Latest / Story Magic / 69 - Dog Training with Eric Goebelbecker

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69 - Dog Training with Eric Goebelbecker · Story Magic

• 2:28
  Rachel: Hey, writers.
• 2:28
  Rachel: Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
• 2:32
  Emily: I'm Emily.
• 2:33
  Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
• 2:34
  Emily: And today we are talking with author Eric Goebbelbecker, who's been in tenacious writing and in the Golden Maze Fair for a long time.
• 2:43
  Emily: And we're going to talk about all the ways that writers avoid getting to work and how to, how to get around it.
• 2:53
  Emily: So before we get into that super fun topic, Eric, can you tell us, tell the listeners a little bit about you and what you write and how you found us, maybe?
• 3:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: Oh, how I found you?
• 3:05
  Rachel: That was a while ago.
• 3:07
  Emily: That's a question from me.
• 3:09
  Emily: You know, the pre Covid eradic.
• 3:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: Wow. I have no idea.
• 3:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: So where do I start?
• 3:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: I guess I'll start with, I'm one of those writers that always wanted to be a writer.
• 3:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: Going back to, like, junior high school.
• 3:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: I wrote all kinds of short stories and all that.
• 3:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: Lost track of that when I joined the army but never stopped reading, I will say.
• 3:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the fact that I was able to write a helped me, even in the military, with their points when working on radars that I actually rewrote some test plans that they had when I got out of the military and became a programmer, which you could get away with in the early nineties without a degree.
• 3:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: My ability to write helped in my career.
• 3:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: And now?
• 3:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: Well, not now, probably about a decade ago, I started writing about tech part time.
• 4:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: Im actually in a couple of the unleashed Sam's books.
• 4:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: I wrote a couple of chapters for them.
• 4:08
  Eric Goebelbecker: And when I got fed up with programming and retired, we don't have videos of the fact that I'm doing.
• 4:14
  Emily: I know.
• 4:14
  Emily: I was going to say, uh huh.
• 4:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: Um, I am now for the day job writing about tech more or less full time, doing some editing, some strategizing, and part time.
• 4:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: I've finished my first indie science fiction book with your help.
• 4:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I'm working currently behind schedule on the second book in the series.
• 4:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's why I'm the expert on aren't we all?
• 4:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm the expert on avoiding work, actually.
• 4:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, I do podcasts to talk about it instead of working.
• 4:50
  Emily: So cool.
• 4:51
  Emily: Well, tell us, can you tell us a little bit about shadows of the past?
• 4:54
  Emily: I know the story behind this book and I love it.
• 4:59
  Emily: So I want everybody else to know it, too.
• 5:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: So shadows of the past is a book about my grandfather in disguise, which maybe someday I'll write the book about my grandfather.
• 5:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: And actually, I can talk later.
• 5:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: I spoke to Ken Liu he's a science fiction author.
• 5:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: He translated a book called three Body Problems that you might heard of.
• 5:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: He actually gave me a really cool idea on how to approach the book about my grandfather.
• 5:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: I can go to that later.
• 5:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: But when I was a snot nosed, skeptical teenager, my dad, and I don't know why he waited until I was like 15 or 16 to tell me this story, told me a story about how my grandfather, when they were still in Germany in the late twenties, my father was born in Germany.
• 5:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: Some Nazis tried to kill him because he was considered a hero in World War one.
• 5:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: They wanted his endorsement, and he said, no, I think you guys are crazy.
• 5:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: And they tried to kill him.
• 5:59
  Eric Goebelbecker: That led to a riot in this tiny village that I visited in the eighties.
• 6:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: And it was still tiny.
• 6:05
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that's how we ended up in the States.
• 6:07
  Eric Goebelbecker: And being a skeptical, stop nosed teenager, I completely forgot about this story.
• 6:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I'll say that already.
• 6:15
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like I said, I wanted to be a writer.
• 6:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I, like, something in me was like, this is too good.
• 6:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: This has to be exaggerated.
• 6:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: There has to be some, what is the word, hagiography going on?
• 6:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think how great my grandfather was.
• 6:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: And he was this little guy, and he was really low key and really chill, taught me how to fix bicycles.
• 6:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I'm like, this guy.
• 6:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: No, this couldn't be.
• 6:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I joined the army stationed in Germany.
• 6:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: And my grandmother arranged to have my cousin Hans, because of course, my german cousins name was Hans, pick me up and took me to Liedelsheim, our little village.
• 6:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: And like, even the name of the village, Liedelsheim, sounds like little, right?
• 6:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, how could this have been a hotbed of nazi stuff?
• 6:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: And he takes me around during the day.
• 6:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: He's like, this is my cousin Eric.
• 6:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: He's american, he's in the army.
• 6:59
  Eric Goebelbecker: And everybody's like, hey, Eric, how you doing?
• 7:00
  Eric Goebelbecker: That night, though, he had a bunch of older guys over for drinks.
• 7:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: And this is like 1983, so World War one, world War two, people were still out and around in the early eighties.
• 7:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: And suddenly I was able's grandson.
• 7:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: And all these guys are like, we're not worthy.
• 7:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: We're not worthy.
• 7:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: You're amos grandson.
• 7:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: And they tell me the same story, but, like, actually more detail.
• 7:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's even more interesting.
• 7:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: And so, again, forgot about it.
• 7:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, go back to army stuff.
• 7:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: Go back.
• 7:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think I might have already been married by that point.
• 7:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: I've got all this kind of stuff going on.
• 7:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: I just kind of think in the background that this stuff really happened.
• 7:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: And it's kind of cool and then right around when I, you know, past five or six years, I'm thinking about not programming anymore.
• 7:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm thinking about finally writing a book, thinking about finally catching up with my sister, who's got, like, 60.
• 7:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: And.
• 7:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: And politics, um, you know, politics been kind of interesting lately.
• 8:03
  Emily: I don't know if anyone noticed.
• 8:06
  Emily: In a minute.
• 8:07
  Rachel: Surprise.
• 8:08
  Emily: Yeah.
• 8:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the stuff that's, that's been going on around here, if you.
• 8:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: If you look at the late twenties in Germany.
• 8:15
  Eric Goebelbecker: Um, yeah, I'm not going to say much more, but yeah, and I. I will say at one point when I want.
• 8:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: I started researching about my grandfather, I actually thought I better write this fast because, you know, this stuff's going to end soon.
• 8:30
  Emily: Yeah.
• 8:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I found out more and more, um.
• 8:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: Oh, that's right.
• 8:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: We don't have a video.
