was dismantle that notion of genius. Because as you mentioned, it is such a kind of problematic idea that, as I was mentioning before. Right. If we see other people who are successful, we can just tell ourselves, oh, they. They're just a genius. Right. They were sort of born with some talent or some ability that other people aren't. I'll never succeed because I don't have that thing. Right. And I think that, you know, where a lot of us begin the writing process and with this idea that we're trying to figure out if we have what it takes, some. Somewhere within our. When the reality is what it takes is a lot of persistence, a lot of practice, a lot of stubbornness and. But also mixed in. And I think this is where it gets hard. An ability to learn from your mistakes and see where you've gone wrong and then make corrections the next time that. And when you look at these stories of these writers, you realize that this is what they've done as well, and that it is not like they just sat down one day, wrote a masterpiece because they have some magical abilities that. That. That you or I don't.

[Joanna Penn]

Yeah.

[Christopher Jansma]

And this is what kind of annoys me with writing compared to something like visual art. So here in Europe, if you go to Malaga, you can go to the Picasso's early museum where he was born, and you can see some of the pieces that he did when he was a child and then when he was a young man. And you can see the development. And in visual art also, they have this idea of sort of periods like, that's the blue period. And then that was this. As visual artists experimented and it wasn't. Oh, they suddenly arrive on the scene with a perfect novel, which seems to be the expectation.

[Joanna Penn]

Right.

[Christopher Jansma]

Even now in modern publishing, it's like, oh, this debut author. So I guess we don't have this show your work thing in writing, do we?

[Joanna Penn]

We don't really accept that.

[Chris]

No. We, we hide those drafts and we hope that nobody ever sees them because we want to sort of perpetuate this myth. I think that we are just, you know, that we did just sit down and this wonderful thing came out. There's sort of this mystique around the writer that way. Yeah. Debut writers are often, you know, fairly young and you haven't read anything else by them before. So it creates this sense that they just decided to write a book one day and then this great thing came out. And that's a hard thing to live up to. A lot of debut authors don't end up publishing a second book. I. I think because the expectations are so high that the second book will be just as seemingly effortless to do as the first one was. Where in fact the first one probably took a decade, sometimes longer of sort of effort. I have the same thought about the visual art as I was working on this book. And music too. There's this sort of collectors will get demo tapes and rough tracks of artists that they love and they enjoy going back and listening to sort of the raw sound of an early version of a song before it got all produced and polished and everything else. And there's something really authentic and cool and fun about that. To be able to hear this is what it sounded like when he was just in the garage with the guitar and the drum machine or whatever. And we just. Yeah, with writing we. We tend not to do that. What we have instead, which is almost, I think, more problematic. I talk about this a little bit in the chapter in the book about Louisa May Alcott with Little Women. What we have instead is every once in a while publishers will put out a new book that they say they've discovered by a writer that was never published before. And what it turns out to be is, you know, what we would in academic worlds call like juvenile or here's a short story that Hemingway wrote when he was 8 years old or something like that and published in the local newspaper. And they're often quite bad as either or. They're fine, I'm sure for an 8 year old, you know, they're nothing like what they're going to be able to do later. But the publishers, I think, wanting to kind of trick people into believing that they've discovered some new masterpiece that no one's ever read before they'll hype it up and they'll say, okay, this. This is an amazing book by Louisa May Alcott that you've never read before. And it turns out to be, oh, it's a book that she wrote and realized wasn't very good and so she never published it.

[Christopher Jansma]

You know, didn't they do that with them? Didn't they do that with Harper Lee?

[Chris]

