Shownotes
In this revelatory episode, Holly Ostara
shares her unconventional journey and discusses the alchemy of nonfiction book writing. She explores aligning creative efforts with seasonal energies on her podcast, "The Dream Season," where magic and transformation play key roles.
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Transcripts
Hi and welcome to the You World Order Showcase podcast. Today we have with us Holly Ostara. Holly is from books and alchemy dot com. She's a book writing coach and she's the host of the dream season. I'm really excited to have you on the show to learn all about what you're doing and really how you got started with it. And your name is so cool.
::I just love everything about books and alchemy.
::Thank you so much, Jill. I'm really excited.
::To be here.
::So how did?
::You get started in all of this.
::Oh gosh, I have. I have such a circuitous pathway to where I ended up.
::I'm not going to give you a.
::Whole memoir, but.
::I will say that I have always been a creative spirit and I was originally going to go to school for visual art and I was talked out of it by my mother who said you're never going to get a job.
::Go to business.
::School and that way you'll have a job and you'll be able to support yourself.
::You won't. You won't be broke all.
::The time.
::And so I did. I went and I started with a degree in accounting and.
::And then I went right into a Masters degree in MBA program and I thought, OK, you know one.
::Degree is good two.
::Degrees or better and I got through 1/4 of this MBA program before I realized.
::I am really blowing this. I do not want to do this for the rest of my life. I don't want to be in finance and here I am doubling down on something I don't want to do and so to take it back a little bit during this time that I was kind of struggling through getting this business degree and it took me 8 years to get this undergrad because I was so uncommitted.
::To it I was. I changed majors, I think 11 times I think was the final count with all within business and.
::It was just never happy because it wasn't where?
::I was supposed.
::To be. And so I started writing books on the side in college just to do something creatively.
::And then by the time I got to that MBA program, I had written a book and it was a fantasy novel, and it was like on the third draft at that point. And I thought I already have.
::A degree in business so.
::Hopefully I'll be able to get a job with this. I'm going to go do something I want that's fun instead, and so I switched my graduate program to a publishing.
::That, and fortunately, they allowed all my credits to transfer and I didn't have to spend 8 years of grad school too, but I ended up falling in love with it because I was already in love with books. At that point, I had always been a big reader. I had just thought that my creative outlet was visual art and then I got to a point in my life where I thought this is a lot of cleanup. I don't want to.
::Use turpentine every single day of my life to clean my brushes so this is something.
::I can do.
::That doesn't take as much out of me to actually be creative and love the publishing program. I was going to go.
::To New York City and get this publishing internship and then go be like an acquisitions editor at one of the Big 5 publishing houses. And then I realized to get that you had to, you had to go work for free for 40 hours a week in New York City and you somehow had to pay rent in New York City. And I thought, OK, well, maybe.
::This is not for everybody. And so I pivoted again and I thought, OK.
::I gotta get a job so.
::Well, I went into project management.
::And ended up getting certified in project management. I did project management for a while and I ended up working for education technology companies and specifically most recently a literature based education technology company and from there.
::I finally got to come full circle and I worked in publishing because they acquired A nonfiction publishing imprint and gave it to me to basically resurrect from the dead single handedly. And it was so much fun. I enjoyed it so much I thought I'm finally here. My publishing degree is finally getting used and.
::I really loved what I was doing, but I wanted to work more with authors individually. I wanted to work with them on the process of writing the book because I was on my 4th book at that point and then it so happened that the universe was in alignment with me. I he was planning to quit.
::In May of that year and in January of that year, the universe said, actually, we're gonna lay you.
::Off and so I got pushed into this and I think it was.
::One of the most winding paths to get where I was going to go, but it all worked out because it was good timing. It was bad timing, but it was good timing. You know, layoffs. Never good timing, but it was also like it pushed me to be brave and to really take something that had been just a side business for me and make it and force it to grow. So there's my long winded.
::Answer from my circular path of how I got here.
::That's fascinating. That's really, it's fun to see how people's journeys lead them to their purpose. And like every part of that makes so much sense to me. I and it's interesting to me how many creative people I run across who started out in accounting or bookkeeping.
::It's.
::Like we were all told, go to school, get a business degree, do something with it, because there will always be business.
::And so we just like migrate to the thing.
::Most creative because actually accounting is very creative. There's aspects to it. It's like puzzles more than math.
::That's what I.