• 8:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: I actually found two books.
• 8:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: One book is about this tiny little village.
• 8:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: When I went to that village in, like, 1983, it might have been 2 miles square.
• 8:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the father and the house from the 18 hundreds that my grandfather was born in was still there.
• 8:53
  Emily: That's cool.
• 8:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: My wife and I went back, and just before COVID Christmas 2019, we were back there visiting family, and it's much bigger now.
• 9:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's like, what happens over here.
• 9:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: Carlsboro is the big city that's nearby.
• 9:07
  Eric Goebelbecker: Carlsburg was mentioned in the shadows a couple of times.
• 9:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's become more of a metropolis type that.
• 9:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: Although my cousin, who's a librarian, actually rides his bike into Carlsruhe every day through this one path, I'm kind of jealous.
• 9:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: Anyway, getting back to shadows.
• 9:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I was working on the book about my grandfather, did a ton of research.
• 9:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: A Donna fiddling, I will say, instead of writing a lot of research.
• 9:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah.
• 9:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: Found amazing amounts of information.
• 9:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: This guy named Wegener, who, if you've read shadows, he's a character in there.
• 9:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: He was a guy from the lidelsheim area that actually, after World War One ended, wanted to restore the Kaiser, except he wanted the Kaiser to be him.
• 9:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: And of course, the proto Nazis were running around, and these two guys, the roets, were trying to get candidates elected to, like, mayor and local council seats in Liehlsheim, which is where my grandfather comes in.
• 10:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: But I hit a point where I'm like, this is not the first book I'm going to write.
• 10:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: This is way too serious.
• 10:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: And still the question that Ken Liu helped me out with, which is, I can't write a history book about this.
• 10:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: I can't even find the records of when my grandfather was captured by the French and when he was released.
• 10:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: I have other books that he's interviewed for talking about it, but I couldn't find, you know, so, like, I can't do an academic book with footnotes.
• 10:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's going to be fictionalized.
• 10:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: But how much?
• 10:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: And at some point, because I'm a science fiction guy and a little crazy, I was thinking about the Sohm and thinking about the battle of the Somme.
• 10:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: My grandfather was on.
• 10:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: And if you don't know about that battle, that.
• 10:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: What was the PBS series set in England that was really popular?
• 10:59
  Eric Goebelbecker: Downton Abbey.
• 11:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: Downton Abbey, yes.
• 11:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: Actually has scenes with the battle of the Stone.
• 11:05
  Emily: That was so funny that that's where you went to.
• 11:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: Well, I mean, that's something that people that are not, you know, World War two geeks.
• 11:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right.
• 11:14
  Emily: Like Downton season.
• 11:16
  Emily: Love it.
• 11:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right.
• 11:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: When you reach.
• 11:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: When you reach 30 guys either have to be into roman history or World War one and two.
• 11:22
  Emily: Yes.
• 11:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right. So I'm trying to relate there, but that was a battle in the trenches in France, where in one day, I think it was 18,000 british troops were killed.
• 11:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: Jeez.
• 11:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: And if you think about World War one weapons.
• 11:37
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 11:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, like, you had to reload the rifle every time to kill 18,000 people.
• 11:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: What that takes.
• 11:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that was the battle my grandfather had survived and what made him a hero.
• 11:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: The British broke through in one place.
• 11:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: Guess where it was.
• 11:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: And here again, I hear the story about my grandfather.
• 11:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm like, get out of here.
• 11:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: Come on.
• 11:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: Then I'm in the New York public library reading about the battle and reading about his unit and it happening.
• 12:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: He knew which way to run and saved his unit.
• 12:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about how cool it would be to write about that.
• 12:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: But again, I can't do it as my first book.
• 12:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I made a book where it's the Martians instead of the British.
• 12:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: And actually, that scene is in the book.
• 12:24
  Emily: I was just going to say, I remember when Amel knows the trenches because he's the radio guy.
• 12:29
  Emily: Yeah.
• 12:29
  Eric Goebelbecker: So my grandfather is Emil Goblebecker.
• 12:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: Goebbelbecker with the.
• 12:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: With the umlaut.
• 12:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: My grandmother was Emily Zimmerman.
• 12:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: So one of the main characters in shadows of the past is Amel Zimmerman.
• 12:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: Didn't even try to hide that.
• 12:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: And so what I try to do in shadows is mix those two stories of the world War.
• 12:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: World War one era battles, but in a world that it was changed by HG Wells.
• 13:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: Martian attack.
• 13:02
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 13:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: So if you're not familiar with the original War of the worlds and you're only familiar with the Tom Cruise movie.
• 13:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: Or if you get a chance, the movie from the fifties is much better.
• 13:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: They kind of duct tape a romance story to it, but it's a much, much better movie.
• 13:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: The Martians show up in, I don't know, 18.
• 13:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think I decided it was 1894.
• 13:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: They tear everything up.
• 13:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: They're literally eating us.
• 13:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: And then they drop dead because they can't tolerate Earth's microbes.
• 13:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: They catch the flu and die.
• 13:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's Covid.
• 13:39
  Rachel: Think about that.
• 13:40
  Rachel: Timely.
• 13:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think Spielberg kind of does that, sort of.
• 13:45
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 13:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: And my question was, they had these heat rays.
• 13:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: They had this amazing hardware.
• 13:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: What happened to it?
• 13:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: They just dropped dead and left that stuff laying there.
• 13:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: And like, let's look at 1894.
• 13:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: You've got Kaiser Wilhelm, for crying out loud.
• 14:00
  Eric Goebelbecker: He was not a nice guy.
• 14:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: He was actually trying to take over South America.
• 14:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: What happens when he gets heat raised and poison gas?
• 14:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the czar in Russia.
• 14:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: I didn't even get to Russia yet in the book.
• 14:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: But I thought about that and I thought about also one of the reasons why we're in the political situation we're in right now.
• 14:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: The only reason that guy is even a thing is 911. 911 really changed our politics.
• 14:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: So what would happen to America if aliens invaded?
• 14:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah.
• 14:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: What kind of country would we have turned into?
• 14:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that's the american half of shadows.
• 14:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: In the past, I think I could have done a better job.
• 14:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the third book goes into that kind of a situation where how does a country like America react to being invaded?
• 14:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: I mean, what did we do for 911?
• 14:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: I mean, 3000 people and we lost our minds.
• 15:01
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 15:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, go look at other countries where slightly bigger things have happened.
• 15:07
  Eric Goebelbecker: They actually stayed democracy somehow.
