Ep. 241: Ilana Masad on How to Chase Emotional Obsession

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, essayist, and book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, the Paris Review, NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as several others. All My Mother’s Lovers is Masad’s debut novel.

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Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #241 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So glad that you’re here today as I speak to Ilana Masad on something that is always really exciting to me to think about and to dwell on, which is chasing emotional obsession. It’s not really fair to say, but I’m going to say it anyway, that I am obsessed with obsession. I might be, might have a little bit to do with the fact that I’m an addict in recovery, but obsession is so fascinating in all of it. Tiny ways that it sneaks into our lives and all the big ways in which it can make our lives incredible or derail or kill us. So we talk about that and our conversation was just fascinating. I know that you are going to enjoy talking to her. You’re not gonna be talking to her. You’re gonna be listening to her, but listening her to talk to me and with me for your benefit. So please enjoy that. 

[00:01:18] What’s going on around here? Well, I’m still in the house for another three weeks or so. And then we move into an Airbnb. The sale is still going ahead. We’re supposed to close escrow in, I think 12 days, touch wood as my mother would say, I’m still very nervous about it. Oh, just nervous about everything. But yeah, that’s where we are in our move toward New Zealand. I did have a moment today when I was writing my journal and I thought, what the hell are we doing? Because all of a sudden it’s really close. Like I can see three weeks in our house, two weeks in an Airbnb, one week in Boise, and then we leave. That’s seven weeks away and then we are leaving to go live in a new country. Just the two of us with no friends, a very small smattering of family who, no you know, I’m not close to but they are a family and I liked them a lot, but wow. Wow! What the hell? That’s my feeling today. What the hell? Writing wise, I have been steadily plugging along my assistant Ed Giordano. If you have not heard the episode where we talked to each other on episode 200, you should go back and listen to that because he’s awesome. We have committed to some accountability together because its always helpful to have an accountability partner. And I want to reassure you that if you’ve had an accountability partner in the past and you flaked on them, we all have. That’s how accountability partners go. Get a new one, go back to the old one, restarted up. That’s part of accountability is failing and I really got pretty granular when I was talking to him about what I want to accomplish in the next few weeks while we’re so busy, I just want one hour, a day focused work on the project at hand.

[00:03:11] And I have a bunch of projects at hand that I could choose from, but I am just choosing one at a time and I’m working my way through them. And generally I do more than one hour. But knowing that I have to do one hour, one focused hour means that I don’t look at my email first in the morning. I don’t all the things that are normally easy for me, are not easy for me right now. Well, everything is so upside down. So having that one hour to fall into, has been really awesome. This morning I was working so my project at hand right now, I will tell you is a re-release of my collection of essays in memoir shape called A Life in Stitches. It’s a 10 year anniversary, and I got the rights back. So I am self-publishing it with a new essay and a new epilogue, a new cover. I am hoping to get a bunch of beta readers from my email list because I would like some reviews. I have great reviews on the book and I am going to have to lose all those reviews, since the one thing you can’t change on the vendors is ISBN. And I do not own the ISBN the Chronicle books assigned to the memoir. So I have to give it my own ISBN, which means it’s a brand new book and I’ll lose all those awesome reviews. So that’s something I’m thinking about, but that’s what I’m working on right now. That’s my project at hand and working steadily on it.

[00:04:29] Moving forward, it’s just getting done. It’s just getting done in one and two and three hour bursts, but mostly one or two hour bursts and it’s going to be done soon. And then I’m going to read the audio book of it, which I was so excited about. I don’t think I’ve mentioned that on this show, but I always wanted an audio book of that particular book. Knitters, listen to audio books, knitters, listen to audio books before anyone else was listening to audio books so that they could keep their hands free and their eyes on their work. Knitters crasher’s, crafters in general love audio books. So I’m very excited that I’m going to be able to do that. And in something I may regret, I’m going to try and do it here in the house in the next three weeks before we leave so that I can at least be editing it when we’re in New Zealand. So I am in the process of soundproofing, or at least sound dampening one of our closets because we’ve never had a closet that was empty. And right now we have bunches of closets. Well, three closets that are empty and I’m going to line one and make it into a soundproof chamber. We have air conditioning now that’ll save my life. So that’s what I’m working on right now. That’s what’s going on around here. 