::Loved about it anyway.
::Yeah, there's a.
::Lot of creative accounting going on, but.
::And here I am back.
::In business.
::Yeah. Yeah, a lot of real.
::Business for myself these days. Yeah. No creative accounting in my business. So I swear everything.
::Is very well accounted for, but yeah.
::It's kind of.
::I think they call that government accounting.
::Right, right, right. So I think it's kind of funny that I went from.
::Creative to business, to creative, and now I'm business and creative. So in the end we got there with both.
::With both aspects.
::That's very cool.
::So you actually work with people to take them through?
::The process of writing a book.
::How does that look? What does it? What's it like?
::Yeah, it's.
::Well, I've worked. I worked with fiction and nonfiction. I most mostly work with nonfiction writers, and so I will say that the process is slightly different. Well, it's been significantly different depending on what type of your book you're writing, but for nonfiction authors, which is my creative entrepreneurs who want to write a book to help grow their business, the process is, I think, really fun.
::And what I think is really scary for a lot of people who want who are thinking about writing a book is that they think, oh, this is going to take a lot of time. I don't even know what to write about or my English teacher told me. I'm.
::Not good or I don't think I'm a writer and the process.
::Kind of overturns all of those beliefs so.
::One of the things that I one of my core beliefs as a book coach is that non fiction books are not so different from fiction books. And I started writing fiction.
::And when I wanted to start writing nonfiction, and when I wanted to start working with nonfiction authors, I started looking at the two types of books because I mostly read nonfiction these days. So I my.
::Data gathering is actually mostly nonfiction, and.
::I started looking at.
::How these books?
::The good books, the books that get five stars and the books that go to bestseller lists. What about these books is, you know, core. And I found that they are quite similar in how they are written.
::For two, not two fiction books, excuse me. And the similarity is in the narrative arc, of course. So nonfiction books you think you're learning something? It's a how to book. It's a professional development book. It's a memoir.
::Or it's a process learning a process or it's something academic and you think this is very maybe stodgy. This is very factually driven or this is very salesy and versus a fiction book, which is you're hearing a story you're following along with the story, a journey, a character.
::Is going on a hero's journey, or heroines journey and.
::That's true also for nonfiction.
::The difference is that for.
::Nonfiction readers, they are the hero, are the heroine.
::And you're taking them on the journey. So they have the quest and they go through the hurdles via you telling this these many stories within while you're teaching and they come out at the other end of this quest having like.
::Overcome the villain or whatever, and the villain is like whatever problem they're trying to solve or whatever topic they're trying to learn more about. And so to trying to generalize this nonfiction books have what I term purpose points instead of plot points and.
::There's five main ones, and each of these purpose points takes your reader.
::Step by step through this narrative arc that teaches them, educates them, motivates them, and inspires them.
::That is fascinating. I love how you broke it down. I was just. Do you know who Alex Vamosi is? I'm just going to back up for just a second.
::The name is familiar.
::He's a.
::He runs acquisition dot com and.
::Yes. Oh, yes, yeah. I listen to his podcast. He
::Just did a book launch. He's got, like, a three. I think we're maybe five part. I know there's at least going to be 3 books in this series, but as you're talking about all of this, I'm thinking about how he writes his books. His books are almost a sales letter.
::But they suck.
::You in and he's. He's just like cutting edge on some of this stuff that he's doing as far as like the promotion.
::He did this huge.
::Promo to launch his last book based on the first book that he wrote.
::But when you read his.
::Books. It follows the arcs that you're or the points that you're talking about. And it I could see how that.
::It's like a good sales letter. It draws you in and takes you through the journey and you are the you are the star of the book or the sales letter and it's how well you can make that happen. That's.
::Yeah. So thank you for jogging my memory on his name because I'm I was actually listening to his. He put the book out in audio book kind of on his podcast. And I listened to, like, the first three parts and then I have a 5 year old. So, you know when I'll get to listen to the rest is for a debate. But I listen to the first three parts and I can tell you I can point out to you.
::What those what he's doing and hitting his story?
::So he tells the story of his rise and fall, basically of his business and all the hurdles he's overcome in pieces. That kind of take you up a mountain a little bit, a few steps up, and then you fall back down and a few steps up and you fall back down a few steps up. And that creates the tension that keeps the reader.
