I recently had a realization that changed the way I'm approaching my current book: I'd turned writing into a job. After 40 years of working in business, where deadlines, deliverables, and getting things done were part of my DNA, I found myself bringing that same mindset to my creative work. I was tracking word counts, setting arbitrary deadlines, and judging myself when I wasn't making the progress I thought I should. The irony? I'm writing a book about the very constraints that keep us from becoming the writers we're meant to be. At one point, I even found myself asking, "Have I fallen out of love with this book?"

In this episode, I explore how easily our professional habits and expectations can creep into our creative lives, turning something we love into another obligation. I share what I learned during a writing retreat, why so much writing happens away from the keyboard, and how self-imposed pressure can quiet our voice, personality, and imagination. I'm not suggesting that discipline, goals, or deadlines are bad things. They're useful tools, but we need to recognize when they're serving us and when they're getting in the way. Sometimes, awareness alone is enough to help us make a different choice.

I also share three writing prompts to help you examine your own expectations, reconsider how you measure progress, and reconnect with the experience you want to have as a writer. Whether you're working on a book, an essay, a poem, or simply trying to make writing part of your life, I hope this conversation helps you find a balance between commitment and creative freedom. The goal isn't just to finish the work. It's to create the space for your most authentic writing to emerge.

In part 2 of my conversation with author Kent Schwendy, I wanted to dig into something that can be both essential to writing and a wonderfully sophisticated form of procrastination: research. Kent writes historical military fiction, so research is a significant part of his process. But what struck me was his distinction between research that gives a story depth and research that becomes a way to avoid actually writing it. As Kent puts it, research can be liberating when it gives you ideas and understanding, but it can also become “handcuffs” when you convince yourself you need to know everything before you can move forward.

We also talk about something I think every writer needs to hear: there is no single prescription for what the writer’s life is supposed to look like. Kent has discovered that his own writing works best when he keeps it fun. As an engineer and businessman, he naturally gravitates toward goals, measurement, and productivity—including once experimenting with how quickly he could write a book. But he discovered that word counts and deadlines aren't what make his writing work. He writes linearly, he thinks deeply about what comes next, and sometimes he simply doesn't feel like writing. And that's okay.

This conversation became a much bigger exploration of permission: permission to write from what you know, permission to let research serve the story rather than consume it, permission to have a small or large audience, and permission to discover your own way of being a writer. Kent reminded me that the process evolves, too. What works today may not work tomorrow—and that's part of the writer's journey. My hope, as always with The Signal, is that something in this conversation gives you a little more room to sit down and write.

What happens when someone who has spent his life thinking in systems, processes, and logic decides to make room for something much less predictable: writing? In this conversation, I sat down with author Kent Schwendy to explore the writer’s journey, not the mechanics of publishing, but the internal shift that happens when you finally give yourself permission to call yourself a writer.

Kent began writing as a child, initially as part of therapy for an auditory processing disorder. Over the years, writing remained a constant, even through his military career, engineering work, and corporate life. But he never thought of himself as a writer. He was simply “someone who wrote.” It took a career transition, a conversation about what might come next, and one simple question, “Why wait?” to make him reconsider what was possible.

Kent and I talk candidly about the fear of failure that can keep writers from beginning, the danger of worrying about publishing before there are even words on the page, and the importance of aligning your goals, expectations, and willingness to do the work. For Kent, the breakthrough wasn't writing more. It was taking the writing he was already doing and giving it a direction. His advice is deceptively simple: start where you are, take the next step, and don't make yourself solve tomorrow's problem today.