Tips from an author with more than 65 titles to her name
By Robin James
As writers, we all have certain superpowers. Mine is productivity. I picked up a few tricks during my time as an attorney and then refined them during the course of writing 65-plus novels.
After all, as writers and authors, productivity is our lifeblood. It’s how we turn scenes into chapters, chapters into drafts and drafts into books.
Last Friday, fellow thriller author Danielle Girard hosted me on Authors A.I.’s First Draft Friday gab fest on Facebook Live. The event is quickly becoming an indispensable gathering spot on Friday afternoons (every other week) for established and aspiring authors.
During the 35-minute session, which you can watch above, we covered a wide range of productivity techniques. I compiled them into this handy handout, which I encourage you to download, print out and apply to your own writing process.
Here it is: Six key productivity hacks for authors.
Claim your space
1While some authors prefer to write in a people-watching venue like a cafe, most of us write in our homes these days. Stake out an area of the house that serves as your dedicated writing space. Set specific hours and ask family members to try to avoid interrupting your creative “me time.”
Time yourself with the Pomodoro Method.
Try writing sprints
2Have you heard of the Pomodoro Method? It’s a great technique to get out of your own way and honor your commitment to get words on the page every day. Write in 25-minute bursts and let the words flow. Don’t self-edit, just write! Then take a break and begin another sprint. Some authors can get 5,000 words down on a page in an hour!
Measure word counts
3Keep track of how many words you write during each sprint or session. Set goals. Over time, you’ll get more words down on the page. Your writing program (Scivener, Word, etc.) likely already has this feature. If not, try this free word counter.
Take advantage of a free app.
Use an app
4Several apps can help you maintain focus. Popular attention apps include:
• Be Focused (iOS)
• Focus To-Do (Android)
You can also use your phone’s built-in timer or stopwatch — or an actual egg timer.
The Alphasmart 3000 comes without Internet. Instant productivity!
Ditch your computer!
5A writer’s best-kept secret is the Alphasmart 3000 or Neo product line. This virtually indestructible, amazing hunk-of-junk word processor can really free your mind and offers truly distraction-free writing. Any place can be your writing space with an Alphasmart. Snag one for as little as $25.
Get ambient
6Get in the mood and shut out the rest of the world with Brain.fm, Amazon Music (did you know it comes free with your Amazon Prime subscription?) or build your own ambient soundscape at myNoise.
Don’t forget to register for the next First Draft Friday, with a high-profile editor in the hot seat.
Full transcript of the conversation
Danielle Gerard: Hi I’m Danielle Gerard, and I am here today with Robin James for First Draft Friday and today we are talking about productivity hacks. And let me just tell you, as I said, Danielle, Gerard, I’m the author of 14 thrillers. My 14th book Whiteout is actually coming out tomorrow, August 1st. And it’s actually crazy, number five in the Amazon store at this moment, so that is kind of exciting.
Robin James: Amazing.
Danielle Gerard: I know. That stuff like never happens, that’s like dreams. Let me introduce you to Robin James, who is unbelievably impressive. Robin is former law professor and trial lawyer with over 20 years’ experience in civil criminal and family law cases. She has been writing full-time for seven years and has published over wait for it, 65 novels under several pen names, but is best known for her legal thrillers, featuring small town defense lawyer, Cass Leary. She’s here to share some of her best productivity hacks of which she must be kind of a star because 65 novels in six years. That’s insane. So we’re going to hear about her productivity hacks for meeting word count goals, beating writer’s block and crafting page turning novels when life tries to get in the way. And if you’re joining us here on Facebook or Authors AI; you can leave comments and Robin will answer your questions. So Robin start us off, how in the world do you do?
Robin James: Well, I will say that I have a disclaimer. I mean, I have a background, with my background, I mean, I went through law school and then I was a litigation lawyer for a lot of years. So doing those things has really sort of built me to be able to write under pressure on deadline. Like there’s no choice, this has to be done by this day and it has to follow these specific rules or whatever. My entire working life has always been writing under pressure writing on deadline, so that obviously is the foundation for me is to be able to do that. I will be honest; I never set out to write 65 novels in seven years. That was never my goal.
