Last year, I struggled to find a local author’s group, and realized that it mattered if the others were basically in my genre. The first one I tried was mostly attended by memoir writers. The second, Shut Up & Write, was mostly fiction writers. It was fun to attend, but I didn’t find much common ground, and so I stopped going to them.

Yesterday, I joined the Useful Books community, which is a community of authors that are writing non-fiction books based on ideas in Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick. He’s in tech, but the community is more broad than that—the genre is described as useful non-fiction: “to create a book so useful that readers can’t help but recommend it.” I went to a virtual writing session yesterday and did end up getting a lot done—and it carried through to the rest of the day.

It’s early on, so I don’t know if this will stick yet, but I do think having something in common with the group helps. Not just that we’re all trying to write, but also the type of thing we’re writing.