::Turning the page and as they're turning the pages and as they're this tension is created, he's teaching, he's teaching like .12 and three, which he reiterates, and then he tells another part of the story and then reiterates it again and.
::Because you're so into the story, you're also learning it. The story helps you absorb as the reader the lesson and helps you.
::As the reader.
::Go in the quest.
::He did a great job.
::Yeah, yeah, yeah, it.
::He had he had the back story of how he wrote it, that he gave to people that went to his live presentation. And it's really fascinating. It's like he spent so much time working on this table of contents because that was how he hung the whole story.
::And the drawings that he does. I mean, you can't see them on the podcast, but in the book, it's almost like a kids book because you his hand drawn characters are stick. They care but.
::They're unique to him and they help you remember key points.
::That he has.
::In the story.
::I just.
::This isn't about him, but it's about you.
::And I just was like.
::That is so.
::Fascinating that you're talking about these things because it.
::I could see a real life example that a lot of people are familiar with that they could watch and maybe work on it themselves if they're interested in in writing a book.
::You were you.
::Were starting to tell me before we started recording about your podcast, the Dream season. How does that relate?
::To books and alchemy and.
::And we do need to talk about.
::Alchemy a little bit.
::Yes, we definitely need to talk about alchemy. So the dream season I I've, I've had, I've got 10 episodes, so it's still fairly new. And it was born from my need for creative outlet and.
::And another way to connect with people. Because I'm definitely a nesting kind of person. I love to nest and connect and snuggle. I guess with everybody I meet not in a weird way, but the dream season is about one of the experiments I did. I'm kind of an experiment.
::Person. That's where we kind of get into.
::The alchemy.
::And in fact, my newsletters called the Book Lab where I love to do experiments, but it's one of the experiments I did.
::On trying to live more in tune with the seasons and not going overboard with it like I'm not.
::Changing out my entire front door decorations like with double layered floor mats and like the scarecrows and stuff like here in the autumn. But it's more like.
::Each season has a different energy to it, and we as human beings we just kind of inherently feel that just like a bear and feels that it needs to hibernate in the winter. We also feel this need to kind of go inwards and rest and rejuvenate and reflect and.
::When you try to work against these energies, it makes it a lot harder, and I've noticed that.
::For example, if I try to write.
::Fiction in the summer.
::I will burn myself out to the point where I can't write fiction for like another 12 months, maybe, but if I skip this summer?
::And don't even think about it. Then I'll write a whole book in the fall.
::It's because the summer is a lethargic season. Everybody's hot. Everybody has.
::Activities that they have to do. You know, if you have kids and your kids are out and you've got to entertain them if you know you're a teacher, you've got to do everything you weren't able to do during the.
::School year, it's.
::There's just a lot going, so the seasons as I see them, are winter, spring, summer, fall, winter is the dream season spring.
::Is the magic season. Summer is the grow season and fall is the flow season and what that means is.
::In the winter, you dream up all these big ideas that you're going to have for the next year. Your projects, your goals, everything and that, that that aligns, right, we all do New Year's Eve resolutions or something. Well, some of us do. And some of us are, like, grumpily against it, which is totally fine too. I am one.
::Of those people, we.
::But we use winter for that kind of like.
::Thinking phase where we're just dreaming up what's coming next and what we want to accomplish the spring, we get this huge burst of energy.
::And you know, we're all like spring cleaning with like, while we're listening to an audio book while we're launching a new program. While we're like, you know, I don't know, starting a new yoga challenge or something and that we somehow have the energy for all of these things at once in spring, then summer hits, we need to break again. So we've had three months of work, and we need that break in the summer.
::And it's kind of coasting and they call it the gross season because you've already planted these seeds in the spring. All you could do is a little bit of watering and it.
::Keeps them going. Don't mess with it.
::Just let it let it ride for a little bit and then in the fall you get another burst of energy and you see that, especially in the book world with, like, Nanowrimo in November. The national novel Writing Month, people can just like turn out 50,000 words of a book and one month, which is great. And if you do that.
::And June, they also have a Camp 9, camp 9, or Remo Nanowrimo, and it doesn't get nearly as good results from what I've seen. So that's what I think about the seasons and the podcast is.
::About these, like how it's kind of a different tip each time about what we could do for the current season. We're in to maybe a line and some interviews with other creative entrepreneurs and what they're doing and how that helps you align.
::I love that. I love that a lot and I'm really big on seasons in life and it's not just like.