Let me tell you, at 65 published novels; I’ve probably got about eight that are in various stages of dust funny collection. Those took me seven or eight years to write one, so we can all start out being able to do that. I mean, I also think that I have a little bit of an ADHD brain. Honestly, I think a lot of writers do. Novelists are sort of built a little different in that we’ve got, you know, we see stories and characters and you know, all of those things are all around us. So, what we all are trying to do is just kind of harness that and write stories that people want to read.
Danielle Gerard: Exactly.
Robin James: But so that would be foundationally, I would say those things have given me the discipline to be able to get words on the page and craft the stories in a relatively timely manner.
Danielle Gerard: Give us some tips on how you did it, Robin.
Robin James: Writing is normal, and you know I get that question a lot; I’m sure you do to. People that are like, how do you write a novel? And my answer is always, any way you can because there isn’t one way. I mean, you won’t really talk a whole lot about writing process and I do want to be really careful about that. I don’t know about you, but throughout my writing life, everyone’s process is unique to that person. Any tips or tricks that I would say would be adaptable to whatever your writing processes, just because this is how I outline or this is how I, you know, some people are pantsers, some people are plotters and that’s all great. But yeah, I don’t do well when I try to emulate someone else’s steps.
So what I have, or just some things to kind of help you put those distractions to the side and get your work done. And especially now with everyone working from home that hasn’t been before, you know, everyone is now doing what we’ve, those of us who’ve been full-time writers for a while, figuring out how to get our work done when the dog is barking and the kids are coming home from school and the mailman’s at the door, like all those things are part of our daily life. And I think we’ve been fortunate in that we were built for this as far as the stay-at-home part. But I would say, and we do have a handout that is available.
Danielle Gerard: Let me put that up. Here’s the URL for Robin’s amazing handout. So if you go to this link, and unfortunately, this isn’t a live link that you can click on, so you’ll have to… but the bitly link is pretty easy, productivity-authors. And if you go there, Robin, do you want to just show us a quick, like…?
Robin James: Where the camera is? There we go.
Danielle Gerard: It sounds like we’ve got six productivity hacks. Why don’t you just introduce us to those? And then we’ll see if we get some questions or people have specific issues that they want to hear about how to address.
Robin James: Excellent. Well, I would say tip number one is to claim space and that can be physical space, whether it’s in a home office or wherever it is that you are comfortable using. But in conjunction with that, I would also say claim your goals for the day, whatever it is. Whether it’s the word count, whether it’s a scene that you want to finish, you know, I would say my… I start out with what is my goal for the day? And in my case, it’s almost always the same goal every day. And it’s not, I don’t write in words I write in, I mean, I write in words, but I don’t have a word count, but I have essentially for me, it’s a chapter. I’m going to write a chapter today. And if I’m really moving and shaking, when you hit that critical mass on any novel, then it might be three or four chapters in a day, but most days it’s for me a chapter a day.
And what was really hard for me at first was just, I am, again, it’s sort of that distracted brain that I have, you know, get up, I have my coffee, I want to look on Facebook, I want to look at my emails, I want to go on this writing forum that I met, like all of these different things, you’ll kill two hours or more. And then I write words with, you know, whatever it is. So what I would suggest is number one, claim your goal, claim your space, where are you going to write and what are you going to write today, and hold yourself accountable to that. And then tip number two is sort of a groundbreaking thing for me. It was a game changer, and that is writing sprints.
Danielle Gerard: Oh, I do. I love these.
Robin James: Maybe four or five years ago, it was just like the heavens opened and my brain just… it was so… so for those of you guys who aren’t familiar with the Pomodoro method, it is a method where you basically decide how many sprints a day. What is the time increment that you’re going to sit down with whatever you’re writing on; laptop, pen and paper, dictation. With me, I have my little keyboard that I’ll talk about a minute, whatever it is and I’ll just take 25 minutes is kind of the standard increment. That’s totally adjustable. 25 minute works for me. 20 minutes, 10 minutes might work for you, whatever it is. So for me, I only write for 50 minutes a day. Fifty solid minutes a day is what I write. I used to do that, couldn’t do it anymore. So on a normal day, I will write two writing sprints or two Pomodoros which basically means I set a timer for 25 minutes. I’m writing. I don’t care what it is. I have to like give myself permission to not write the greatest thing in that time. I have to get the words out. And then we all hate, I mean, I think for most of us draft writing is the worst part of writing.