[00:05:39] That’s enough of an update for me. Let’s jump into the interview with Ilana. I hope that you enjoy it. I hope that you are getting some of your own writing done. Do you need an accountability partner? Come to any of these episodes, HowDoYouWrite.net and at the bottom, there’s always a link to join my slack channel. Find an accountability partner in there. We have an accountability channel in onward writer, slack channel. So you should come and join that. All right. Happy writing my friends and enjoy the interview. We’ll talk soon. 

Rachael Herron: [00:06:07] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Ilana Masad. Hello, Ilana, welcome!

Ilana Masad: [00:06:12] Hi, how are you?

Rachael Herron: [00:06:14] I am so happy to talk to you about All My Mother’s Lover’s. I have been really

Ilana Masad: [00:06:19] Thank you 

Rachael Herron: [00:06:20] looking forward to this interview. Let me give you a little bit of an introduction here. Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, SAS, and a book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and the Paris Review, NPR, BuzzFeed, Catapult, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, as well as several others. All My Mother’s Lovers is Masad’s debut novel. And first of all, I loved it. 

Ilana Masad: [00:06:49] Thank you

Rachael Herron: [00:06:50] Second of all, I saw it referred to, and I kind of remember where I saw this, but I saw it referred to as a queer tour de force. And I really feel like that’s what it was. So first of all, I want to thank you for the way that you write about love 

Ilana Masad: [00:07:06] Thank you 

Rachael Herron: [00:07:07] and its forms. But even more than that, like my, one of my favorite things in life to write about, and to think about not to feel necessarily, but to write about his grief. And you do- I have goosebumps just thinking about your book right now. You did such an incredible job with that

Ilana Masad: [00:07:22] Thank you. Thank you. I, grief is one of those legitimately universal feelings. I think it just looks so different depending on who you are and when you are and where you are and how,

Rachael Herron: [00:07:32] Yes

Ilana Masad: [00:07:33] How you relate to it. But it’s something that I think any person who is lucky enough to have any kind of love in their life feels

Rachael Herron: [00:07:40] And I think it’s really important, what you just said to how you relate to it. I think how we all relate to it changes as we, you know, aging and changing the lives of, there are some people in my own life that I’ve known who are not willing to ever look at it. And then there are people who kind of enter into willingness unwillingly because of events. And I think that’s kind of what you look at in the book. And it was just so moving to me. So I would like to talk to you about your writing process. This is a show for writers and about process. However, I feel like you might have, this is my jumping to an assumption. I feel like you might have feelings about not writing a book like this, but also being a book critic. How does that feel? How do you put those two things together? How do you step out of your own way to get the work done?

Ilana Masad: [00:08:31] Well, in terms of, I mean, I think about fiction and criticism just very differently, you know, like they serve such different purposes in my life as a writer and I tend to not think about them in relation to one another very often, or at least I think that was true before the book was published. I think the process of publication as most writers will tell you is so utterly different than what writing is, right. Publication is like the opposite of writing. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:02] Every way

Ilana Masad: [00:09:03] Right, exactly. And so, I think probably now I’m realizing more how much being a critic means that I get in my head about who’s doing better than I am, and who’s getting the accolades and, you know, and I need to always remind myself, well, first of all, it only looks like that from where you’re sitting, the people who are experiencing that are probably not feeling it the way that it looks. Right. Most people, I think, I mean, at least most writers I know even those who’ve succeeded very much don’t tend to feel the success in the way that it maybe looks like they should feel it. But otherwise, I mean, I, you know, and just in terms of the craft, I really don’t think about them in related ways at all. Which I think is lucky because I’m not sure I wouldn’t be able to write fiction if I had started out as a book critic, but I started out as a fiction writer. I just succeeded in my book criticism sort of writing earlier or more publicly than I did with my fiction writing. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:08] That makes so much sense to me. For some reason, I thought the book critic proceeded the fictional, although really nothing usually proceeds fiction. We started so, so young that makes a lot of sense in my head. How does it- and these are just my own, I know these aren’t on the list of questions that I said, but how, how does it feel just out of curiosity, how does it feel to be critiqued?