• 15:11
  Emily: Yeah.
• 15:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah. Just saying.
• 15:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: So that's where shadows comes from.
• 15:15
  Eric Goebelbecker: Kind of all over the place on that.
• 15:17
  Emily: Yeah. Well, I think it's.
• 15:19
  Emily: I think it's really interesting because the topic that you sort of brought to us today is this idea of, like, stop fiddling and get to work, which I think is something a lot of us can relate to and also has lots of layers to it.
• 15:33
  Emily: Right.
• 15:34
  Emily: But I think what I love about your story with this story is that you recognized that writing your grandfather story felt so big.
• 15:44
  Emily: And so instead of just, like, not doing it, you decided to write something else instead.
• 15:49
  Emily: That used all of the research that you worked on.
• 15:52
  Emily: That was fun for you because it was Sci-Fi and it got to, you got to ask all these other questions without the pressure of, like, you know, quote unquote getting it right.
• 16:03
  Emily: So I think that's a great segue into, you know, what you brought to talk to us about today.
• 16:10
  Emily: So can you tell us a little bit more about why you suggested this topic?
• 16:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: Because I do it too much, and maybe if I talk about it in public, I'll have to stop.
• 16:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think it's a problem everybody struggles with in different ways.
• 16:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm in a couple of writing groups, and it's interesting to, like, before we go into a writing sprint or before we review each other's work, we'll talk about where we're at.
• 16:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I see these people, and again, I'm not judging them.
• 16:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: We talk about it, engaging in these delaying behaviors.
• 16:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I also have a history with dog training and animal behavior.
• 16:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: And with dogs, we talk about displacement behaviors.
• 16:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, your dog is nervous.
• 16:59
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, my dog hates the harness for some reason.
• 17:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: I don't know why.
• 17:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: Never beat her, honestly.
• 17:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: But when you approach her with the harness, she starts to scratch because having that thing go over her head.
• 17:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think we have those displacement behaviors.
• 17:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: And sometimes I wonder when people talk about, well, I can't write till I have a cup of tea.
• 17:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, and a cup of tea puts me in the mood.
• 17:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think it puts you in the mood, but I think it's also a kind of a. Before I go and write, I'm going to engage in this other behavior to prepare myself.
• 17:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think about that.
• 17:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: And also in the programming world, totally the same thing.
• 17:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: Spend hours reading programming forums before I actually write some code, because I want to figure out how to get this one loop better.
• 17:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: Or should I really be using 16 bit integers?
• 17:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: Maybe 32 would work.
• 17:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: I can waste five days researching that.
• 17:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think that kind of thing.
• 17:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: That seemed to be me, to be something that.
• 17:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: To talk about and to bring out into the open.
• 18:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: Steve Frisfield has an entire book about the resistance, and I think that's the same thing.
• 18:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: Is the resistance, is that resistance to working those behaviors?
• 18:16
  Emily: Yeah, I mean, I feel like we call it all kinds of different things.
• 18:21
  Emily: Like, we call it resistance.
• 18:22
  Emily: We call it procrastination.
• 18:23
  Emily: We call it fiddling.
• 18:26
  Emily: But, like, I mean, where do you think that comes from?
• 18:32
  Emily: Because a lot of times we talk about it coming from fear, but I feel like it can be more than just fear.
• 18:41
  Emily: Like, it can come from other places.
• 18:43
  Emily: I think that's the root of it.
• 18:45
  Emily: I don't know.
• 18:45
  Emily: That's a question for both of you.
• 18:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: Here is the first thing in my notes for me.
• 18:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: I do think it like, I am in a scene right now on my book that I've been on probably for a week.
• 18:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: It is very simple scene with a bunch of characters sitting around a table.
• 19:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I, and I know that there are several things that have to happen in that scene for my story to work, and I'm afraid it's going to be boring.
• 19:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah.
• 19:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: The right thing to do would probably be to write the next scene, and I will avoid that at 230.
• 19:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think that's fear.
• 19:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think that you hear those voices in your head and saying that somebody's going to read this, they're going to put the book down, or you don't know what you're doing, or how could you possibly be writing a second book already, you loser?
• 19:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: You've already sold 200.
• 19:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: But we know what's going on, that kind of thing.
• 19:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I think people will engage in that.
• 19:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: And there's two ways you can go with that.
• 19:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: One of them is find an opportunity to clean your office, get a new Mac mini, decide the scrivener truly sucks, because it does.
• 19:54
  Rachel: That's me.
• 19:54
  Rachel: I'm always like, is it?
• 19:56
  Rachel: I think it's Scrivener's fault.
• 19:57
  Rachel: I'm going to go look at dabble.
• 20:00
  Rachel: Stop it.
• 20:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: Look at tools.
• 20:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think AI has probably been a boon to the procrastination industry.
• 20:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the other one is to go find a class.
• 20:12
  Emily: Yes.
• 20:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I will say, I don't know if they'll, if they'll listen to this podcast, but I have a few friends that are professional students.
• 20:20
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 20:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, you know, and.
• 20:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: But I think a lot of that, a lot of it is fear.
• 20:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: I do think burnout is a thing.
• 20:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think that sometimes you do need that break.
• 20:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the paradox there being, if you don't stop and get up and go do something else, you're never gonna break out of that loop.
• 20:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: And so, you know, I think that's a valuable skill for us to learn, is the difference between I'm just afraid of writing this scene or finishing this outline and I'm working too hard.
• 20:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: I need to go touch some grass.
• 20:58
  Rachel: Yeah, I think that's, that's like, such learning that distinction, for me, made a huge difference in the being aware of my procrastination, being aware of my fiddling and then getting to choose whether I continue.
• 21:13
  Rachel: I consciously am like, I'm not doing this right now.
• 21:17
  Rachel: I'm gonna go scroll on my phone versus the resistance, the avoidance.
• 21:22
  Rachel: And I just can't find a way to sit down in the chair.
• 21:25
  Rachel: But to me now, at the beginning, it was really hard to differentiate between those feelings of, like, am I overwhelmed?
• 21:33
  Rachel: Am I afraid?
• 21:33
  Rachel: Or am I just tired?
• 21:36
  Rachel: And, like, I think the more that you ask the question of why do I not want to do this?
• 21:42
  Rachel: And you can, like, bring awareness to what it is and start to recognize the differences in those feelings.
• 21:50
  Rachel: Sometimes.
• 21:50
  Rachel: I, like, overwhelm is a big one for me, and I hit that over the weekend, wherever.
• 21:57
  Rachel: I'm revising right now.