Danielle Gerard: Well, I kind of love draft writing. I accept the fact that as I say, it’s like, I just vomit on the page, which is not the prettiest image, but you can imagine there are some chunks of diamond in the vomit and then you just kind of have to pick them out and polish it up.
Danielle Gerard: Well, I think it’s Anne Lamott in “Bird by Bird.”
Danielle Gerard: Write shitty first drafts.
Robin James: That is key, too. When I say create clean your space, clean your goal. It’s okay to tell yourself that this might not be the greatest thing I’ve ever written today, but dang it, I’m going to get it down on the page.
Danielle Gerard: Give yourself permission to just let it out. Right, absolutely.
Robin James: And so for me because I have that distracted brain and it’s just like, you know, it’s tempting to look at this email and do this, I will write… again, I’m only going to do two sprints a day because that’s just about as much as that I can mentally handle without feeling that burnout. I will write usually by 10 in the morning, I will do that first sprint that first 25 minutes sprint. For me, if once I’ve got that done, it’s like I know I’m going to meet my goal because I’ve already started. A lot of times, if I’m rolling, I’ll just keep going. You know, instead of taking a five minute break, I’m in the middle of the scene, I know what the guy is going to say next or whatever. I’ll keep going. And so, within an hour I’m done with my writing for the day. For me, I usually in those two twenty-five minutes sprints, I usually can write, it’s about twenty-five hundred words a day. It depends, you know, sometimes it depends on what you’re writing, I mean, I do legal thrillers, so there’s a lot of courtroom action going on. Even me with my legal experience, I might not remember the legal or procedural rule that I want to reference or something, for me, there’s a lot of in all caps “put rule in here later.” A lot of my drafts, I forget the name, and this might be an age thing. I’ll forget the name of a character for a second there, but not major. You know, secondary, not major. There’s a lot of “what’s his names” then I’ll go back and I edit.
Danielle Gerard: The sprints are new to me. Actually, JT Ellison, a friend of mine, JT Ellison, obviously incredible, and she turned me on to them. And she actually kind of says, does it a little differently than you. She says, there’s something important about sort of taking that break. I mean, not to stop sort of write but to not let yourself get to the point where maybe you will hit the fatigue. So that you kind of ease off the twenty-five minutes or maybe it’s 30 because you’re in the middle of writing and then really do take the break. And she’s got me doing four a day and that is like write though, by the end of four day, I want to go like take a 10 hour nap. Normally, the method is a five-minute break between the two, and then…
Robin James: Yeah. And the thing that I want to stress for people that want to try this out; you can adapt it to whatever works for you. Now, like I said, if four 15 minutes, for instance, is how your brain works, fantastic. But it’s just important to once you set that goal and you work out what works best for you, then stick to it.
Danielle Gerard: And a lot of it is how much time do you have, right. If people are like got little kids or you’re working, or maybe you just say, I’m going to take this 15. My kids are napping or my kids are in front of Barney or whatever, you’ve got 15 minutes; you can make that your sprint.
Robin James: I’m sure with you, like once you start writing a scene or whatever it is, lots of times other things… first of all, it may not work out exactly how you planned or they have an idea for something else. So, as long as you’re kind of opening that creative well in your mind every day, more stuff is going to come to you. Most writers I know it’s never a function of how are you going to have enough ideas; it’s I have too many ideas and I don’t know.
Danielle Gerard: Once you’ve done that sprint, then the rest of the day, you can kind of, some piece of your mind like is working on that scene. So then if you’re writing little notes down, when you come to your next sprint or your next opportunity, it’s there. Am I cheating? Did I get ahead of myself on your productivity?
Robin James: No, no. I think that’s absolutely true. I get most inspired when I’m going to shower. I don’t know why, but for whatever reason, when I’m in the shower, that’s when I will have these, you know, my husband will hear me screaming like, “I know how we’re going to solve this murder.”
Danielle Gerard: Well that, yeah, so I love sprints. I think you can make a sprint work, whatever your life is. I mean, you can always find 15 or 20 minutes where you can shut the world out. My first writing office, which is claim your space was the back of a closet in San Francisco. Like literally, all the clothes hung at the very back of this little closet was a tiny window. And I had like a child-sized desk at the back of it. So, claim your space in all the ways; that means, writer sprints, where are we now, and what’s our next hack.
Robin James: That was actually two in one we did there.