::The winter, spring, summer and fall seasons. There's also seasons in your life. You know there's the childhood season. There's a teenager season, there's.
::The getting started.
::With your life season. And then there's, you know, the family season and then there's.
::Kind of. The After family season that I didn't actually even know that was a thing until I got there myself. It's like there's a whole another life after kids and a lot of people if you have.
::Kids young.
::That it usually hits around.
::You know 4045, if you.
::Have them when you're in your 40s like.
::I did it. It doesn't hit till you're 60.
::But it's.
::And even like with infants, when you have infants, when you're in that season, it may seem like, oh, God, this is going to be forever. I'm going to be carrying this child around with me for the rest of my life. I'm never going to be able to put it down. But that time passes and relatively quickly.
::And then they're. They're like, no, no, don't hold me. Don't hold me. And they do the jello.
::Body thing.
::Possibly you wonder how they become LED overnight.
::That seasons are great.
::In terms of keeping track of what's happening in your life, but knowing that there's another season coming, it's not like.
::You're stuck in it, and I think with your dream season in terms of writing, I can see how that would be really helpful for people.
::Not only planning where you are.
::But planning on what you're doing.
::Yes, yes, those are all excellent points. And as you were talking about the baby season and then turning into Jello and lead, I was just thinking of my morning getting my 5 year old to kindergarten. Yes, they are seasons for everything, seasons for your business.
::Reasons for your life and.
::When you apply them to, you know business or to writing a book, I think it changes everything it makes.
::I think for like my example of like I can't write fiction in the summer. I don't even try anymore. I mean, after several failed years. It's just you learn from this and this helps to create those rituals. And I think that that's part of the.
::Alchemy of it.
::So why did you call your?
::Business books and alchemy. What? What led to that title?
::Well I am.
::I am a fantasy breeder at heart. I read mostly nonfiction these days, but.
::Fantasy has always been my first love and I love I love magic and I love transformation. So to me, when I created the brand name, it was both metaphorical and literal in that, well kind of literal, literally literal.
::Metaphorical in that.
::Alchemy, if you like, look at like.
::Like John D and all the historical real alchemists like Paracelsus, they wrote it in a way that people kind of read this as, oh, this is a real thing. They're actually trying to turn, you know, base metals into gold and if you look at it the other direction, these are metaphors for growing as a person, like enlightenment.
::Their version of Enlightenment and the way I see it is that.
::Writing a book.
::Even if it's not your quote UN quote magnum opus.
::But which is a great work in alchemy, like turning lead into gold, even if you're not doing that, you are still creating transformation in yourself.
::And by creating transformation in yourself, you get closer to being able to create something that will leave your legacy.
::I believe, and I've seen this in action, that when people write books, when entrepreneurs write books, when coaches write books.
::Even more about what they're doing and they clarify what they're doing even more.
::Taking it closer and closer to being gold for themselves and their clients. So I think that every book is life.
::Changing because the person who writes it as being subtly changed at the very least, and more likely.
::Changed a more profound level just through the act of writing the book, so that in itself is an alchemy, and eventually you are also going to create alchemy for readers because they are going to be transformed by what they read.
::I love that. Yeah, I can. I can totally relate to it. And I just like we were talking earlier that books to me are.
::They're kind of.
::Sacred. And I get the whole listening on to audio the audio version. There's something about actually holding a book.
::And books and alchemy together just remind me of the power of actually holding a book and reading it. And.
::People that read get transformed. There's something about the act of taking in the words that just moves you into a different state.
::Of being you.
::Especially with fantasy books, I mean you actually.
::For me when I read.
::The whole world. Just.
::Disappears. I am suddenly in this movie it and it is like a movie for me.
::I see the.
::The things going on and I'm part of it, more than like watching it or listening to it ever can do. But, you know, listening is it still allows you to.
::Go off in that.
::That space, but because you're not forced to sit and focus.
::On the words you.
::Can do other stuff where you.
::Listening it, it kind of it, it takes away that little edge that you get from just carving out time and sitting down and diving into a book and.
::I agree I.
::Wandering through it, crawling out the other side.
::Oh yeah, I agree. I.
::I don't. I can't really get absorbed in.
::Like movies or TV.
::Shows that are fantasy as much because.
::You know, they never cast it right, you know, even if it's a great casting, it's not what you've imagined in your head when you.
::Read the book.