• 21:59
  Rachel: And something about this, I was gonna revise the catalyst of my book, which is a scene that's, like, 4500 words.
• 22:06
  Rachel: If that scene was a thousand words, I would have had no problem to do it.
• 22:09
  Rachel: But some reason that.
• 22:10
  Rachel: The reason that I saw it was 4500 words, I was like, I'm not doing.
• 22:14
  Rachel: I cannot do it.
• 22:15
  Rachel: And then for three days, I was, like, dreading it.
• 22:18
  Rachel: And then yesterday, I sat down and I was like, if I just finish this one scene, it's fine.
• 22:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: I.
• 22:24
  Rachel: And then I got through it in, like, 45 minutes, and it was no big deal.
• 22:26
  Rachel: And then I did three more scenes.
• 22:27
  Rachel: It's like, gosh, why?
• 22:29
  Emily: Just.
• 22:30
  Rachel: There's all sorts of reasons why I felt so overwhelmed by, like, the.
• 22:34
  Rachel: The amount of thing.
• 22:35
  Rachel: Like, the amount of words that were before me.
• 22:39
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 22:41
  Emily: That's making me wonder if there's.
• 22:44
  Emily: I was just thinking, like, that makes me wonder if there's a difference, because we've talked about fear and burnout and tiredness, but then also overwhelm.
• 22:54
  Emily: And I'm wondering if.
• 22:55
  Emily: Is there a tie?
• 22:55
  Emily: I almost think it's tied to both.
• 22:59
  Emily: The idea of overwhelm.
• 23:00
  Emily: Overwhelm is both tied to being tired because it's so much easier to get overwhelmed when you're tired.
• 23:05
  Emily: But I also wonder, is overwhelm a function of fear, of the energy it's gonna take to do something, right?
• 23:15
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah. Yeah, that could definitely be that.
• 23:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: And with the size of a scene and the amount of work, there's another dog training concept of it's sort of related when you see any animal doing any kind of a complex behavior, like, if you go to, like, some animal act and, you know, a cute little seal dancing around and doing a sequence of events that wasn't trained in one shot that was broken down.
• 23:49
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 23:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: And even a simple thing like getting a dog to sit, depending upon where the dog is, can.
• 23:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: Can take multiple steps.
• 23:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: And what they say when a trainer is trying to take on too much at once, one of the things you can call is lumping.
• 24:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: They call that lumping.
• 24:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: And if you're looking at a scene with 4000 words, maybe you're lumping 4000 words together.
• 24:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: And you just do 500 or do a thousand or do one scroll, you know, in word or scrivener, whatever it is.
• 24:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: And you may find yourself saying, ask, good, finish it anyway.
• 24:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: But, you know, trying to take on too much at once can, can contribute to that overwhelm and that fear.
• 24:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, I'm only mentally prepared to revise a thousand words right now.
• 24:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: Didn't do a thousand words right now.
• 24:38
  Rachel: Yeah. This idea of, like, lumping.
• 24:41
  Rachel: Okay.
• 24:42
  Rachel: When you were explaining earlier, dog training, my brain, like, latched onto it and I was trying not to bring it back up again because I'm like, tell me about dog training.
• 24:51
  Rachel: This is amazing.
• 24:52
  Rachel: So I'm so glad we circled back to it because this psychology feels, it feels like such a compatible comparison to me.
• 25:00
  Rachel: And I don't know why I'm just now like, wow, that is so interesting.
• 25:05
  Rachel: Um, because I do feel like we tend to, I have no idea if this is going to sound correct, but now I'm latching onto that word lumping.
• 25:13
  Rachel: But, like, I feel like we sit down and we try to lump on all these behaviors that we expect of ourselves, but we've not trained ourselves to perform one.
• 25:22
  Rachel: So how do I, how am I supposed to expect myself to perform five at a time of, like, I've got to write, I've got to understand, show, don't tell.
• 25:30
  Rachel: I've got a no scene structure.
• 25:31
  Rachel: I've got to do.
• 25:32
  Rachel: Like, we just expect ourselves to perform the complex behavior without letting ourselves go through the motions of, like, they have to become muscle memory first, or they have to become, like, we have to train ourselves to be comfortable in the face of fear, or we have to train ourselves to sit down even if we're feeling a certain way, or train ourselves to not feel guilty, to take a day off.
• 25:57
  Rachel: Anyway, I want to hear more comparisons.
• 26:02
  Rachel: I am a complex animal with complex behaviors.
• 26:05
  Emily: Train me well.
• 26:08
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, now I'm risking the wrath of the dog trainers because, well, pretty much forgotten.
• 26:14
  Emily: Eric on Twitter, right?
• 26:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: At egoblevecker.
• 26:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: Not that anymore, but find it and flame it.
• 26:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: So there are a couple things in there that really work.
• 26:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: So to not derail this into a three hour podcast on dog training, I.
• 26:35
  Emily: Mean, I'm like, let's name the podcast dog training with.
• 26:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: One of the pivotal, pivotal books when I started, and I don't know if it is anymore because it's been a while.
• 26:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: For those of you who can't see me, I'm old.
• 26:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: Was don't shoot the dog was the name of the book.
• 26:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: It was written by Karen Pryor, a very famous trainer.
• 27:00
  Eric Goebelbecker: She actually really, at most of her experience, as far as I know.
• 27:05
  Eric Goebelbecker: And here again, don't shoot me.
• 27:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: Dog people was actually training marine mammals, you know, your orcas, your dolphins and all that.
• 27:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: And she wrote a book, don't shoot the dog.
• 27:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: And what it was supposed to be about was supposed to be for people.
• 27:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: And it was supposed to, if you know any psychology, operant conditioning.
• 27:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: Skinner.
• 27:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: It was supposed to be how to use operant conditioning in your everyday life, your roommate has this annoying behavior.
• 27:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: How, instead of yelling at your roommate and trying to punish your roommate, can you switch it around and use positive reinforcement and, like, reward them for hanging up their towel or putting the cap on the toothpaste or whatever?
• 27:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right?
• 27:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: We're all married.
• 27:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: We all know about this stuff.
• 27:45
  Emily: Right?
• 27:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: I. And have kids on the way.
• 27:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: You have kids on the way.
• 27:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: You will remember this conversation, but she called it don't shoot the dog.
• 27:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: And if I don't even know if I have my copy anymore, she might had one chapter about dogs in there, and what the title was a reference to was, go back far enough.
• 28:05
  Eric Goebelbecker: In the animal behavior days, you can't get the dog to do what you want.
