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Hi Chris! Welcome to our Creator Series. Tell us about yourself and how you got started as a writer.

A: Everything began in seventh grade. I was actually in remedial English with a small group of students working under a patient and encouraging teacher named Sheila Muldaur. She also happened to be reading a book by a local author: The Conduct of the Game by John Hough Jr. The book was about baseball but from the perspective of an umpire, and it was the first real book I read that engaged me and opened me up to the possibilities of narrative and worldbuilding. We all took turns reading it, and then we met the author in person. Later I would go to his house with my godfather, and John gave me copies of all his books. I was enamored with the writer mentality, lifestyle, solitude, etc.

In that same class we were assigned to write a story, and I wrote about a socially ostracized boy who befriends a buck in the nearby forests (aptly titled The Buck). It ended in tragedy, but the necessary change arc for the protagonist was there, it was a successful story. My teacher had me sit on a stool and read it aloud to the entire class – meaning the kids in the non-remedial English class. They applauded, and right then and there I knew there I’d found my calling.

Q: When did you know you wanted to pursue your career as a writer? 

A: When I published my first poems in a literary magazine around age 16 or 17 and saw that there was a larger audience. But I was also aware that few succeed in a career as a writer on the writing alone and that I would need a diverse skill set, which includes but is not limited to: editing, ghostwriting, coaching, content writing, marketing & branding, and other tangential skills like design and conceptualization. So while I make very little money off my own writing, I make a living working in the industry, mainly through editing and ghostwriting. 

Q: Let’s talk about Heliophobia! What inspired your debut novel and the creation of its main character, Murray Sandman?

A: I now live in Finland, where the sun is either omnipresent or in hibernation, depending on the season. Over time I’ve developed a weird relationship with the sun and have used it to displace my own issues, so I figured there was something comical and off-kilter to explore there. The book really just stemmed from the first page or so, which was a writing experiment, and people responded to it, so I kept working on the premise over the years. It evolved into a more darkly comic story in the latter versions, and I wanted to write something sadly funny and entertaining and not necessarily profound. There’s simply not enough humorous literary fiction out there! Life is dark and hard and literature capitalizes on that. So I sought to add some humor to the mix. 

Q: Your stories have been published in numerous multiple literary journals and publications. Are these all fictional works – do you prefer writing fiction over non-fiction?

A: Yes, fiction is my go-to genre, though I’ve written and published some essays and articles. Fiction allows us to bend reality and compress spans of time into paragraphs or expand moments into great swaths of writing, and in fiction we’re able to layer themes more easily and get into deeper truths. In nonfiction, truths arise from realizations while reflecting on past actions. I guess I just have a vivid imagination, and I get a lot of my ideas from both my dreams and the bizarre situations I experience and marginal characters I encounter.

Q: As an author with a small press, what are some of the obstacles or challenges you’ve had to overcome? What are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed in the publishing industry within the last five years?

A: The industry is in flux, but it’s been in flux for decades. Now people are reading on their phones and reading less and less overall and yet the book remains a foundational element of culture. So we’re in a weird moment. I think the book is due for a bit of a renaissance or a rethinking. Personally, I’d like to see more art and music incorporated into the reading experience, but past attempts to technologize the book have failed.

Small presses are both a blessing and a challenge. They are the backbone of the industry, but they’re labors of love. They offer less marketing support, so authors are left to do a lot of the legwork themselves. That’s kind of unfair. We’re not experts in it, and we may quickly tap out our social circles. Authors who are on the latest and most popular social media channels tend to market themselves really well, but how do they have time for writing? Social media takes so much work. And sales shouldn’t rely on social media… but the sad truth is that it does. 

Q: In addition to the recent release of Heliophobia, are there any other creative projects in the works?

A: Yes, I’m well into my next project, which is radically different in subject matter, tone, and scope. I’m working well outside my comfort zone, which is how we should always operate. I also always have short fiction projects going on, so there’s never any downtime, for better or worse. I have a couple other novels in the drawer too; one publishing deal fell through during the pandemic, and I gave up on another because the contract was sketchy. I also recently won a small contest and earned a Pushcart Nomination, which I’m proud of. 