Ilana Masad: [00:10:29] It’s weird, you know, because I find myself looking at the articles, like both from, you know, my own ego is there as a writer of like, what are they saying? And are they saying nice things? Or are they saying not nice things? What are they criticizing? But then also as a critic,

Rachael Herron: [00:10:44] Yes

Ilana Masad: [00:10:45] and I’m thinking of it like, oh, well, I don’t like I don’t critic. I don’t write criticism the way that this person wrote criticism and I’m critiquing the critique from my critic perspective of what the kind of criticism that I like and that I think is important. And the kind of criticism that I feel is bland or is nitpicky in ways that I don’t always think are useful, but that’s also my very particular approach to criticism. And it doesn’t mean that my approach to criticism is correct. It’s just mine, 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:13] It might be a superpower of sorts though. You don’t have, honestly, they can’t, you know how we talk about it in meditation when you’re, you know, when you can separate yourself from the thought and be looking at the thought. You’re kind of looking at the criticism and not wrapped up in the emotion perhaps of being inside and I’m guessing

Ilana Masad: [00:11:30] It’s both. I think it’s both. I think sometimes actually the critiquing of the criticism is probably a defense mechanism so that I don’t have to deal with my emotions about it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:41] Yeah. That makes total sense. Okay. So what is your writing process? How do you get it done? 

Ilana Masad: [00:11:48] You know, this is one of those questions that I think is difficult for me, just because it’s so different, depending on what I’m writing and it’s changed over time and it changes in terms of how my life changes. So, but I tend, it seems like what I tend to do is I write in short bursts. So like, I’ll have, I mean, first of all, I can’t write for very long at a time, you know, so I’ll sit down at my computer and maybe two hours is the most that I can do. And that includes reading over what I’ve written. And I tend to write in like, you know, like a month here and then I won’t for a long time. And by not writing, I mean, specifically fiction because I will be writing a bunch of other things, but not fiction. And then, I’ll take time off and then I’ll do another month. And yeah, I think that’s the NaNoWriMo training that I did, you know, like doing a lot of NaNoWriMo when I was younger and I still use it as kind of a tool, you know, like, oh, November’s coming, let me plan out. Like, I’m going to have a chunk of something that I’m going to write during that month. Even though it won’t be maybe the amount of words or, you know, I’ll just use it as a tool, you know? But again, everything that I write tends to happen differently, like sometimes I’ll sit down and write a whole flash fiction piece at in one go and it’ll be nearly done from that one time. And then some short stories I will take, you know, months and years to figure out. So I think it really just depends. I wish I had a, you know, a more consistent practice, but I just don’t. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:22] Well, I love to how you’re illustrating for listeners, how our writing processes do change. And that’s why I do the show because mine is always morphing and changing just a little bit. I am a huge NaNo fan. My first published novel was a NaNo. My first NaNo actually. And I’m on the writer’s board. And I just think that, you know, like the month as a package of time is so useful for a lot of writers, not for every writer, but for a lot of us.

Ilana Masad: [00:13:50] Yeah. And the gamification aspect of it as well was fun though, getting a little badges and things, you know, it’s like just little rewards 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:56] and just knowing that you’re not alone, 

Ilana Masad: [00:13:58] Yes.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:59] You’re really, really not alone. So what is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing?

Ilana Masad: [00:14:03] Well, I will be very honest. I think the biggest challenge at the moment is my own fear of writing again and my mental health, and the difficulty in pulling back from things that give me more immediate gratification or cookies. Like I just mentioned, you know, like those badges. So the fact that writing, you know, it takes time and it requires some form of discipline but I’m so terribly and utterly burned out from four years of graduate school, while simultaneously freelancing is a book critic, then I’m finding it really difficult to get myself back into that discipline the groove, although I’ve managed to do it in the past and so I will, again, I am sure I will again.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:44] It sounds like you understand seasons. 