• 28:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: Get another dog could fill in the rest.
• 28:12
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 28:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: Dog trainer people latched onto this book and started using her concepts to train dogs.
• 28:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: And actually, the Karen Pryor Academy was one of the certificates I had until expired.
• 28:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: We used clicker training for training dogs, and it was, you know, 99.99% focused on training dogs with positive reinforcement.
• 28:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: And there are a lot of techniques in there that apply to what you're talking about to take a long way around.
• 28:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: One of them was they brought in the concept of tag teach, which was a way to use positive reinforcement training for people.
• 28:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: It was huge.
• 28:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: In the gymnastics world, one of the cardinal rules of tag teach is when you're correcting somebody one thing at a time.
• 29:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: So they're trying to, you know, vault over that vault thing that they use in Olympics things, and they're dropping their arms and their knees at the same time.
• 29:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: You pick one, either tell them to pick up their arms, tell them to pick up their knees.
• 29:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: They do it one more time, they get that right.
• 29:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: Great job.
• 29:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: Do it again.
• 29:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: Then you might tell them about the knees and what you're talking about.
• 29:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: There is show, don't tell, you know, punctuation and all that.
• 29:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: Trying to get all that right in your draft.
• 29:32
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 29:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: You will never finish.
• 29:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right.
• 29:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's why we have revisions.
• 29:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: And when you're making, when you make multiple passes in revisions.
• 29:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right?
• 29:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, what was I doing?
• 29:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: First pass was pro writing aid.
• 29:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: Second pass was autocrit.
• 29:46
  Eric Goebelbecker: Third pass, I finally read the damn thing.
• 29:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, I didn't try to do that all at once.
• 29:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's the same thing for us.
• 29:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that can help overcome some of this fear.
• 29:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, what I really need to do, probably, now that I think about it, is just nail the dialogue in this scene around the table.
• 30:03
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 30:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: And then go back and fill in how my character feels, you know, how do you feel about that?
• 30:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: Who cares?
• 30:13
  Emily: The number of times Eric was like, really?
• 30:15
  Emily: When I asked him that, why?
• 30:17
  Rachel: Why, why?
• 30:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: We're the heat rays.
• 30:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: Let's bring out the heat rays.
• 30:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: But that's, wow.
• 30:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: We're going to talk about dog training and writing.
• 30:28
  Rachel: I'm titling.
• 30:29
  Eric Goebelbecker: This episode does not listen to this.
• 30:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: But, and, you know, we haven't another expression, the dog training world.
• 30:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: Positive reinforcement works.
• 30:40
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 30:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: Rewarding yourself works.
• 30:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: And whether that's, you know, giving yourself candy or making yourself a cup of lapse on sushan or whatever for finishing that chapter, you can do that.
• 30:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: The premac principle is a really key one, which is the dog wants to go play in the yard.
• 31:00
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right.
• 31:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: Your dog likes nothing more than going into the yard to look for rabbits.
• 31:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: My dog definitely does that.
• 31:07
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm going to make her let me put her eardrops in before I open the door and let her go outside.
• 31:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: So use a less reinforcing behavior or a more reinforcing behavior as a reward for a less behavior.
• 31:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: Reinforcing.
• 31:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah.
• 31:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: Well, there you go.
• 31:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: Can't ride your bicycle till you finish that chapter.
• 31:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: I will tell myself that today.
• 31:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, we'll see if that happens.
• 31:32
  Rachel: I feel like some of this has parallels to, like, what, what is often recommended for habit building for neuro, neurodivergent people, where you like habit stack.
• 31:42
  Rachel: So if you're, if you don't know how, like, if you are so bad at flossing, well, make sure you always floss after you brush your teeth.
• 31:50
  Rachel: And then they become, like, a stacked habit where you do both at the same time.
• 31:54
  Rachel: And I'm now realizing, like, I guess that kind of became how I write where, like, I get all ready for bed.
• 32:03
  Rachel: I, like, brush my teeth, wash my face, and I get in bed, and then I pull out my computer and I, like, write.
• 32:08
  Rachel: So it just, and then I go to sleep afterwards.
• 32:10
  Rachel: And that became, like, such a consistent part of my nightly life that writing at night works for me.
• 32:18
  Rachel: But I guess I'm seeing a lot of parallels.
• 32:21
  Rachel: I trained myself, I had, like, a lot of positivity there.
• 32:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: James clear.
• 32:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: You read James Clear's stuff, and as somebody who studied a lot of animal behavior, his stuff makes perfect sense.
• 32:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: He's dead on about this.
• 32:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah.
• 32:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: I have almost no college, but I ended up reading a lot of text to get the dog training certifications I had.
• 32:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: And a lot of them were psychology books for humans.
• 32:44
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 32:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, they're not that far from us dogs.
• 32:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I could go on.
• 32:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: You gotta stop me.
• 32:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: I could go on for hours.
• 32:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: I had a podcast for a while for this one association I was on the board for, and I was interviewing people from Duke and the canine cognition labs and.
• 33:01
  Emily: Oh, cool.
• 33:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the behaviors, like, dogs are better adjusted to live with us than primates are.
• 33:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: But all this stuff with positive reinforcement and the downsides of punishment and all that apply to us exactly the same way.
• 33:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: And we do punish ourselves.
• 33:19
  Emily: I was just going to say that that's a really good piece of this.
• 33:22
  Emily: Yeah.
• 33:23
  Emily: The shaming and the punishing that we do when we don't, like, meet our expectations, which are usually, like, out of the, you know, out of this world.
• 33:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, I think that, you know, that's definitely played into it for me, was, I still don't call myself an author.
• 33:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: I still don't call myself a writer.
• 33:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: Or I'll put in caveats, like, no, I write about technology and, you know, the ways you can punish yourself.
• 33:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think, like, you, you'll keep yourself from writing.
• 33:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: So the technical definition of a punishment is something that reduces a behavior that's really, really important when you're going to people and helping them with their dogs, because they'll get hung up on, you know.
• 34:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: Well, I yell at him and he keeps doing it.
• 34:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, you know, and my friend Margie, she's.
• 34:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: She's got lots of wise wisecracks.
• 34:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: She's like, so how's that working for you?
• 34:23
  Emily: Yeah.
• 34:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: The dog doesn't find you yelling, punishing.
• 34:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: Matter of fact, they may find it rewarding.
• 34:31
  Eric Goebelbecker: And as soon as your kids are able to crawl more than, like 1 mile an hour, you will learn of the ways that they will try to get attention from you.