Yes. Yeah. Harper Lee's story is one that I really love. I talk about this one in the book as well. And this, again, was a very sort of confused rollout by the publisher. They claimed that they had like a long lost second novel by Harper Lee and that it was. They made it sound like it was a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. And the new book was called Go Set a Watchman. And when it came out, it was very shocking because it involves the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus and Scout and all of them, but as sort of older characters. So it did seem like something that she wrote later about what would happen to them after To Kill a Mockingbird. And people were very scandalized because it turned out that Atticus Finch, who in To Kill a Mockingbird was this noble lawyer who takes on this case to defend a black man from the mob. Anyway, in this sort of sequel, he turned out to be like a racist, like a Ku Klux Klan member or had gone to meetings or something, and people were, like, horrified. How could this happen to her? You know, how could she write this book about him? And what it turned out had happened. Finally we sort of worked it backwards and we discovered that that book was actually not even really a prequel. It was a rough draft, or even. Not even. You couldn't even really call it a rough draft. It was a book that she wrote before To Kill a Mockingbird, and she wanted to write about this woman and she came up with these characters. And when she submitted that book to her publisher, her publisher said, basically, no, thank you. I don't like this book, but I do like this sort of this character, and I do like this world in Alabama that you're writing about. So if you want to go back and write a completely different book now, I would take a look at that. And so, you know, that's the moment when most writers would say, okay, this is a sign. I obviously don't have what it takes. I got so far, and my editor, you know, this editor still said no and sent me back to the drawing board again. And that's, I think, when a lot of people would sort of Give up. And Harper Lee had that persistence where she said, okay, great. There are a couple of things here that this editor said she liked. I'm going to go back, I'm going to start over. I'm going to take those elements and I'm going to work with them. And then she wrote one of the greatest novel in the 20th century. So she was just, she was so close to it. She just didn't know yet that that's where she was going with it.

[Christopher Jansma]

But then, classic example of someone who then didn't write, which as some. I mean, I write a lot of books and I feel like every time I write a book, more ideas come and I just can't imagine stopping writing.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Christopher Jansma]

And so maybe that's a paralysis of success or something.

[Chris]

I wonder about that with her. She talked a lot in her interviews afterwards that it was, it was so successful and she got so much attention. And I don't think she was somebody that particularly desired that kind of attention. You know, it's a funny thing. A lot of writers are. We have, you know, maybe there's some ego to it that we want to share our thoughts and ideas with people and we think that others should hear or would enjoy them at least. But we're not really necessarily people that want to be in the spotlight. Being a writer is. Is an art form that really has to be done alone for the most part. A lot of writers are pretty introspective, kind of quiet people who wouldn't mind sitting alone at their computer for hours and hours and hours. So, yeah, I think Harper Lee and J.D. salinger. There was another. Earlier. I didn't end up talking about Salinger in this book, but I wrote an earlier column about him. I think had had that response to the fame that followed their books coming out that they sort of retreated away from it. And we do know that Harper Lee worked on at least one other project after To Kill a Mockingbird. She was working on a crime novel. So it was sort of a true crime novel or based on a true crime that had happened that's never been published. I don't think she finished it, or at least we don't know that she's finished it. And it's never been published, as far as we know. When they found Gosetta Watchmen, they originally, that's what they, they thought they had found was the finished crime novel. But I don't believe that you ever, ever did finish it.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, it's interesting. All right, well, let's go a bit deeper into how we can turn our books into something better. You have a good quote in the book. You said, I've seen how messes metamorphosize into masterpieces. So how.

[Joanna Penn]

How can we do the same thing?

[Christopher Jansma]

Like, when you have students and they're like this, there's a. Something in there, but it's a bit of a mess. What are some ways we can improve our manuscript?

[Chris]

Yeah, there's a couple of things that came up over and over again in the book, and there's sort of a persistence theme that runs through several of the chapters, like with Harper Lee, where sometimes what needs to happen is, you know, that we just need to kind of stick with the project a little longer and try something else there and see how that works. So sometimes that's how the mess turns into a masterpiece, which is just that we continue to kind of dig in deeper and have some faith that we'll get there trying out some different ideas and along the way. But I think a lot of times for most writers, we get to a place where we've done everything we know how to do, and it's still quite a bit of a mess. And I think that's when it helps a lot to. To get some help, basically. And this. This also comes up over and over again. So a lot of these writers had people in their lives that they were able to kind of turn to for advice or just to be sort of a helper, a reader. F. Scott Fitzgerald's first version of the Great Gatsby, Trimalchio, is. Was not as. Not nearly as good as the Great Gatsby for a number of reasons, and also had a horrible title. And when he. He got it as far as he could on his own, and then he took it to his. You know, at that point he had an editor that he'd worked with on his first book, and Max Perkins read it and gave him some feedback on it that was really helpful. He also needed the help of his wife, Zelda, who gave him some ideas about how to better define Gatsby as a character. And so that's another thing that I often recommend, which is, can you. Is there anybody that you can give the book to that might be able to give it a fresh read? And then the important thing is then you need to be open to the feedback that they give you. You can't. I think a lot of times we give the book to somebody and we hope that they're going to tell us it's perfect, and that always feels good, but it's not going to really help Us get it where we need it to go. You know, Kafka, I talk about Kafka in the book. Never finished any of the books that he started writing. He always sort of undermined himself and had all this doubt. But luckily he had a good friend, Max Brod, who basically pushed him all the time, you know, keep on going and try to finish things. So I think, I think that helps a lot, like bringing it to somebody else. And then the last thing I would say this came up a few times too. It's sort of the flip side of persistence in some ways, which is sometimes you need to know how to walk away from a project that just isn't working. It's very hard. Of course, we spend a lot of time on these books, sometimes years, and we just can't get it to work right. And I really wanted people to see through the, through the project here, through revisionaries, that this happens to all the writers that they've, that they, that they love as well, work on a project that just can't, for whatever reason, doesn't come together the way that they wanted to. And the best thing they've been able, the best thing they can do is sort of take a step away from it and start trying to work on something different for a while.

