This is K.M. Island and you are listening to the 400 third episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

We're getting very close to the publication of the Creating Character Arts Workbook.

I don't have an exact date yet, but I'm shooting for the beginning of October so those of you

who will be participating in National Novel Writing Month can use it in your prep work

before November. My focus right now is getting it set up for sale on the major sites and putting together another launch party with another round of fantastic celebratory prizes.

No matter how many times I do this, it's always exciting and fun. I'm particularly excited about this workbook. I think it may be the most useful of any of my workbooks so far, especially since character arcs are such an important topic.

So I can't wait to share that with all of you very soon.

Meanwhile, the latest post on my blog is Five Tips for Creating Believ believable fictional languages.

If you're writing fantasy or sci-fi, you may need to create fictional languages.

And here are five concrete tips for imagining new languages in realistic ways.

To read the post, visit helping writers become Authors.com.

And now I hope you enjoyed this week's podcast, Six Lifestyle Changes I'm Making to Protect My Creativity.

Life creates art. Life also devours art. For nearly 10 years now I have been a full-time writer and

yet it wasn't until this past year that this truth finally came home to me and forced me to realize

how important it is for committed artists to take steps to protect creativity.

As someone who notoriously attacks life in tenacious ways that

inevitably end up injuring me, for example repetitive stress injuries in my wrists from

computer work, I have always had cause to accept

the idea that the thing we love most is what kills us. However, I have always skated rather tenderly around the adjoining idea that we all kill

the thing we love. For the last 10 years I have obsessively pursued my writing not

just out of love of it, but also out of ambition.

The powerful need to prove myself to myself and others has driven me to reach my goals and to achieve success in just about every way I could ever have dreamed of.

...