Writing advice from inside the work.
Ink in Your Veins pairs short solo updates with warm author conversations about how writing actually gets done. The show treats craft as something lived through schedules, headaches, childcare, revisions, retreat plans, book panic, and the small systems that keep a draft moving.
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Ink in Your Veins is a writing-process show with the door left open. Rachel Herron frames each episode around a practical question from the writing life, then moves into conversation with authors who have found their own imperfect ways through the work. The tone is warm and quick. It is not a distant craft lecture. Recent episodes move from protecting deep-work hours with a visible schedule to writing without pressure, from making characters feel real to waiting for the next book to reveal itself. The show is especially interested in what writers do before the clean success story exists. A book can die on submission. A draft can lose momentum. Another author can appear to be publishing something uncomfortably close to the thing being written. Ink in Your Veins makes room for that panic without letting it become the whole story. The solo openings often turn ordinary life into craft material: windy bike commutes, headaches, office uncertainty, retreat planning, signing logistics, and the weird math of fitting writing around everything else. The interviews keep returning to process. Guests talk about revising as they go, asking for help, dropping readers into action, writing the book they need to read, and staying generous toward fragile early work. The show also has a looser recurring conversation mode, especially in the Black Herron episodes, where book business, romance conventions, reader expectations, and publishing chores become funny, blunt, inside-baseball talk. That mix gives the show its shape. It is practical, but not tidy. It is encouraging, but not sentimental. It treats writing as a vocation made of time, nerve, bodies, money, weather, deadlines, and stubborn hope. Writers looking for permission to keep going will find plenty here, but the show is strongest when it turns permission into something concrete enough to put on a calendar.
Made for: For writers who want candid process talk, practical craft prompts, and company through the messy middle of a writing life.
What sets it apart: The show folds everyday logistics into craft, so advice about pages, pressure, publishing, and persistence comes through lived examples rather than neat formulas.
How writers actually write! You might need to be a writer, but you don't need to struggle so hard. With internationally bestselling author Rachael Herron, learn how to embrace ease, reject perfectionism, and finally create your perfect writing process. (Formerly known as How Do You Write) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Rachel Herron's practical interviews make the decisions behind drafting, revision, publishing, and book launches easier for writers to see and use.
Rachel Herron treats writing as a practice shaped by time, doubt, money, family obligations, and the practical business of publishing. Her author interviews move easily from the blank page to proposals, agents, book launches, and signed editions, keeping creative work connected…
A book-signing meltdown yields the shortcut you wish you'd known 20,000 signatures ago.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A loose, human writing conversation about process, perphantasia, and the way writing can feel like a path toward a better self.
Episode 552 settles into a loose conversation with Rachel Herron, Samantha B. Cummings, and Matilda Swift, and it stays true to the show's promise of being short.
A practical writer-to-writer conversation about making time, asking for help, and finding the next book.
The episode follows Lauren Novak as she talks through writing with a practical eye, shaped by ordinary constraints like child care, scheduled time, asking for help, and the patience required to let a next book emerge.
A writer-to-writer conversation that turns reading taste and signing logistics into useful craft talk.
Rachel Herron and Sasha Black frame a plain but sturdy question: why read at all, and what happens when a favored genre still leaves something missing?
A candid craft conversation about beginnings, scene-building, and finding momentum.
Virginia Cantra's writing process lands in the practical mess of making fiction work: picturing a room, getting a volleyball player's movement right, and understanding how a town runs before a mayor can walk onto the page. The strongest thread is her candor about beginnings.
A memoir launch becomes a grounded look at anticipation, family life, and rolling with chaos.
Jackie Gorlick's episode sits in the charged stretch around her memoir's arrival, where the private work of writing gives way to the public work of helping a book meet readers.
Alicia Jo Ravens's turn toward spiritual memoir becomes a case for kinder, more generative making.
Alicia Jo Ravens's move from poetry into spiritual memoir gives this episode its pull: creative work can remain sweet, generative, and kind even before it fully knows its shape.
A candid publishing conversation about the questions, calls, and choices behind a writer's next step.
Success comes through as a chain of practical choices. Rachel Herron's conversation with Isabel tracks the strain of agent calls, the long list of questions prepared for them, and the eventual decision to work with Jessica Faust at BookEnds.
Apple decisions, examined down to the window corner.
Weekly film, music, and arts criticism from Monocle 24's Midori House studio in London.
The engineering decisions behind code, agents, and control.
Episode 556 starts in motion.
Success gets practical fast.
Sasha Black says she cleared out a second warehouse, locked in until the end of January, in the summer rather than at Christmas, and that her website sales climbed afterward.
Episode 552 opens on a rough week.
Episode 551 starts with office trouble.
Sasha Black has had a rough month.
Rachel Herron begins in the familiar writing mess: teaching, writing, and an office move all crowding the desk before the interview even settles.
Rachel Herron brings Jackie Gorlick back for a conversation that already feels a little charged.