Q: We appreciate you visiting with us on Creator Series! Before you go, tell us your favorite quote or mantra and why.

A: I am guided by three quotes in my work; I’ll paraphrase the first two. 

Director Michel Gondry said that for an idea to be really good, it has to border on being really stupid. I truly agree. 

The second comes from Zadie Smith, who says that writers should look at their work from the viewpoint of a critic or, more harshly, our worst enemy. 

The third is from Emil Cioran, who says: “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

Q: Is there anything you learned from the experience of publishing your first novel that you’d like to share?

A: I learned that the corniest of cliches is true: you have to believe in yourself—because no one else will. That’s the cynical, heartbreaking side of the cliche. Only your closest friends and family will believe in you, but even that has its limits. Against all odds, you have to stick to your vision and risk embarrassment and failure, because the world wants you to fail. The creative marketplace is cluttered with projects large and small, and it doesn’t want you to join it. 

That’s also why we have to come out in force to support other creators. Buy that record your friend put out, even if it’s not your genre. Buy their book, even if you don’t like to read or if it doesn’t suit your tastes. If you can’t afford to buy it, promote it. Promotion costs you nothing. Just support them in some way, even if only a gesture. It will mean a lot to the creator, and it will eventually come around when you launch your own work. 

Thanks for having me and for supporting writers and creators, Keetria!

Connect with Christopher X. Ryan

Website: www.christopherxryan.com

Social/Product links:  Amazon  Bookshop

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you want to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Welcome Tudor! Tell us about your background and how you got started in entrepreneurship.

I got my start as a direct response copywriter in the finance industry pretty much around the same time I started college. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be employed, and wanted to be able to do my own thing. I ended up in copywriting because I was talented at writing, and some quick research showed me that copywriting may be a great way to make money with a writing-based skill.

At one point one of my active clients didn’t have any spare designers or developers to work on a funnel that I wrote the copy for, so they asked me to take over. I told them I don’t do that, and they insisted that I find someone to do the work. That was the birth of my agency, which I grew to the point that I was actively managing 18 people.

The experience of building a direct response agency gave me a ton of knowledge about leadership, marketing, sales and scaling an agency. I also learned that I prefer to manage smaller teams, and continuing to grow with the agency model would mean an ever-expanding team. It wasn’t what I wanted, so that’s why I shifted into coaching & training other agency owners who were interested to build bigger teams and go farther than I have.

Today TANDA Digital’s mission is to help 25,000 agency owners build the agencies of the future and scale to $50K+/mo while putting in the right business systems so they don’t have to trade their time for money.

How does creativity play into your goals as an entrepreneur and someone who trains others on how to build their businesses?

It’s very important – that’s sort of the key to it all. There are no ready-made answers, and you have to be creative to figure it out. My clients own agencies operating in different markets & verticals, and it’s always a challenge to find the best combination of strategies for their niche. I get paid for my ability to deliver results to people, and creativity is at the center of that.

What do you enjoy most about being an entrepreneur? What’s been the most challenging aspect of being an entrepreneur?

What I enjoy most is the freedom. Especially the freedom of choosing who I work with. If I don’t particularly like or enjoy working with an agency owner, then I can turn them away and explain to them I’m not right for them. There are no consequences for that. By comparison, if you work a job, you can’t choose your work colleagues, your boss, and your clients. You have to do what you have to do, when someone else wants you to.

The second thing I enjoy most is being able to run my business with a small team. We’re just 5 people. You can’t really do this with the agency model, where you need to add more people at some point to keep on growing.

The most challenging aspect, I would say, is figuring out how to allocate your time. There are a lot of priorities in a business and a lot of things you could be doing. Having clarity about where you’ll get the highest return on the time you invest – I’d say that’s by far the biggest challenge. We go over this in our Agency Ascendancy Program™ but money is the only really limited resource that we have. Ultimately all economics is, is the science of time allocation. Money itself is a form of time. If you have money, you can use it to get access to other people’s time. That’s all it is. People love to fetishize money, but ultimately the real source of money is return on your time invested. We all have the same amount of time – yourself, I and Bill Gates. But Bill Gates has more money because he has obtained significantly larger returns on the time he has invested in his projects than others.