[Christopher Jansma]

But as you said about Kafka there, I feel like, like I know someone who has 15 books that are not finished. And the thing is, sometimes, like you say, you might need to walk away, but maybe you actually just need to go for a walk and walk away for a week and then come back and finish it. Because if you walking away from projects because it's hard. I mean, the point is this is hard. It is hard to write a book, right? So how do you know? Where's the balance?

[Chris]

Yeah, it is hard. And I wish there was an easy way to know when you're sort of into too deep on something that just isn't working. I was just reading this the other day. Mark Twain, prolific writer, finished lots and lots of things, wrote wonderful classics. He tried to write a book about Joan of Arc. I think he said six times in 12 years. And every time he got into it and just realized he wasn't going to be able to finish it, it wasn't going to be able to get any further. But when you're in a situation like you're talking about where you have somebody who never finishes anything, you know, or starts many things and never finishes them, I do think that is, that is sort of a, a different problem with Kafka. It Was an issue of just a lack of confidence. He would finish something and then he would rethink it and decide, oh, no, no, no, actually I, I don't think it's good enough. I have to go back and change it again. Even when other people were telling him, no, no, no, it's great, let's go. Kafka tried to claw back the manuscript for the Metamorphosis, probably his most famous short story, probably one of the most famous short stories in the 20th century. He tried to get his editor to send it back to him so that he could keep making more changes to it, even right before it got published. So that there is a different kind of problem that comes up sometimes where you're just never satisfied with what you've done. You have to be able to sort of decide, okay, this is, this is good enough the way it is. I'm gonna, I'm gonna let it go and move on to the next thing.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah. And so often like, well, I mean, obviously sometimes there are some big structural problems, but that is what editors can help with. But often the little tweaks, I mean, we all read our work that's published and we're like, oh, I would change that now, I would change that now. But it's probably not even something that a reader would notice or care about.

[Chris]

Right? Exactly. Yeah. And I think again, as writer, we're always going to have some self doubt and we're always going to be to some degree like our own worst critic. We also have to sort of balance that out against the moments where we feel optimistic and we feel like, you know, what we're writing is actually good. This is again kind of a moment when I think having somebody else on the outside, outside give you a, give you a pat on the back and some encouragement is helpful. Jane Austen was a great example of someone. She wrote a few books when she was young, like very young. 16, 17, 18 years old that she, that were finished and she thought they were good and other people that read them liked them, but she just, she wasn't sure. She, she felt like they weren't as good as she wanted them to be. And then one of them she sort of, she waited on for about a decade almost, I think, and then eventually wrote it completely and turned it into, I think it was Sense and Sensibility. And so she, that she had a sense that she had more to learn or more, you know, she needed more time to become a better writer first before she wanted to kind of put that work out there.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, I think we do get that sense. I wrote a book on the shadow, writing the shadow using Jungian psychology. And that took like a couple of decades really before I was ready to do that. And I had to write a memoir first because memoir changes your writing. And, and then I was like, oh, now I'm ready to write that book.

[Chris]

Yeah, it's, it is hard, although I think, I think when you love the process of it and you can get to a place where you're enjoying the writing part a lot, you know that, that can be very freeing and then you're not as concerned about, you know, okay, which one happens first or how does this, how does this get done before that one? That kind of thing.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you said enjoying the writing and in the book you said say, take the time to write for its own sake again. And I feel like this kind of simple joy is difficult. I mean, I, I'm a full time author and many listeners write for a living. And it's like the, the industry drives us into faster output or publish it. Publishers don't put as much editing into things as they did back in the day of those classic authors. Or we have to do a lot more marketing.