::And that kind of throws me out.
::Although I can enjoy it, you know I can.
::Still enjoy it.
::But it's just not as absorbable to me and then audiobook I agree. I.
::I can get more absorbed into it, but I get more. I get the most when I'm actually physically reading, but I will read different formats of books for different types of books, like I'm more likely to read fiction and audio book if it's, you know, like long fiction because.
::I can. I can listen and kind of read at the same time on a Kindle. Or but for nonfiction, I always get paperback or hardback, because I need to see this. I need to see the words, to absorb the information.
::And I think.
::A lot of people are that way you used.
::To absorb things differently.
::Are you the kind of person that remembers things on a page?
::Better than I would remember it being spoken to me because I have a little bit of like a.
::Squirrel brain.
::I I'm kind of that way too. It's like I know when I was in school, I would read things and I would remember where they were on the page and if I could remember where they were on the page, I could remember what they said.
::Oh, that's perfect.
::That's like a mind palace in your textbook.
::I do that with other things too, like if I take notes, if I remember where on the page I put the note, I can find it again.
::Or I can remember it what it said because I can picture the.
::Age it's.
::It's bizarre.
::I thought some people.
::Could do that, and some people can't. I just was wondering. I think that's probably why I really enjoy.
::Reading actual books because they like, stick with me for a long time, especially a really good book.
::I'll remember it for years and years and years.
::So what are your what are your?
::Biggest tips for people who?
::Think they might want to write a book?
::The first tip.
::To not be scared, it can be really scary and I know that's such a vague tip, but let me let me.
::Just kind of expand on it a little bit because you here don't be scared. You're like, OK, duh, but that is something that I see so much as people say.
::I don't think I'm gonna have time to do this or I what if I put myself out there and everybody hates it or I get terrible reviews and my rude sister-in-law like mocks me about it every Thanksgiving or?
::Like what if nobody reads it at all? Or what if nobody buys it? These are all real fears, but they're all overcome, able fears. And so the first thing I tell anyone is just don't be scared because.
::You all, you just have to start writing. You have to start writing. There is no book unless you write it or hiring a ghostwriter. Unless you hire a ghostwriter, there is no book, and so just put it down on a page or a document. And don't think about putting it out into the world yet. Just think about getting your thoughts down.
::And once they're down and they're this big jumbled mess of thoughts, then you can start like figuring things out and putting things where they go that that is if you've already started writing. That's not how I would do with my clients. I would not tell them to do that. But for people who are just scared and just wanting to do it just.
::Get something down on page and then don't worry about anybody looking at it. Don't worry about it. If it's going to sell or not because.
::That doesn't matter. Yet the second thing I would say is that you.
::Need to develop.
::A ritual or a habit of writing, and it can be 5 minutes a day. You just need to.
::Get that muscle memory in. It doesn't have to be good writing. It could be journaling every day. It could be writing a gratitude list. It could be writing it. You know what you see out the window? Like 5 sentences and that's it. You just have to get this muscle memory in up. Putting your thoughts into words because.
::The way we think the words in our brain, you know, we think we're thinking coherent thoughts. But if you kind of stop and.
::Really like getting meta with what your goes on inside your brain. You'll realize that you don't really think so much in words all the time. It's like images.
::Well, for most people, I think images and visuals and word here and there. Maybe a piece of dialogue here and there, something you wish you'd said when you had that argument with, like the cashier or something.
::I don't know.
::But it's not coherent really. So you need to have this muscle memory practice of putting sentences down in some sort of narrative structure, and you can just write.
::Just like the old high school and college essay style, here's my thesis statement. Here's one supporting argument. And here's my conclusion. My thesis statement is it's a beautiful day. Today my supporting argument is I saw the sunrise and it was pink. And now that the leaves are turning and the concluding statement was, I hope I have more days like this.
::It's really that simple. And then you do that every day and you create that ritual.
::Yeah. And So what? What do you have to suggest to people if they've written a?
::Book and they want to publish it.
::So I work with people who want to either. So either traditional publishing or self-publishing. My preference is self-publishing. I just think that it's a better bang for your buck and more creative control.
::But I understand that people, some people have different reasons for wanting traditional publishing, and I support that and help them do that. So if they want to publish their book first, you need to know what you want. Do you want to do traditional publishing or do you want to do self-publishing because they're very different? You.
::Know you have.