How do you stay motivated and focused when it comes to business goals?

I think focus & drive come from inner clarity – when you know what you truly want and you have clarity on your purpose and your why, then staying motivated and focused just happens. This isn’t to say that you never have moments or even days when you’re not motivated. But rather that sooner or later your motivation comes back. Even in the face of setbacks, if you know what your purpose is, you’ll keep on going. This is exactly the reason why part of our process of working with agency owners involves helping them to get clarity on where they want to take their business and what’s truly meaningful for them as people. Doing that in the early stages of our Agency Ascendancy Program™ gives them a huge boost of motivation and focus and enables them to hit the ambitious targets we set together.

As an entrepreneur, I’m sure you’ve had your fair share of challenges to overcome – how do you manage obstacles?

It’s the same way I teach my students. I call it the 5-Step Management Process. It starts with getting clarity on your intended outcome or goal. So that’s the first step. Then the second step is figuring out the problem – what’s stopping you from achieving your goal? Why aren’t you there yet? Once you’ve figured out the problem we go to step 3 – diagnosing the problem. Now the focus is on what’s causing the problem and maintaining it into existence? Once the root cause is identified, then we can begin to form a plan to sidestep or overcome it. And then the final step is just executing the plan, and seeing if the goal is achieved or not. If it isn’t then somewhere along our 5-step process we went wrong and missed something or drew a wrong conclusion. So we would iterate again.

To give a concrete example. Very often I’ll get on the phone with agency owners and they’ll say something like “We’re just not getting enough leads”. So clearly they have a target – how many leads per month they’d like to get. So I ask them questions until that becomes clear: “we’d love to get 30 appointments every month”. Then I ask them what the problem is. The first thing they’ll say is “We tried cold calling (or cold email, LinkedIn, posting content, could be anything) and we’re not getting enough leads! We were thinking to try TikTok ads instead”. So when this happens I know that they are misidentifying the cause of the problem with the problem itself. The problem is they’re not getting leads through cold calling. But the cause of that problem could be very different from the method of lead generation itself – and in fact it most often is. Very often cold calling could work great – but they’re doing it wrong, or they have issues with the niche they’re going after, or the credibility they portray, or their positioning, or even their pricing. Sometimes agency owners just don’t have high enough prices to allow them to hire others and grow the business! So that’s where I come in most strongly, in steps 3 and 4. I help them diagnose the real cause of their problem, and then design a plan to fix it that they can then execute on.

I manage personal obstacles in the same manner. I get clarity on my goal, understand what the obstacle is, and then search for the root cause of that obstacle. Then I design a plan, and implement it to remove the obstacle. If it doesn’t work, then either I made an incorrect assumption at some point of my analysis, or new information came to light that reveals that the real root cause isn’t what I thought it was. And then it’s back to designing a plan to remove the real root cause and implementing it.

We appreciate you visiting with us on Creator Series! Before you go, tell us your favorite quote or mantra and why.

“Your agency is a mirror image of who you are”. I came up with it because I noticed that quite often agency owners would have problems that would persist because of their own mindset and belief systems.

For example:

You’ll never grow bigger than you think you can.
You’ll never win clients you think are too big for you.
You’ll never have clients pay you $10,000 for a contract if you think $10,000 is a gigantic sum of money
You’ll never have hardworking employees if you’re lazy
You’ll never have people trust you if you don’t trust people
You’ll never have people be honest with you if you’re not honest

Therefore change starts with yourself. And when we work with agency owners that’s where we start in our Agency Ascendancy Program™ – with the correct mindset for building & scaling their organisation. Joining Agency Ascendancy itself involves a financial commitment, and the people who make that commitment the fastest are typically the ones who get the best results, because they have the right mindset. They understand money isn’t scarce, they know how valuable their time is, and they’re willing to do what it takes to make their dreams happen. From there we can expand into other areas including working on their offers, pricing structure, the niche they serve, their positioning, sales, marketing, hiring others and so on.

But it all starts with the person and their mindset.