Ilana Masad: [00:14:46] I’m trying to, it’s very, that’s, you know, it’s hard to remember that when I’m alone in a bad moment but I try to remember that. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:55] Yeah. What is your biggest joy when it comes to writing? 

Ilana Masad: [00:14:58] Well, that again, I think changes, right. And I think that recently I’ve lost a lot of that joy and I’m trying to get it back and to remind myself of the things that I love about writing and about stories, because I think that I’ve fallen into this trap of capitalist consumerist culture. And I’ve started to think about my work as a product rather than as art, right. That’s meant to touch people. And even if that’s 5 people, if that’s 10 people, rather than like, oh, I need to count how many people it’s touching. And I mean, it’s true that a book is an object, is a product, right? I mean, the reality is the thinking of, but the reality is that thinking about it this way, it’s really the quickest way at least for me to lose sight of why I write. And I think I write to forge connections between readers and a story to delight, to cause someone to feel as deeply when reading as I feel while reading, to draw someone toward a different place and time and person and I mean, making things up as this weird kind of alchemy, right? It’s making something from nothing or making something from a jumble of impressions and ideas and mysterious spaces, and that’s kind of magic. That’s the closest thing that I recognize to magic. So I guess my biggest joy is when I get to that moment in a story that surprises and delights me where it feels like what it feels like, what it’s about and what it’s doing. It knows. It knows those things. The story knows those things, whether it’s short or long. And I’m kind of just along for the ride. And I mean, it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like, but when it does happen, wow. You know, like that’s just mind blowing and amazing when it does happen. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:33] It is mind blowing. There’s a sound that I like to think about when the book does something like that, when things fit together and you reach that moment and it almost in my head makes an audible *inaudible voice* noise when you feel that. And if only I could feel that every day, 

Ilana Masad: [00:16:48] Yes exactly, I wish. Of course

Rachael Herron: [00:16:50] but you can’t feel that today, that’d be amazing. 

Ilana Masad: [00:16:53] It would.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:54] Can you share a craft tip of any sort with us? 

Ilana Masad: [00:16:57] Sure. So I will say that I feel kind of wildly unqualified to give craft tips, even though I teach creative writing. But the reason I say that is because I’m not always sure how to separate craft elements out when discussing them, because they seem to always relate to one another, right? Like they never really stand in a vacuum and I also find that myself and I think many other writers too, I don’t think about my own writing through the lens of a craft perspective, even though I obviously practice craft elements. Otherwise I, you know, I’d not be writing anything, but it’s, I don’t always think about it very consciously through those lens, which I know some writers are able to do that. I’ve just not one of them. But here’s something maybe I hope, so in terms of idea generation, I often hear that we’re supposed to write what we know, right? Like that that’s a cliché, like what do you know? And I find that kind of ridiculous advice because fiction, isn’t only about what we know. It’s also about the imaginative limital space of discovery and invention and the plurality of genres that we have outside the motive realistic. Prove that like you can’t have fantasy. With writing, what, you know, you just, you can’t because we don’t actually know how physical magic works or how dragons work. We don’t, we invent that. Right. If we wrote what only, what we knew, we’d be writing memoir and even memoir, you know, most nonfiction writers will tell you that it’s not about objective truth or certain knowledge because human memory is fallible human beings, right? Human beings. We’re not objective creatures and we have lots of very rational and complicated feelings, which are subjective. So in terms of idea generation, I’d say right toward your emotional obsessions. So, you know, like I’ve been writing about grief and death and parent-child relationships for ages. And then I published a novel where these ideas were like at the center, right. But recently I’ve become more obsessed by ideas about truth and trauma and how we define mental illness. And who gets to define it, and how and why they’ve gotten to define it. And so in terms of idea generation, my advice is what are you obsessed with? It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be like something you have to research. It can be an emotional obsession to like, not just, you know, I’m obsessed with this particular stamp that’s in my grandfather stamp collection, although that can also generate, there are many novels that start with weird stamps, right? But what are the emotional obsessions and what questions do they raise for you? Because I think the fiction is a really wonderful venue for exploring questions, especially on answerable ones or ones where the gray areas are much more interesting than the definitive answers. 