::You know X is required for this and Y is required for this and I'll just go with self-publishing here because I think that in my experience most creative entrepreneurs want to do that. And what you need to think about what you're going to self publish is what's your end game goal.
::Your work backwards from there, so what's your goal? I want to get more speaking gigs. I want to make royalties from this book. I want to have people book my client or book my coaching service from this book. I want to get national media attention. I want to go on the Today show. I want to.
::You fill in.
::The blank once you know what that is.
::And then you.
::Think about what your promotion is going to be, because whether you traditionally publish or self publish, you will be doing the marketing. Don't let anybody fool you.
::Into thinking otherwise, you will.
::Be doing the marketing either way and you're, you know, as people who have their own businesses, we all know how to do marketing or we suffer through it anyway. It's something you can do.
::So don't let it scare you. Build it backwards and create your little backwards funnel to get there. The publishing aspect for self-publishing is you're gonna need to have the, you know, the document itself, the manual.
::Yeah, you'll have to have a cover designed or create one yourself, although I recommend if you are not a designer to get one designed for you and they can be affordable.
::You want it to be edited and.
::I recommend hiring a professional editor, but.
::Adding on your needs, you could suffice with a couple rounds of like pro writing aid to edit it for you, and then having two well read friends. Double check it for you.
::You also need to have like your Amazon account, your Ingram Spark account your.
::Google sorry Google Play account your Apple iBooks accounts those or there's another service called Draft Digital draft to.
::Digital, which will?
::Export to all of these other platforms for you and.
::It's a really complicated process, but those are the main ducks you want to have in a row. You want to have your accounts ready, you want to have the book ready, which is the miniscript the cover.
::Oh, I forgot. You need to have your metadata. This is very important. This is what everybody saves until last and it should be done first as part of your reverse engineering. Your metadata is your keywords. You get 7 on Amazon and so you want at least seven and you need to know your categories that you're going to put the book in and you get like.
::To this is for Amazon. It varies for others, and you also want to have like a blurb for the back of the book, like your book description and a log line. A log line is think like the movie poster tagline for your book like.
::I can't think.
::Of anything on the shelf right now.
::Gosh, I should have had something in my head but think like how to how to tame giraffes? 4 spots you should look at to tame giraffes or something like that. And it's not your subtitle, but it's like a movie poster tagline. So you want to have all that and all of that goes into how well your book.
::Well, so.
::Does that answer the question? It's such a.
::Complicated process. It's hard to.
::It does it, it makes it.
::A little more clear cause I know.
::That it is a complicated process I've.
::Done some publishing. I've done some little books that I've put on Amazon and it's not.
::It's not easy, but it's not intuitive either.
::It has, you know, little things like creating a cover.
::Depending on how thick your book is, it changes the cover dimensions, those little things that need to be taken into consideration when you're doing that.
::Oh yeah.
::The page count of your book and the type of paper you select for your paperback or hardback will affect the covers spine dimensions.
::And like it can be.
::It can be.
::Scary if you haven't done it before. I do help people with publishing if they decide that they don't want to just involve themselves in that. But it's also something that you can do. So don't think that just because it's a complicated process means it's an impossible process. It's not. You can do it.
::And it's definitely better if you have somebody to.
::Help you like.
::Hiring you would be like.
::A good idea?
::I personally agree I'm biased, I personally.
::Great. I do want to.
::Talk about your writing ritual tracker and I want to make sure we get that in there. So you want to tell people.
::About that and how it helps and.
::So if you are trying to establish a writing habit or you want to establish a writing habit because you want to start writing a book, I have a writing ritual tracker that I think is.
::I mean, personally I think it's the most awesome thing ever it.
::Is so delightful, what it is it's a you think of it as a template, but it's more like a little database where you can input, you know what you did today I wrote 500 words and then you can put in like.
::How you felt?
::About it like I felt great, I felt.
::OK, it was a struggle.
::Things like that and these are like options for you to choose from.
::And then you put like the time of day you wrote like I wrote in the morning, afternoon, night, evening and any external factors like in a noisy coffee shop or laying in my bed with my laptop. Or if you are a person who menstruates I was menstruating or I was like on the somewhere in my cycle.
::Just things that could affect your energy, your mood, and your creativity. You can put them.
::In there and.
::Once you've started collecting this data, like maybe a week.
::So of it.