• 34:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, I'm not sure if you're there yet, but you will.
• 34:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: My son's 34.
• 34:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: I think he's still doing stuff like that.
• 34:46
  Eric Goebelbecker: But if they don't find it punishing, what works, the other hand is, so if you beating yourself up makes you write less.
• 34:56
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 34:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: Then you are punishing yourself and keeping yourself from writing.
• 35:02
  Eric Goebelbecker: So that means don't read it and just type without reading behind yourself gets words on the paper.
• 35:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: Do it, whatever it takes.
• 35:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: And maybe find your ways to reward yourself.
• 35:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like going up to tools word count and seeing it increment.
• 35:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: That is rewarding for me.
• 35:26
  Rachel: Yeah, me too.
• 35:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: I love seeing that.
• 35:29
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I used to stop myself from doing it, and I realized, no, honestly, ten words, dude.
• 35:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: Ten words.
• 35:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's only been 4 hours.
• 35:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, whatever it is, go ahead and do that and think about the things you're doing to yourself that keep you from wanting to write and don't do that.
• 35:49
  Emily: Yeah, this feels like a really important distinction because I think there's something about hustle culture that tells us the message that we receive is that if we're really hard on ourselves, we'll achieve more.
• 36:02
  Emily: So there's this idea that if your internal narratives, the more shame you pile on yourself and the more you guilt yourself into showing up, the more you're going to do it.
• 36:11
  Emily: But the reality based in animal psychology, like you're saying, is that that actually doesn't do what we want it to do.
• 36:20
  Emily: It has the opposite effect most of the time, because we can't.
• 36:25
  Emily: That punishment does not lead us to showing up on the.
• 36:29
  Emily: Showing up to the page or doing the hard thing or whatever it is that we want to do.
• 36:33
  Emily: It's just going to keep us from doing it.
• 36:37
  Rachel: I was on an Instagram algorithm this morning that was.
• 36:44
  Rachel: It was like a mom algorithm.
• 36:45
  Rachel: So I was getting lots of mom parenting videos, but one of the ones I came across was a post that was.
• 36:51
  Rachel: The message was, moms, don't shame yourselves.
• 36:55
  Rachel: Like, you're doing a great job.
• 36:56
  Rachel: And that was wonderful.
• 36:57
  Rachel: Then I opened up the comments, and the comments were like, shame yourself.
• 37:01
  Rachel: Like, it was just so terr.
• 37:04
  Rachel: Like, it was so disheartening to see these comments on this woman's video that were basically like, no, you should shame yourself to be better.
• 37:10
  Rachel: And I, like, distinctly remember, I can, like, picture the comment box in my brain right now.
• 37:16
  Rachel: It was like, shame teaches us to be better people.
• 37:19
  Rachel: And I, like, had a moment of like, oh, my God, are all of our teachings wrong?
• 37:25
  Rachel: And then I was like, no, no, that's not true.
• 37:29
  Rachel: Like, I think there's so much data to back up that, no, shame does not teach you to be a better person.
• 37:35
  Rachel: Shame makes you hate yourself more, which just is a negative spiral into not doing the things that you want to do.
• 37:43
  Rachel: And that narrative of beating yourself up equates to doing better.
• 37:51
  Rachel: Never once has that been a long term solution for me or anybody.
• 37:56
  Rachel: That I've ever met.
• 37:57
  Rachel: Like, maybe it gets you to change your behavior for one day, but then you, like, revert back to the original thing and, like, the narrative is even worse because now you failed again, and you just continue to shame yourself.
• 38:12
  Rachel: And I wish, like, I want to, like, break.
• 38:14
  Rachel: Break that, like, generational.
• 38:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: I will say, yes, definitely generational.
• 38:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: And what I. You know, my relationship with my dad could be complex at times, but what I started to ask myself about parenting was, what's Chris gonna remember?
• 38:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, to me, was more important than anything else.
• 38:38
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I wish I'd asked myself that question earlier, but that's a whole nother story.
• 38:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: But we are also programmed in our firmware, not just psycho, you know, not just what we learned from our parents to kind of follow the group and follow the pack.
• 38:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, in dog training, you would hear a lot about social facilitation, and we would, in a lot of situations with dogs that were fearful, try to use other dogs to get them involved.
• 39:06
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, like, I had a very, very fearful dog and a very outgoing dog.
• 39:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: The outgoing dog's name was caffeine, as a hint.
• 39:14
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I could use caffeine to get gauge.
• 39:17
  Eric Goebelbecker: To engage in things.
• 39:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: Engage.
• 39:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: Wow.
• 39:20
  Eric Goebelbecker: To engage in things.
• 39:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: And one of the horrible things the social media does to that is it plays on that you see that Instagram influencer, and you're like, why can't I be like that?
• 39:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: Why can't I be out with my six kids in their stroller and my sports bra running 40 miles an hour?
• 39:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: We're programmed for that.
• 39:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think that to bring it back to writing.
• 39:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: So being in a writing group was really critical to me.
• 39:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: Seeing other people write and seeing other people have problems and seeing other people post on slack or discord that they're having a problem.
• 39:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I'm like, I had that problem three months ago, you know, whatever it might be, and see that there are, you know, million books being uploaded to Amazon a day.
• 40:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: There's got to be 30 of those people I can relate to and get over the imposter syndrome and all that.
• 40:13
  Emily: I like that.
• 40:14
  Rachel: Yeah, I feel.
• 40:16
  Rachel: I hear that with fiddling, with procrastination, with this behavioral.
• 40:21
  Rachel: There's a behavioral shift that needs to happen to, one, become aware of it, but then to two, to change the behavior.
• 40:29
  Rachel: And I think we all understand it's not a perfect fix.
• 40:35
  Rachel: These patterns come and go, and you have high points and low points, and there's all sorts of variables and factors that go into why we procrastinate.
• 40:43
  Rachel: But community feels like a big one, like knowing that you're not alone, being aware, like awareness, understanding the fear, sounds like another big one.
• 40:54
  Rachel: What other ways do we stop doing this?
• 40:54
  Rachel: Or get back to how do we.
• 41:00
  Emily: Start working through this?
• 41:02
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 41:07
  Emily: It'S a big question.
• 41:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: I mean, the best way to do the work is to do the work.
• 41:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: So create the environment that allows you to do the work.
• 41:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, you know, we talk about that voice in our head, that imposter syndrome, that voice telling us we're not doing it.
• 41:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: You have to figure out a way to shut that person up, you know?