[Joanna Penn]

You're on this show, you are doing book marketing, not writing. So how, how can we do this?

[Christopher Jansma]

How can we balance that sort of taking the time to do that joyful stuff and the business of being a writer?

[Chris]

Yeah, this is, I think, really the biggest key for writers today. And I don't, you know, like you say, I don't know that it was as big of a struggle for writers in the past because this sort of world of self promotion that exists for writers today, even 10, 20 years ago, I don't know that it was quite as all absorbing as it can be now in this landscape of social media, but also wonderful things like podcasts. Right. That, that come on. And I, you know, I find really fun to do. And we started this by kind of asking about how can we keep fun alive in our writing. I think I enjoy talking to people about what I'm working on. It actually helps me think about what I want to write next and gets me excited to write more. Right. So I try to keep that in mind as I'm, as I'm doing these sort of promotional engagements and things like that. I don't feel like it is, or I try not to feel like it's a distraction from the writing itself at the same time. Right. Eventually you have to be able to kind of log off of Instagram or TikTok or whatever and actually sit down and write and not feel distracted by the desire to go back in and check and see if anyone else is talking about you or. Or responding to your video or something like that. And so I've started setting up times in my day when I can turn off all those devices, when I can turn off social media, when it's just me and the computer. And that's something that I've had to really push hard for the last couple of years to, like, really carve out sort of time away from the rest of it. Different writers have different ways of doing this. If there's like a room in your house that you can go into and you can leave the phone on the outside, or you can use a computer that's not online, I think that those things can help a lot. I set modest goals also for writing. Usually my goal is to do something like 3,000 words in a week, which, you know, sounds like a lot, but ultimately is maybe like 5, 500 words a day, a little more during the work week, which doesn't take all that long to. To do in. In the course of a day. But it really adds up over time. Over the course of a couple of weeks, you start to really feel like you've made some progress, finished a chapter or story that way. And I think when you can build that into your life as sort of separate time, that's sacred from the other parts of being a writer, the other business of being a writer. I think that's really the key. I like to think about. I often talk about, with my students, even like, taking off the. There are times when you have to kind of take off the writer hat and put on your author hat. And the author is the one who is on the podcast who is talking to readers on social media, kind of doing that, doing that part of the job. And then the writer is sort of almost like a separate identity, actually.

[Christopher Jansma]

It's fun.

[Joanna Penn]

I'm not really into golf, but we're.

[Christopher Jansma]

Watching the Netflix series on golf at the moment.

[Joanna Penn]

Moment.

[Christopher Jansma]

And it's mainly about characters. It's not so much about golf. They're excellent at their documentaries and they would talk. These young golfers were talking about how much they have to do social media in order to build up their brands. And I was like, oh, my goodness. It's the same for everyone now.

[Joanna Penn]

Like you golf.

[Christopher Jansma]

Golf is what they do.

[Joanna Penn]

Like we do writing, and then they still have to do social media and all that.

[Christopher Jansma]

So it feels like this is just the reality of being some kind of personal brand. Now you have to do that side of it. And so it's part of teaching your students that that is what you tell them. Right. It's not just the writing.

[Chris]

Yeah, so we talk about it a lot. It's. It's funny. My students are, you know, some of them are very online and. And really enjoy all of those things, and they're excited about that part of it. And to some degree, I almost worry more about those students because they're the ones who I. I suspect sometimes, like, I don't know, that they really want to write. I think they want to be famous. And I try to tell them in as nice a way as possible, if what you want is to be famous, there are better ways to go about it than writing, you know, probably more lucrative ways, too. So I do tell them. I do try to make sure that they remember right. It is. It is important, but it's not. It's not as important as actually writing something good and taking the time to. To master the craft that you're trying to master. I think there's an idea out there, another myth maybe that needs to kind of get dispelled, which is that that it's. The brand is more important than the writing. We've all picked up a book by a flashy author and felt like the writing wasn't all that good. And I think that sort of leads to this idea that, you know, okay, well, maybe that. That part's just not as important. Creating a Persona that people want to follow on online. And again, the reality is that I don't think that that works for most people. I think for most writers, and there are always great examples of writers who are quite successful and really don't have a strong social media presence at all and are still able to do it. So I try to remind them that it's fine to be excited about that side of things, and if you're good at it, it, then you should go ahead and do it. But that it's not a. It's not a shortcut to succeeding in the writing part of it. And in fact, I. I think it's often a distraction.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, there's definitely pros and cons, but you actually have a chapter on keeping secrets, and you do write there about where, you know, where's the line between what we do share? I mean, you know, I podcast because I don't really do much social media. Podcasting is. Is one way that I can, you know, be a brand, but also. And sell books, but also share some things. But There are lines that I don't cross with my own brand. So what are your thoughts on when we share, when we stay silent or.