::You can start filtering and sorting and you can see you can begin to see patterns of what's working and what's not. So for example, when I first started using it, I was tracking for about two weeks and then I started. I started like filtering it and sorting, sorting it. And I realized that.
::Much to my surprise, I don't write well in the evenings, and that's when I've been trying to do it. And for years and like I, I managed to write a whole book in the evenings after my daughter was born. But when I started, like tracking, like my feelings about writing.
::This book and how long I worked like 2 hours and getting 500 words written versus maybe in a morning. I wrote for 30 minutes and got that same 500 words written and I felt better about it.
::I realized that my ritual was all wrong and I had to change that if I wanted to not burn myself out. And that's something that is so near and dear to me because.
::I am.
::I'm a Capricorn and I will just have 35 projects going at once and I will burn myself out and smile while doing it. And so like I realized like, oh, I'm on fire and then I have to crawl my way back up. And so this allowed me to.
::Changed that before I started burning myself out again and.
::I think it's really.
::Helpful. I think you know if you are definitely the type of person who likes to.
::A little bit of science with a little bit of woo maybe. And you like to have a little bit of data backing up your intuitive decisions. It's perfect because you can see this data and you can say, yeah, I do actually realize I write better in the morning, but I don't actually want to write in the morning, so maybe I'll try mid morning instead and then you can kind of mix that intuition.
::Of the data and I think it's great so.
::That that sounds amazing. You just.
::Even if you're not writing a book.
::Just to use.
::It for if you're a Blogger or if you're trying to do something that's creative, requires you to.
::Put something on paper.
::Tracking how you're feeling at that time and how long it took you and how much you got done, that that's kind of genius.
::Yes, really.
::Think here I use it for other creative work too, so I've recently started doing that and I and I know some people are using it and not writing a book and still finding it useful. So yeah.
::Yeah, it can. Just like if it takes you 2 hours to do stuff in the afternoon, the late afternoon that takes you like 15 minutes in the.
::Morning it helps you.
::Make better use of your time if you can figure out where to organize things in your day because we're all doing a lot of different things at different times and it would maximize your.
::Maximize the time that you have to get the most done the most efficiently and.
::And make you feel good at the same time.
::Because you're tracking.
::How you're feeling when you're doing it?
::Yeah, I think so. And don't let it scare you. If you're afraid of, like tracking, it takes like 2 seconds. It's all like drop down. You know, you don't have to do a lot of.
::Typing it's just click.
::Yeah, I love that.
::The whole data.
::Idea is like they go and find it and write all this stuff down and.
::And I could be doing something else.
::So I'll probably.
::Go do something else instead of doing that. So if you make it so.
::Easy and.
::It's just like a couple clicks and.
::And then when you.
::You're looking for.
::The data, it's all there in one spot.
::So it makes it.
::Makes it easy and convenient.
::So how do people get in touch with you?
::Well, you could listen to my podcast. It's called the dream season. I'm toying with the idea of renaming it to the flow season, but for now it's called the dream season, and you can also get me on my website, which is www dot booksandalchemy dot com. I'm on Instagram and TikTok as.
::At Holly Ostara, that's OST ARA. And. And I'm also on LinkedIn and you can find me there as well. If you are a LinkedIn person.
::That is awesome, and I'll make sure I put those links in the show notes below. So what's the one thing you want to leave the audience with today, Holly?
::I would like.
::To say you know, and this is not a sales pitch because you.
::Can do this.
::Without me.
::But I think everybody should write a book because.
::What is that saying? Learn by teaching those who can't do. Teach. That's not true. But teaching helps you learn yourself and what you offer and writing a book is teaching both this, you know vague, nebulous person who will when they read your book and.
::Also yourself.
::Because you're having to put your thoughts down and your framework down and in your special sauce down in this structure that will eventually.
::Allow you to.
::Convey that structure better to your clients and your customers. So even if you never plan to publish it, even if you have no interest in being an author, I think that you.
::Should write a book, so that's what I'm going to leave you with is to think about what you could do.
::To maybe make that happen.
::I agree with you.
::100% like I said, I have written some books and.
::You just get.
::So much clarity.
::About what it is that you're trying.
::To say in the process.
::Even if you start with just putting bunch words on paper, usually in my bed.
::I hate staring at a blank.
::Page. So thank you so much Holly, for joining us. It has been an honor getting to chat with you.
::You as well. Thank you so much, Jill.