Danielle Gerard: I love that.
Robin James: Okay, tip number three is measuring word counts, but I would even expand that back to measure your goal. You know, if your goal is I’m going to write 2,000 words a day. Let’s start even much smaller, 500 words a day. I mean, you can write a novel… if you’re only writing 500 words a day, you can have a full length novel in a couple of months, which is lightning fast. I think it’s good to have a metric, whether it’s your word count goal or like, in my case, word counts aren’t really part of my brain space every day, it’s I want to finish a chapter, and that’s how I can write a book in a month. I write a chapter a day. I will set a goal of 30 chapters; that does end up changing as I go because thing expand or contract or whatever or you have an idea that, Oh, shoot, I have to introduce this character or clue or whatever it is. So I would say tip number three is part of that accountability, whether it’s measuring your word counts, measuring, you know, did I finish this chapter today? Maybe it’s even just, did I solve that one plot problem that I wrote myself into, whatever that is. So, that typically three is I would say some type of measurement or accountability.
Danielle Gerard: And I do word count, word count works for me. I had to get at least a thousand words a day. And then I was going to ask you off topic or sort of in that idea, do you write every day? Because you know, Stephen King says write every single day. I write at least six days a week when I’m in a book because I find that those days off really take me out of my rhythm.
Robin James: Agreed. When I’m first draft writing, I write every day. And pretty much for me, if I’m not first draft writing, then I am working on an outline for the next book that I’m going to write. I work at this every single day and 99% of it is the writing. Well, I shouldn’t say that, like, there’s writing every day, but there’s also, you know, as an independent publisher, there’s backend marketing that I’m doing, so I’m working at this business every single day.
Danielle Gerard: You write for an hour but that’s not the end of your day. You’re not like an hour on, 23 hours off. You’re obviously working through revisions and doing all sorts of other things. Don’t tell people that you can write 65 books in six years by working one hour a day. You’re going to give us all…
Robin James: No, and the other thing that I kind of skipped over was the pre-writing phase. Again, anyone who’s listening, do not think for a second that I am thinking, well, if you don’t do it this exact way that I’m telling you, you can’t write as fast. I am kind of what I’d call a loose plotter. I don’t have a lot of detailed plot notes. You know, I have an outline that takes the form of… it looks something like this. I’ll have one or two notes of things that have to happen in that scene.
Danielle Gerard: Got it.
Robin James: But then, once my timer is running, I know that I’m going to hit that. Like, this has to happen. They have to get from point A to point B by the end of this chapter, whatever. But a lot of the times what I conceive before I start writing ends up being totally different from what comes out. Sometimes characters, and I’m sure you as a thriller writer as well, I’m sure you have, like, I didn’t think I was going to kill that character, but it occurred to me that will be good right now.
Danielle Gerard: Characters, they dictate their own stories.
Robin James: Yeah. Okay, so now you’re ready for the Holy Grail.
Danielle Gerard: Yeah, bring it on.
Robin James: This piece of…
Danielle Gerard: Oh, yes, swear by those.
Robin James: This is just the most important writing tool that I have.
Danielle Gerard: Tell us what that is.
Robin James: This is an Alpha Smart Neo, and so that you know that I’ve lost my mind completely. I have to have that. I actually have three of them. This is my main guy.
Danielle Gerard: And they’re not expensive.
Robin James: No. Here’s the deal. The Alpha Smart Neo was invented 20 some years ago to fill a need for students because laptops were too expensive for them. So, all it is is a keyboard. Let me turn the other one on. I don’t want to accidentally delete something. Okay, so I don’t know if you can see it, but there is a little… this is all the screen space that you get. And so when you’re typing, you’re only going to see three or four lines of text in time, which is fantastic to help you shut off that editor when you’re writing. Because that’s another thing with these writing sprints; what I used to do is every time I would open my laptop to write, I would reread what I’ve written the day before. And I’d spend an hour and a half tinkering with it.
And then, an hour and a half goes by and I haven’t written anything new yet, so that was a big problem for me. What I can do with this is I can write… when I’m writing with my clock is ticking. My 25 minutes are going and my fingers are flying across this keyboard. When I am done, it takes one of those USB cords with the big chunky… hope you can see it. You just hook this thing, I hook it to my laptop, I actually save all my drafts in Google docs. First I go to Google docs, then I edit in word or whatever. But then you just hit send, there is this is low key that you hit send and it just spits all of the writing that you did into your document on your laptop or wherever you’re writing.
