Ink + Alchemy

BONUS MAGIC

Resources, workshops, interviews, and other goodies to support your writing practice.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but building a writing practice that works is kind of tough sometimes!

The world is on fire. Our phones are precision-engineered to swallow our attention and leave us depleted and annoyed. Schedules seem to fill up in the blink of an eye, no matter how much time we swear we're going to set aside for creative work.

Figuring out a writing practice gets even more difficult if you are Autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD.

I'm Autistic, and many of the writers I work with as a coach are somewhere in the neurodivergent neighborhood. When your brain and body don't align with the norm, you tend to spend your whole life hearing that the way you do things is bad, wrong, broken, or just plain weird.

If you're an ADHDer, habit formation is probably pretty difficult for you. If you're Autistic, you might want a lot of structure that your life isn't set up to provide. If you're AuDHD, you might experience a tug of war between a desire for novelty and a need for predictability.

Where is that covered in advice like, "Write every day," or "Just be more disciplined"?

It's not. And being unable to follow that advice results in accusations of laziness, just not wanting it bad enough, and other untrue, harmful nonsense.

That leaves writers like us high and dry, without good advice and with too few models of what it actually means to build a writing practice that works.

Enter the No Mess, No Magic podcast.

In our wide-ranging conversation about building an AuDHD friendly writing practice, host and coach Monica Hay and I talked about why AuDHD writers can spend so much time trying to contort themselves into writing routines that don't work—and what to do instead.

Here's what you'll learn about in this episode:

• The differences between ADHD, autism, and AuDHD
• Why so many neurodivergent writers feel broken by traditional writing advice
• The problem with "just be more disciplined" messaging
• Discipline vs. devotion in a writing practice
• Creating flexible routines that work with your brain instead of against it
• Red-light, yellow-light, and green-light planning for fluctuating energy levels
• Why fantasy writing routines often fail in real life
• Burnout, over-achievement, and recovering from perfectionism
• Permission-giving as a creative practice
• Ritual, magic, and creating meaningful writing habits
• How to stop comparing your process to everyone else's

You can listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or catch the whole thing on YouTube.

Before we go, here's our sponsor for this bit of bonus magic!