• 41:32
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I think one of the reasons why I'm struggling for that is different for everybody.
• 41:39
  Emily: Yeah.
• 41:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: One thing that really hit for me, actually, very recently, the past few days, is one of my other many hobbies is martial arts and Zen.
• 41:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I came across a Zen talk that opened with a story from the Moomin Khan, the gateless barrier, the story of Zen stories.
• 42:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: And this famous monk, Zhou Xu, was a famous chan Zen monk in China.
• 42:10
  Eric Goebelbecker: He was the abbot of a monastery.
• 42:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: And a new student came to him one morning and said, please, please tell me what to do.
• 42:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: And Jo Shu looked at him and said, did you eat your porridge?
• 42:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yes.
• 42:24
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yes, I did.
• 42:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: You better wash your bowl.
• 42:29
  Eric Goebelbecker: And the point of that story in the Zen world is Zen is just living and just doing your thing.
• 42:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: But what hit me about that was, you know, I got this book that I already paid an editor to be ready for on September 6.
• 42:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: What do I need to do?
• 42:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: Write the book?
• 42:45
  Eric Goebelbecker: I need.
• 42:46
  Eric Goebelbecker: I need to wash my bowl.
• 42:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: What's it going to take to get me to do that?
• 42:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: Right, I guess is the first question.
• 42:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: So from there, it's like, so why am I not doing that?
• 43:00
  Emily: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: Why am I not doing that?
• 43:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I, you know, and there's.
• 43:04
  Eric Goebelbecker: And for everybody, the answers are going to be different.
• 43:07
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, the room is too hot.
• 43:08
  Eric Goebelbecker: The room is too cold.
• 43:09
  Eric Goebelbecker: Scrivener looks too much like word 95.
• 43:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, whatever it was like, I personally have stripped down my tools to just literally word at Onedrive, and I stopped playing.
• 43:23
  Eric Goebelbecker: I spent all kinds of time trying to shoehorn my process into obsidian.
• 43:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I just.
• 43:29
  Eric Goebelbecker: After talking to my sister, and she's like, I've been using word for 20 years.
• 43:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm like, maybe she has a point.
• 43:36
  Rachel: Your sister blows my mind.
• 43:39
  Rachel: I respect your sister so hard.
• 43:42
  Rachel: So cool.
• 43:42
  Rachel: To me, the first time you told me about her, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is so cool.
• 43:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: Maybe 60 books later, maybe she's got a point.
• 43:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: Where's that resistance?
• 43:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: And Pressfield, I gotta say, that book got kind of repetitive for me after a while.
• 43:56
  Eric Goebelbecker: But what he is asking you over and over again is, is where is that resistance coming from?
• 43:59
  Eric Goebelbecker: What's stopping you from doing it?
• 44:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: And if it's, you know, like, time of day, you know, if, if you write best at night, then make your nights available to write for me, it's first thing in the morning.
• 44:14
  Emily: Yeah.
• 44:15
  Eric Goebelbecker: So I'm getting up super early to at least get a little bit of writing done before the dog is up my butt, wanting, wanting to be walked, and the birds are squawking too loud for me to think anymore, you know, and that, that's what you have to do.
• 44:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, you know, and I go back to the, to the behavior thing.
• 44:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: If you're not doing it, something is punishing you.
• 44:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's just a fact.
• 44:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: And now, please don't turn that into, oh, my God, I'm punishing myself.
• 44:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm such a terrible person, and I'm.
• 44:45
  Emily: Gonna punish myself for punishing myself.
• 44:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: Exactly. Exactly. Right.
• 44:48
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, you can, it could very quickly turn into, like, some kind of a Mel Brooks thing.
• 44:52
  Eric Goebelbecker: But what are those things that are punishing you?
• 44:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: For me, it's as simple as I did have a habit of every time I sat down and opened up the manuscript, I'd go back a few lines and read to figure out where I am.
• 45:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: That would turn into, oh, that's terrible.
• 45:18
  Eric Goebelbecker: I personally am using an outlining tool plotter that after you get done mapping your book out, it spits out into a word doc that you could work in.
• 45:27
  Eric Goebelbecker: I go to the next thing in the outline, and I work on that, and I figure I will connect the dots in first round, the revisions.
• 45:34
  Emily: Yeah, I love that.
• 45:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that's the best place for me personally, and I'm not telling everybody that is not Eric Goldbecker's how to finish a novel.
• 45:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: Advice.
• 45:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: There is no course forthcoming.
• 45:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's what worked for me was, you know, to stop punishing myself by reading what I wrote while I was passing out in front of the computer the night before.
• 45:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, whatever it might take.
• 46:00
  Eric Goebelbecker: You can't write in a certain room and move to another room.
• 46:06
  Emily: You know, I love, I feel like the Zen story just, like, struck a chord with me because, and I think there's a lot of folks, at least in our, a lot of writers and a lot of folks in tenacious writing who probably resonate, will resonate with this, is that I am a perpetual learner, but I have, like, a a deep love of, like, learning about myself.
• 46:30
  Emily: And so I will, like, I love mindset stuff.
• 46:35
  Emily: Like, I love to understand why I'm doing things.
• 46:37
  Emily: And what I will often do is, like, put a lot more weight to why I'm not showing up than I am.
• 46:41
  Emily: I'll be like, I need to figure it out.
• 46:43
  Emily: Like, I need to figure out what's holding me back.
• 46:45
  Emily: I need to figure out, right?
• 46:46
  Emily: And there's this, like, what's the next mindset thing I need to level up in, right.
• 46:51
  Emily: And the story just struck this chord of, like, it's really not that.
• 46:55
  Emily: It's really not that complex.
• 46:58
  Emily: Like, when it comes down to it, you're writing cause you wanna write.
• 47:01
  Emily: You're writing cause you wanna write a story, right?
• 47:03
  Emily: It's part of I'm gonna butcher the Zen stuff, but, like, just, like, you're living, right?
• 47:06
  Emily: It's just, like, part of what your life is like.
• 47:11
  Emily: And so if you're not showing up, something's in the way.
• 47:14
  Emily: And it can be that simple of, like, I'm afraid of something.
• 47:18
  Emily: Okay, now what?
• 47:21
  Emily: Right?
• 47:21
  Emily: And so figuring out, you know, what it is that's punishing you or what it is that you're afraid of can.
• 47:29
  Emily: It can be as simple as just saying, like, I'm just not gonna engage with that, and I'm just gonna, you know, I'm just gonna show up today.