[Joanna Penn]

Even in our writing?

[Christopher Jansma]

When do you write your truth and when do you keep it quiet?

[Chris]

Yeah, this is something that I. It's. It's funny. I think fiction writers like myself, I was really drawn to fiction early on, partly because I felt like my own life wasn't all that interesting. And so I thought I better have, you know, be writing in a. In a way that I can make things up. Since I've gotten older, I've felt the sort of the other way around about it, which is, you know, there are things in my life now that I feel this, you know, need to protect that I don't want to share with other people. And as a fiction writer, I have that option. I can always kind of hide things or I can change them in such a way that other. That there's still sort of an element of privacy around them. This comes up in Revisionaries, in the chapter on Patricia Highsmith, who was a very prolific crime writer and wrote some fantastic novels, Talented Mr. Ripley, the Price of Salt, etc. That are, you know, still classics today. But what I found was that she had tried a few times to write about her life, her sort of, her personal life. She was a lesbian, and she was having relationships with women in. In the West Village fairly, fairly openly at, you know, as openly as she could at the time. But she was living in a time when writing openly about lesbian relationships and. And so on could. Could have actually gotten her in legal jeopardy. It certainly could have ruined her publishing career. Publishers weren't able to publish stories about those kinds of relationships unless they ended in tragedy, because otherwise it was considered immoral. And so one of her great victories was writing the Price of Salt, which is a novel about these two women. And the relationship at the end is not really a tragedy at all, or arguably is sort of a happy ending. But she couldn't publish it under her own name. She published it under a pseudonymous, which was common practice at the time. And it was really difficult for her personally. She. She almost fell apart completely in the lead up to it because she was so worried about the exposure that might come from it, especially the more that it seemed like the book was about to become a big hit. And then it was the more that she felt like she had just shared way too much. I ended up reading another book of hers. I had to fly all the way to Switzerland to go to the library, the archives there, to Dig up an unfinished book that she tried to write about that was also sort of a woman reflecting on her life and her. Her relationships with women in her life. And she abandoned the book after, I think about 80 pages and just realized this. She just can't do it. She couldn't. Couldn't write about it. It was, you know, it was tearing her up. So I kind of think, and I talk about this in this chapter that we have to be able to do, draw those same lines for ourselves. And like. Like we were saying before. I think it's particularly tricky in today's writing environment where a certain, like, confessional impulse and is actually quite a. It can be a big draw. It can. It can help sell books. My most recent novel came out in the fall, and it's a novel about. Based on my grandmother's story stories during world war ii. And everywhere that I went to talk about it, that was the first question people asked. How much of this is real and how much of this is based on her real story? And which parts are real? Which ones did you make up? And, you know, it's like, well, it's a novel. It's supposed to be made up. You're not supposed to know necessarily which parts are real or not. But I went through a series of interviews. I was listening to other authors. I think maybe it was like interviews on NPR or something like that. And I just was checking for a while to see how many times was the author's own sort of personal life a part of the conversation surrounding the novel that they were publishing. And it was. It was well over 50% of the time. That was like, one of the first questions being asked. How is this book authentic? Because it comes from your own experiences. Right. And these are novels. So again, I sort of feel like we should be able to appreciate the beauty of a piece of fiction without having to be reassured that it came from a true story first.

[Christopher Jansma]

But of course, that's.

[Chris]

That's exciting to know about, so people want to. People want to share it.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I. I write horror and thriller and crime, and you get a lot fewer questions about, like, how much of this murderer is. You do. But then I do a lot of research. So, for example, my next thriller is called Death valley, and it's set in death valley in California. So there's all of the truth of the place, but then it's fictionalized. But I feel like with literary fiction, that is something that's an obsession with so many. And obviously there's been some very high profile Novels that have been ripped apart because they haven't been so called, you know, someone's own story. So I don't know. It's difficult.

[Joanna Penn]

Difficult.