Rachael Herron: [00:19:39] I absolutely love this idea of interrogating yourself for, to look at your emotional obsessions. I often think about looking at obsessions and I recently wrote a first draft of a very terrible book, which might turn into something someday, who knows. But, it was based on my obsession with luggage I, when I am stressed, my wife always knows when I’m stressed out because I’m on Amazon reading luggage reviews. I never buy luggage. I already have the perfect luggage. Like I bought that years and years ago, but they soothed me. And so I wrote, so this became a book, but what it really was, was a journey into the emotional reason behind this person’s need for what did luggage actually mean to this person and where, you know, what

Ilana Masad: [00:20:18] and what that is

Rachael Herron: [00:20:20] Yes, exactly. It’s super easy.

Ilana Masad: [00:20:22] It’s so good

Rachael Herron: [00:20:23] It’s so right there. 

Ilana Masad: [00:20:24] Right there.

Rachael Herron: [00:20:25] It’s my dreams of like, you know, there’s a tsunami, I wonder if I’m stressed out. Yeah. I’m not too deep in that way, but really looking at that emotional connection to the obsession or the emotional obsession, I think is really beautiful. Thank you for that. 

Ilana Masad: [00:20:38] Thank you

Rachael Herron: [00:20:39] That’s going to blow someone or many someone’s in mind as they’re listening to this. Can you tell us what thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way?

Ilana Masad: [00:20:48] Sure. Well, so I think first of all, I think that everything affects my writing to one extent or another, like really. I mean, I feel that I, you know, I think many writers are kind of sponges, emotional sponges or detailed sponges. I think we have different things that we noticed or become sponges for but in that way, like, there are so many things that I wouldn’t even know affected my writing. But at least with the book because I’m not really sure what is, what that surprising thing is with what I’m working on now. But with the book, it took me until I finished writing it and other people started pointing this out for me to realize how Jewish a book it was. Like, I really did not realize that even though there’s a shiver at the core of the book, I don’t know, it seemed like as I was writing it, that wasn’t the important part or it wasn’t unimportant part, or it was just, you know, that was something that I was writing into what I knew kind of, sort of, but it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized, oh, this is actually quite a thread that continues throughout the book. Hah! Interesting. Because I have such a weird, weirdly emotional changing relationship to Judaism, to my own Judaism because of where I grew up and because of what it meant to grow up, where I grew up and so, yeah, so it just, it was surprising to me to realize I’ve written such a like “Jewy” book.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:20] Isn’t that? Interestingly, when somebody points something out and you’re like, well, it is, yes, it is right. It’s right there. You’re right. It’s right there. And I didn’t know, is the Judaism finding its way into the current work in progress that you know?

Ilana Masad: [00:22:32] Not at all. Not at all though, then this time, not even like a little bit, which is fine, 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:37] But I bet there will be something that somebody points out about that book at some point that you will not have seen coming. 

Ilana Masad: [00:22:41] Probably, 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:42] which I think is 

Ilana Masad: [00:22:42] Probably

Rachael Herron: [00:22:43] Delicious. I love that. I love that about writing. What is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it

Ilana Masad: [00:22:51] There’s a lot. So I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna talk about one though. I think. So I recently read Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, which, I mean, it was really big in 2018 when it first came out. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:02] I didn’t read it then, but I heard a lot about it. Yeah.

Ilana Masad: [00:23:04] And I hadn’t gotten around to it then, either, but I did read and review a, and this is a latest novel a few months ago, the Death of Ubik Ogi. And I was really excited to finally read their debut a couple of months ago and I found it just extraordinary. And it’s use of narrative voice because it’s narrated by the gods and or spirits inhabiting a human. And it’s this beautiful. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:25] That’s ambitious. 