• 47:36
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 47:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: I mean, as one author, I can't think of who she was now that I read about recently that she actually said she hates writing, but she likes revising.
• 47:48
  Emily: That's me.
• 47:50
  Eric Goebelbecker: So she had to write.
• 47:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: She's got to get through the draft to get to what she likes, which goes back to that premack principle.
• 47:56
  Emily: Yeah.
• 47:57
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, and if you don't like drafting, what will make drafting go easier for you and for me, honestly, one of the things I disliked in the first book was the outlining here and then drafting here and then going and all that back and forth.
• 48:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: To me, especially as a computer guy who wants everything to be as streamlined as possible.
• 48:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: And when I saw a plotter, I was like, oh, God, there you go.
• 48:22
  Eric Goebelbecker: And that just was one thing, you know, one situation where looking at a new tool actually made my life easier.
• 48:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: But if you're stuck on your book, you're 20,000 words into what's going to be an 80,000 word novel.
• 48:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: Do you really think dumping scrivener right now is the right move?
• 48:41
  Eric Goebelbecker: Like, that's why I made sure, you know, I'm going to word.
• 48:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's it.
• 48:44
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm sticking there, crashing, whatever.
• 48:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: And you're stuck on that book.
• 48:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: You're 30,000 words in.
• 48:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's taking a six week course.
• 48:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: Really what you need right now where.
• 48:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I'm not against learning, and I'm not against.
• 49:01
  Eric Goebelbecker: To me constantly learning is the right thing to do.
• 49:03
  Eric Goebelbecker: But there's a time and a place for everything.
• 49:05
  Eric Goebelbecker: And, you know, what's a displacement behavior and what's going to help you get your job done?
• 49:10
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 49:11
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah. I will also say the one thing that I had to get past is there are a lot of trainer authors, authors that are acting as trainers that tell you that it's got to be a business for me that doesn't work.
• 49:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: When I think of this as my job, I know this is something I'm doing because I enjoy it.
• 49:33
  Rachel: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I. That's where I came up with it's.
• 49:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: I'm going to try to do one book a year.
• 49:40
  Eric Goebelbecker: There's three books a year, three books a quarter, stuff like that.
• 49:43
  Eric Goebelbecker: No, no, no.
• 49:46
  Emily: Yeah.
• 49:47
  Eric Goebelbecker: Now, maybe you're the type of person that treating it like a job is rewarding for you.
• 49:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: Fine.
• 49:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: But ask yourself that question and yourself what.
• 49:54
  Eric Goebelbecker: What story do you need to tell yourself to make this rewarding and fun?
• 49:58
  Emily: Yeah, it could be.
• 49:59
  Emily: Yeah. Planning to have it be a business for yourself could be a reward, but it could also be a punishment.
• 50:06
  Emily: Right.
• 50:06
  Emily: Saying that it's not good enough unless it performs an x y Z way.
• 50:12
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah. It killed dog training for me because.
• 50:15
  Rachel: It became, like a business job and.
• 50:19
  Eric Goebelbecker: That had a lot to do with killing it.
• 50:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: That's why I've done it on and off part time.
• 50:25
  Eric Goebelbecker: And I find it much more, you know, rewarding that way that I can, instead of focusing on the rent, I can focus on the person in front of me who needs help with their dog.
• 50:36
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 50:36
  Eric Goebelbecker: You know, that kind of thing.
• 50:37
  Eric Goebelbecker: Because that's what I found rewarding.
• 50:39
  Eric Goebelbecker: I figured out, you know, what was reinforcing about this was helping somebody relate to their dog, not how to fill the next class.
• 50:48
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 50:49
  Eric Goebelbecker: And with writing, the story I want to tell is what's rewarding, not whether or not I'm breaking even on Facebook ads.
• 50:58
  Rachel: Right.
• 50:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah, that kind of thing.
• 51:01
  Rachel: Yeah. That makes so much sense.
• 51:03
  Emily: Well, thank you so much, Eric.
• 51:06
  Emily: I know.
• 51:09
  Emily: Well, awesome.
• 51:10
  Emily: Well, to close this out, can you tell us a little bit about.
• 51:13
  Emily: Little bit about where people can find you and your books and anything else that you have your dog training?
• 51:21
  Eric Goebelbecker: So my neglected website is Eric goblebecker.com.
• 51:28
  Eric Goebelbecker: is it worth it to try to even spell that.
• 51:30
  Eric Goebelbecker: Or I guess it could be in the show notes.
• 51:31
  Emily: We'll put it in the show notes.
• 51:33
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yeah. Eric with a C.
• 51:34
  Eric Goebelbecker: Goblebecker.
• 51:35
  Eric Goebelbecker: It's rekeblabog spelled backwards.
• 51:38
  Rachel: That's helpful.
• 51:39
  Rachel: Yeah.
• 51:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: My newsletter is newsletter dot ericgoblbecker.com and Facebook.
• 51:51
  Eric Goebelbecker: My author page, equally neglected is facebook.com.
• 51:55
  Eric Goebelbecker: first initial, last name E. Goblebecker.
• 51:58
  Eric Goebelbecker: But if you go to my main my website, you will find everything, including your book.
• 52:05
  Eric Goebelbecker: My book is the first book, shadows of the past is wide, pretty much everywhere.
• 52:13
  Eric Goebelbecker: If you can avoid giving money to Amazon, I'm very cool with that.
• 52:16
  Eric Goebelbecker: But it is on Amazon and the second book is also wide available for pre order and it's also up on Hulu and library things.
• 52:26
  Eric Goebelbecker: I've had a couple of library borrows that made me very happy.
• 52:29
  Emily: That's cool.
• 52:31
  Rachel: We've got in the show notes, we've got links to your website and your newsletters.
• 52:36
  Rachel: So then go to Eric's website and click on the books tab and get more links to to where you can go grab it.
• 52:42
  Eric Goebelbecker: Yep, there's one of those books to read, things that take you all over the place.
• 52:45
  Rachel: Love that.
• 52:46
  Emily: Awesome.
• 52:47
  Emily: Thank you so much, Eric.
• 52:48
  Emily: It has been a pleasure having you on the podcast and I mean, we'll see you around.
• 52:53
  Eric Goebelbecker: Thank you.
• 52:54
  Rachel: If you want to build a successful, fulfilling and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
• 53:00
  Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course.
• 53:02
  Emily: The magic of character arcs after seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers slipping pages all through the night.
• 53:08
  Rachel: Link in the show notes.
• 53:09
  Rachel: We'll see you there.
• 53:10
  Rachel: Bye.