[Chris]

Yeah. Well, there's novels where. And again, I think the trouble is, let's say a novel where it's marketed in such a way that it seems it's marketed on the basis of some sort of authenticity, this suggesting that the writer's own experiences are informing it. And then it turns out not to be the case that that's. You know, we've almost turned novels and fiction then into nonfiction, and we have that kind of. That same obligation that a memoirist does to be fully honest about everything that goes into the book. You know, when James Fry had his big scandal around A Million Little Pieces, right. That book was originally written as a piece of fiction. It was supposed to be a novel, and nobody was interested in it. And he then changed it over, basically said, oh, what if I just pretend it was a memoir? And then people loved it. Right. But that's because you've given people this assurance that it's real. And I think, going back to my earlier point, I think as fiction writers, we should try more often not to do that. So it's an easy way to get attention for the books that we're doing that we're writing. Because, of course, people want to know that. Even. Even earlier books of mine, the very first question I would get asked at every event was, how much of this is based on your real life? I used to know a little better, I think, than I do today. I used to know to kind of demure a little bit at that question and say, oh, well, you know, that's personal. Or that's private.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Well, the book is super interesting. We're almost out of time. But who is Revisionaries for? Like, who are the people who are going to get the most out of this book?

[Chris]

Yeah, I think Revisionaries is. I really wrote it for writers who are sort of in. You know, I really wrote it for writers in the earlier part of their lives. I really wished it was a book that I could have read when I was trying to write my first novel and feeling very frustrated, trying, you know, realizing I wrote two books or three books before the first one that actually sold. Two of them went out to agents and got. And actually two of them had agents and then couldn't find a publisher. And all through that process, feeling like, okay, maybe. Maybe I'm just not good. Maybe I just don't have what it takes Right. And so this was the book that I wish that I had been able to read at that point in my life when I was worried that the fact that I was failing or what felt like failure was not some sign that I didn't. That I would never be as good as I. As I wanted to be, or that I would never be as good as the other writers that I admired so much. And the only reason I hesitate to say that it's just for the, you know, sort of writers trying to find a way to break out is that I. When I was writing this book, actually, over the last five years, I was in the same position again. I had published two novels. They both came out and did well. And then for whatever reason, I. I couldn't get the next one sold. And then I wrote another one and that one didn't sell in. In the us it only sold in French translations, which is. That's a whole other story. Random. Yes. You know, delightful. I hope the French enjoyed it. So once again, all these years into my writing career, I hit a moment where I thought, okay, maybe that was it. Maybe I lost whatever I had and now I can't do it again. And then writing this book was a nice way to remind myself that actually, yes, this happens to lots of other writers. Was it? Richard Wright had this huge hit and then his publisher rejected at his next book. There are other stories like that in here about writers who are, you know, it's not a constant climb, you know, higher and higher. It's an up and down experience.

[Christopher Jansma]

Yes. It's not a straight up and to the right graph.

[Chris]

Exactly. And there's nothing wrong with that, with that being part of the way that it works.

[Joanna Penn]

Indeed.

[Christopher Jansma]

So where can people find you and your books online?

[Chris]

Well, ChristopherJansma.com is my website. That's Kris with a K. K R I Jansma. J A N S M A. And I'm on Instagram and these days, threads. Those are both great ways to find me. I have a substack called the Nature of the Fun where I post every month. Sort of a short piece that's all dedicated to finding ways to rediscover the joy in our writing process and making it more fun again.

[Christopher Jansma]

Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Chris. That was great.

[Chris]

Thanks so much, Joe.

[Joanna Penn]

So I hope you found this discussion interesting today. And remember, if you get depressed that your first drafts aren't as good as the books you read, don't worry, Keep writing, keep editing, and you will make it. So let me know what you think. Of today's episode. Leave a comment on the podcast Show Notes at the creative pen.com or on the YouTube channel. Comment on X hecreative pen or email me joannathecreativepen.com Send me pictures of where you're listening or your favourite cemetery or churchyard. Next week I'm talking to longtime Hollywood screenwriter and first time novelist TD Donnelly about the differences between the craft of books and screenplays as well as the different business models, how to go deep into character, what we might learn as authors from the changes in the film and TV industry and more. In the meantime, happy writing and I'll see you next time. Thanks for listening today. I hope you found it helpful. You can find the backlist episodes and show [e-mail] podcast and you can get your free Author [e-mail] Blueprint if you'd like to connect, you can find me on Facebook and X at the Creative Pen or on Instagram and Facebook. Fpenauthor Happy writing and I'll see you next time.