Danielle Gerard: Wow.
Robin James: And it is fantastic. It takes three AA batteries. That is how it’s powered. It has no connection to the Internet. It’s virtually indestructible. What is amazing… talking about planning your writing space. My writing space is wherever I am. I can write outside with this thing. You can’t really do that with your laptop because your screen glare is going to get in the sun ray. This, I sit outside in the backyard with my little Alpha Smart. If we’re at the lake, I will sit on the boat and write there. This has allowed me to make my writing space be wherever I am. Yeah. My kids like kids can drive now, but when I was the chauffeur… how much time you spend in parking? I would take out the smart and I would write the car was waiting. I get 25 minutes. Am I waiting 25 minutes? All the time. So for me, coupling those writing sprints with my Alpha Smart, absolutely totally changed my game as far as writing.
Danielle Gerard: Robin, Ian Turner here has said that he at one point wrote 6,000 words in two hours, which was, you know, amazing honestly. But then at the end of the day, he sort of flushed it because he felt like it wasn’t quality.
Robin James: Don’t do that. Even if you put it in like, do you have a burn file, I’ve got like a scroll where I put my burn file when I’m editing. I never throw scenes away. I will just cut. If I feel like it doesn’t work for that book, I’ll put them in a burn file and then there’s certain times sort of resurrected them and use them in other books or whatever.
Danielle Gerard: What’s the process for sort of keeping yourself from flushing that stuff when it doesn’t feel right? Like, how do you search for, in my really terrible analogy, the diamonds in the vomit? What’s the process for saving the stuff that’s good?
Robin James: Well, in the end, it has to be good enough for us in the end. Do you know what I mean? I don’t know about you, but a lot of the times the stuff I think that didn’t come together how I wanted it to, or I finish a book and I, I love this… I always end up liking the stuff, which is funny to me. I don’t like what I’m writing when I’m writing it, but then when I come back to it, it’s like, “Oh, that’s really good.”
Danielle Gerard: Maybe it’s about giving it more time.
Robin James: Let it breathe.
Danielle Gerard: Yeah, let it breathe. It’s like wine, right. It has to be uncorked and you got to let it breathe, so maybe Ian took it out a little fast; maybe he needed to come back to it.
Robin James: I would say, there’s no such perfect. You can’t strive for perfection. Have to strive for persistence. The more you write, it’s that whole Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of anything. The more you write, the better you’re going to get. And the other thing I find is that stuff that I maybe didn’t think was the best or wasn’t exactly whatever. A lot of the times when it’s out there, it’s the thing that my readers love the most, you know, we’re always the harshest critic to ourselves.
Danielle Gerard: That’s right. That’s true.
Robin James: Would say, just because it doesn’t quite fit your idea of what it’s not perfect; I don’t think that’s the goal. I think the goal is you have to be persistent the more… I bet you, and pick any Stephen King, pick anyone and they’re going to tell you, like, there’ll be able to pick a part the things that they didn’t like about their…
Danielle Gerard: Rebecca asks a really good question and this occurred to me as well because you’re talking a lot about sort of like the first chapters down. So, how long does the first draft take versus when you go back and flesh out those scenes?
Robin James: For me, the things that take me the longest or my legal thrillers because, well, there’s the police procedural and all that. Usually for me, it’s about two weeks’ worth of edits. I mean, I go through it myself. I always have a running, editing note thing going on as I’m writing because I don’t edit while I’m doing that first draft, but I might think, “Oh, I have to go back and introduce that evidence or whatever it is.” So my second pass is always kind of tying up those loose ends and remembering that character named that I’d called “what’s his name” for three chapters because I couldn’t remember it, those types of things. And then I let it sit for a few days, and then I read it again. And then I have beta readers and I have professional editors.
Danielle Gerard: And you write the very first draft without looking back at all?
Robin James: Correct. I just hit the gas and I write that first draft.