Ilana Masad: [00:23:26] Yes. And it’s this beautiful kind of reorientation of what in the west many people might recognizes or categorize as a mental illness, but which instead is wrestled with and eventually embraced as like a valid and even sacred form of difference that relates to the human ada’s history and belief system and traditions and worldview and it also views itself, it allows itself to move through time in this really fluid and unapologetic way that I really enjoy. I have troubled myself writing without this kind of strict delineation of time and knowing like when everything is happening, which is part of why my book is sort of condensed in this quite short period and there’s dates and everything, because I helps me think. But I really admire how Emezi sort of allows the story to unfold via this kind of more narrative sense of time. So time that allows itself to sway from past to recent past following the needs of the narrative and the needs of what needs to be explored, what needs to be given backstory, what needs to, why we need to maybe jump forward at some time, why we need to then fold back. And I just really admire that kind of fluidity that’s in there so just from my, both from a story perspective and from a craft perspective, I really, really admire it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:39] If I were to read one of their books, would you recommend that one, more than the newer one?

Ilana Masad: [00:24:43] Oh, I would recommend both now because they’re both very different. But for I guess if you’re looking for a really cool narrative structure and narration structure and aeration choice, yes, I would take Freshwater, first. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:04] I really liked the way that your whole being lit up when you were talking about that narrative structure. It sounds really exciting to me. Let’s talk a little bit about your book and for those who haven’t read it, will you please tell us maybe the log line or how you describe your book.

Ilana Masad: [00:25:20] Sure. So, it is about a queer 27-year-old woman named Maggie, whose mother dies very suddenly in a car crash. And Maggie goes home for the Shivah and the funeral. And while she’s there, she discovers five letters that her mother asked to have sent out upon her death. And they’re all addressed to men or to names that she recognizes as men’s names. And she’s like, who are these dudes? Because my mom has been married to my dad for however many years and like, seems like a perfect marriage. And both in order to discover who these men are and in order to escape her grief and the reality of the Shivah and her family, and needing to sit with people, she decides to go on a road trip to deliver those letters and begins to get to know her mom in a way that she never had before. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:11] The mother-daughter story is like, it’s the- two things for me in writing and reading: is grief and mother daughter story. And oftentimes those things are linked. So basically you were pushing every button that I own. So thank you for that. I really, really appreciate that.

Ilana Masad: [00:26:26] Thank you for reading it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:27] Of course. So again, the book is called All My Mother’s Lovers and where can we find you and all the things that you do online?

Ilana Masad: [00:26:35] Well, and the paperback is also coming out soon. I’m not sure when this is going to be airing, either just came out or 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:42] By the time this airs, the paperback will be out. 

Ilana Masad: [00:26:45] Okay. Great. Well, so there’s a lovely paperback, which is all writers know is the best of all formats. So please enjoy the paperback. And you can find me online at @IlanaMasad.com, that’s my website on Twitter and TikTok, I’m @ilanaslightly, and on Instagram, I’m @ilanaslightlyignorant and I am on those platforms too much. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:10] I have actually never had an author give their TikTok handle here. And I’m very excited to go follow you because I can’t like that is my that’s my dopamine reward, is TikTok land.

Ilana Masad: [00:27:20] Well, I confess to not having a niche. I use it very much the way I use all other social media, which is with my small little live journal heart, by which I mean sometimes it’s cringe and sometimes it’s political and sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s cringe again because I that’s when I came of age.

Rachael Herron: [00:27:43] Well, I can’t wait to follow you over there. Ilana, thank you so much for your time and for your book and for your words of wisdom here, it’s been a treat.

Ilana Masad: [00:27:50] Thank you. Thank you so much for this and for doing this as a former podcaster, I know how much work it is and I really appreciate it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:59] The pleasure is 100% mine. Thank you so much and happy writing!

Ilana Masad: [00:28:02] You too! 

Rachael Herron: [00:28:03] Bye!

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.