Two Writers, No Hook

byAlan Langford and Michael Pinkus

Arts

Every two weeks authors Alan Langford and Michael Pinkus talk about an aspect of the writing process, set our writing goals, and report on our progress since the last episode.Note: We're Canadian, we swear a bit. Marked explicit for occasional strong language.This started as a way for us to hold each other accountable to our writing goals. Two conversations in, we decided to publicly embarrass ourselves and post our conversations on YouTube, the idea being that if there was an audience out there (ha!) we'd be even more committed to our goals.After we spent far too much...

Episodes(26 episodes)

Season 1 - Episode 8

Killing a Character

Recorded 2026-01-12Michael and I have known each other for something like 18 years. During that period we've met over coffee a few times, but aside from that, all of our interactions—and the formation of our friendship—have been online. For reasons known only to him and his partner, they decided to take their winter break up here in Campbellford. As a result, last week we actually got together for a meal. That's the topic as we open this episode.The progress part of our conversation takes on a relatively minor role as we focu...

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 35m 23s

Season 1 - Episode 7

Series: the Good and the Bad

Recorded 2025-12-29We talk about yesterday's ice storm, missing our progress targets (so much for complete first drafts by year end 🙁), and what makes a book series good, bad, or ugly.Next week we'll explore how to decide when to kill a character.

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 43m 52s

Season 1 - Episode 6

Killing Our Darlings

Recorded 2025-12-15This conversation starts with Canadian stuff. A little reminiscing about SCTV and a discussion of snow clearing, eh?I deliver most of my progress report but we digress into books for a minute before I come back and wrap up with stats on a decent two weeks work.A spam call throws us back into Canuck mode as we bitch about phone providers.Then ⁨ Michael reports his barnstorming results from the last two weeks.We get into naming characters and I explain that I added a ch...

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 43m 52s

Season 1 - Episode 5

All Over the Map

You can tell these sessions are largely unscripted because we start off this week's check-in with a brief discussion of sports, specifically the NFL and Formula 1. If that's not your thing, skip ahead three minutes.At three minutes, Michael reports on his progress over the past two weeks. His word count: 5,455. then we digress into how many characters we have and how we track them.At 5:20 we get to my update, a resounding (for me) 1,888 words, a new record! [yet still well below where I need to be.]At six minutes that segues...

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 35m 15s

Season 1 - Episode 4

Recorded 2025-12-01There's no real topic in this episode aside from keeping each other up to date on progress, although we do mention a webinar offered by Author's Publish (a great resource for authors). Michael has a 500 word story rejected because it's two words over, but this comes as a surprise. It turns out that the word count in the program he uses differs from the word count in Microsoft Word [MS Word counts an ellipsis character as a word!]. I mention giving a talk on self-publishing to a local writer's group, and Michael...

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 31m 23s

Season 1 - Episode 3

Getting Started

Recorded 2025-11-17Every two weeks, author Michael Pinkus and I get together to check in with each other's writing progress and to set goals for the next two weeks. We're in different genres; he's writing mysteries, I'm writing science fiction. We also have differing styles (he's a pantser, I'm a plotter) and use different tools (he hates to type, you can pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands). We thought we'd try posting our update meetings. Maybe showing some of our different processes might be interesting. We're not sure what to call this yet. So...

Published: Oct 6, 2026Duration: 29m 37s