Danielle Gerard: That’s not exactly… I work a little bit differently. And you mentioned when you were talking about sort of how you used to go back and read what you’d written the day before. I actually still do that, but to your point, I don’t let myself get too bogged down. If there’s a problem, I use asterisks and in my book I’d say, “This isn’t quite working or what’s his name?” Although sometimes I just search it out because it drives me crazy. But you know, I can do that as a way of sort of flushing it out a little bit, and that often for me at least, working on sort of a way to kind of then motivate myself to be like, okay, now I’m excited to write the next scene, which is my sprints for the day. Obviously, as we talked about earlier, there’s a million ways of doing this, right. You know, writing the whole draft through all at once, and maybe also, because it takes me longer to write a first draft; I wouldn’t remember necessarily what was happening earlier on. I have to kind of stay in the… go back a little bit and then go forward again, but that was interesting. You’re fast.
Robin James: Well, like I said, that is my forever. That has been my training. When I’m writing a legal brief, I don’t get to take weeks and weeks and weeks on it for the most part. If I’m writing a motion for something, some emergency that’s come up, you know, I have a custody issue that they need a motion filed the next day. That was always my training to begin with, so I certainly think that that has served me well. And here’s the thing; you don’t have to write 65. Nobody has to write, I don’t have command.
Danielle Gerard: I don’t even know of any… I mean, how many even could. I can tell you…
Robin James: It goes back to, how do you write a novel? Any way you can. The way I can is, it’s all for me about getting out of my own way.
Danielle Gerard: Totally.
Robin James: When I’m able to do that, then it just flows for me.
Danielle Gerard: when you get out of your own way is, you know, the tricks about the writing sprints about only being able to see a little bit of the book while you’re working on it. Those are really great ways of getting out of your own way. We’re actually getting here to the end of our half an hour. So tell me Robin, what have we missed on our hacks? And then, I we’ll make sure we can show that URL again so people can check out your…
Robin James: The thing was as far as background music. If you need something to help literally drown out some of that background noise, here’s a couple of things, so I can’t write to music with lyrics, anything that has lyrics, I’m listening to that instead of what’s going on in my head. I’m a big fan of brain.fm. They have different settings that I use a focus setting, and they’re sort of mood music depending on whether I’m doing deep work focus or whatnot. The other thing is, most of us, I’m thinking a lot of us are Amazon prime members; Amazon music is part of your Amazon Prime subscription. And if you go in there and just search music to write by, music to study by they have tons of different playlists. Like I said, some might have lyrics, some might be more ambient sound type of things. And then there’s another website that I have been playing around with which I can’t remember the name of it, but it is on the handout. It’s called Mind Noise, where you can actually build your own…
Danielle Gerard: Mind Noise?
Robin James: Yes, Mind Noise. And like I said, the link is in the handout that we have available. But you can actually build your own ambient sounds. I’m still playing around with a little bit, like I want to listen to thunderstorms and green sounds or rainforest, so you can layer different. if you like to play with gadgets like that.
Danielle Gerard: I’ve tried several of those. You sort of assimilate those noises with work to be more productive. You hear the noise and think, “I’m supposed to be writing.”
Robin James: Absolutely, yeah. And then I’ll have a playlist when I’m editing, I can listen to music with lyrics when I’m editing. I can’t do it when I’m draft writing, but a lot of times I’ll have kind of a playlist in my head that whether it’s reminds me of the character or something. I’m trying to get better about actually putting my playlist in my books and, or on a website. But I thought like, you know, if you want to listen to the playlist, but that’s one of the things I would suggest is if you’re trying to like again, physically, literally drown out those distractions. Those are some places that you can go to get some really great either ambient noise or study music, focused music.
Danielle Gerard: All kind of home together all the time, I’ve really taken to, I use these, these are earplugs. I pop those in because you know, you could probably hear my house above me. My family and also, I have a big pair of noise reducing headphones and sometimes I do both, earplug and headphones and really block everybody out. Okay, amazing. Let’s see, I’m going to just see if I missed anything really important and I’m going to say I did not. I hope I didn’t. This is the URL to visit Authors AI. And if you type that in your URL bar, it actually knows to put an HTTP ahead of it; that’s way smarter than I was. Check out Robin’s, her hacks here at productivity-authors on a Bitly link, that’s super exciting and stay tuned. Our next First Draft Friday is in two weeks on August 14th. In the meantime, get online and buy some Robin James legal thrillers and Danielle Gerard book or two as well.
Robin James: Thank you, Danielle.
Danielle Gerard: This was so much fun. Everybody, thanks so much. We’ll see you next time.