Connect with Tudor & TANDA Digital

Website: https://tanda.digital

Social/App links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tudorfd

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you want to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

In March, I had the pleasure of interviewing Stacy Zeal, a wellness coach specializing in cannabis and the host of “High on Self Care” Podcast. If you missed the interview you can check it out here: Epi 141: Cannabis & Self-Care with High On Self Care Podcaster Stacy Zeal.

Today, Stacy shares more of her story on creating a mindfulness practice using cannabis and how she is helping others create and prioritize their self-care routine.

Hey Stacy, thanks for the interview! Tell us about your wellness journey. How did it influence the launch of the High of Self Care Podcast?

My cannabis wellness journey started with me falling asleep driving after years of ignoring my sleep problems. I have insomnia and for years I ignored it to the point where I fell asleep driving one time and that was my wake-up call. I decided to use that time to really take my sleep problem seriously so I started to Google all the things and try all the things. After trying everything from melatonin to cutting caffeine to sleeping pills and nothing working, I decided to try cannabis and that changed my life.

Cannabis is the only thing that consistently helps me sleep and after I fixed my problem I realized that I can help other people so I started a blog and a podcast where I talk about cannabis as self care.

Can you tell us more about Mary Zeal and the different services you offer?

Mary Zeal is a community mainly for women of color looking to get education, inspiration, and encouragement about using cannabis and self-care to live their best abundant lives. We offer education and product recommendations for things like CBD and any other cannabis and self-care related things you may need for your wellness journey. 

How do you prioritize your mental health? How has including cannabis in your self-care routine helped you be more mindful?

I prioritize my mental health by starting my day with my self-care and cannabis-infused morning routine and ending my day by getting plenty of restful sleep. My morning routine includes cannabis, yoga, and meditation and it really helps me to start the day with gratitude and feeling grounding in my purpose. 

Including cannabis in my self-care helps me to be more present, calms my mind, makes me feel more centered throughout the day.

In launching your business, what are some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome? How have you stayed motivated?

In launching my business some of the challenges I’ve had to overcome are really self-inhibiting challenges so things like perfectionism and imposter syndrome. The way I stay motivated is by reminding myself of why I launched this business, how much cannabis has helped me, and how much joy I get out of shifting someone’s perspective about the plant.

What’s one idea or resource you’d suggest to other creatives and entrepreneurs?

One idea I would suggest for other creatives and entrepreneurs, especially the multi-passionate ones like myself, is to batch your content. The way I say on top of my weekly podcast is by blocking off specific time during the month to record all of my episodes for the next month or to create content for the next month. That helps me to meet my deadlines and stay consistent.

About Stacy Zeal

As the CEO of MaryZeal.com and host of the High on Self Care Podcast, Stacy Zeal is on a mission to help women of color live their best abundant lives by creating a mindful cannabis practice.

Cannabis literally changed Stacy’s life by becoming her only consistent solution for her insomnia. After being prescribed sleeping pills that only worked for 2 weeks, she turned to cannabis while living in Las Vegas and it has been the only thing that consistently helps her sleep peacefully every night. Getting consistent sleep has been a game-changer creating the energy needed to live the life that she desires. 

As a yoga teacher and self-proclaimed high functioning stoner, Stacy understands that combining the amazing benefits of self-care with the uplifting benefits of cannabis leads to a deeper connection to self. 

Connect with Stacy

Website: MaryZeal.com | High on Self Care Podcast

Links to socials:

• Instagram.com/StacyZeal
• Twitter.com/StacyZeal

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

The annual SlyFox fest, hosted by production company SlyFox entertainment, is a multicultural and multigenerational music festival, which aims to bring international artistic expression together in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in the five days leading up to New Year’s Eve.

The festival celebrates the cultural mix between countries that converse as much as America and Brazil.

By bringing together business, music, urban art, visual art, and fashion, the SlyFox fest aims to create a culturally rich space, making everyone present shine. From the cultural agents and managers of small businesses to owners of larger businesses – everyone has the chance to showcase their work; display it on a catwalk or on a stage or in an open-air art gallery – even on the skateboard.

The SlyFox fest is also a potential market mover for the economy, and a networking event, where people can rub shoulders with like-minded individuals, creating opportunities for all those present.

For more information on the festival, sponsorship opportunities, and event schedule visit www.slyfoxfest.com

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!