Rachael

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

July 12, 2021

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.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers.

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,

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Ep. 240: Kathryn Nicolai on Focusing on the Good in Life and Writing

July 12, 2021

Kathryn Nicolai is the creator of the enormously successful podcast Nothing Much Happens and the author of the book of the same name. Nicolai is an architect of coziness, writing soothing stories that both ease the reader into peaceful sleep and teach the principals of mindfulness so that waking hours likewise become sweet and serene. She leans on her years of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher to seamlessly blend storytelling with brain training techniques that build better sleep habits over time. She is the owner of Ethos Yoga. She lives in Michigan with her wife and three dogs.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #240 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I’m absolutely thrilled that you are here with me today because today I am talking to Kathryn Nicolai and I fan girl quite a bit. This woman has changed in my life, because she has changed my sleep. She tells stories that help you go to sleep. And she has a book about it too. And it just popped into my head one night when I was listening to her voice. I thought, oh my goodness, I want to talk to this writer. And she said, yes. And it’s a fantastic conversation. We talk about focusing on the good in life and also in writing, I know you’re going to love it. I can’t wait to re-listen to it myself, honestly. So that’s coming up, stick around for that.

[00:01:03] What’s going on around here? Well, the house sold, it went on the market last Wednesday, and it’s sold on Monday. So five days, tons of people through the house, we were not here. We exited the house and stayed at a friend’s house who was out of town, which was so miraculous and wonderful. It sold quickly. It sold for above asking, and I will believe it when the money hits the bank and I hand the keys over until then, I’m just very, very hopeful because everything is working out. Timing wise, the staged furniture gets to stay in here we were out of the house for about a week or so, and it was really hard to un-nest the house that we had lived in 15 years and leave just the stage furniture in here. And some things that we hid in closets and drawers, you know, like our spices, I still want to cook for the next five weeks while we’re in the house. And then we came back to the house last night and re-nested all of the stuff that had traveled with us over to my friend’s house is now all over all the tables and the counters. And, you know, my desk has exploded and it’s everywhere and we’re going to have to un-nest again for the appraiser to come through. And then for the buyers who we are allowing to come through and measure things and do things like that.

[00:02:23] So we have to re-stage it. Which is weird. But it feels really good to be back in these walls where we have spent 15 years, even if the house looks nothing like ours, it looks beige. If you’re looking at me on YouTube, number one, I apologize about my hair. It’s just been a day. And number two it’s all gray. Like I said, white carpets. It’s not us. I literally went to Home Depot and bought seven drop class to cover the carpets. I am not letting our feet touch these white carpets, even for a moment, I don’t trust us. So that’s where I’m at and living still in chaos and trying to get more and more comfortable with that because it’s going to be this way for a while. In terms of writing, I have only been writing during Rachael Says Write, I think I mentioned this last week. I really like Rachael Says Write, those two hours twice a week people show up and write and I am one of them, that is like a sacredly held space for me to do my writing. Otherwise I’m having such a hard time finding time to fit it in. So that’s I always record these on Thursday and that’s happening this afternoon. Thank goodness. I’m going to be writing a Patreon essay about nesting, about what it means to have home, what home means, what it means when you adjust it for good reasons, you know, good grief. We are the luckiest. We’re not being displaced by war. We are choosing to do this amazing, exciting thing that we are very, very, very privileged to be able to do. But it still makes me feel like a cat who’s just had cold water thrown all over them and just the lack of continuity really puts me on edge. And that’s, you know this, an exciting thing for me.

[00:04:22] I believe that one of our biggest goals in life is to learn how to deal with moments that aren’t comfortable. Especially when it comes to our writing, dealing with moments that aren’t comfortable. If we want to be comfortable people who have a happy, smooth life, we are not going to be writers. Writing is hard to do, and it’s not smooth. And it is uncomfortable. A great majority of the time. And if we are people who cannot stand discomfort and run away, of course, we’re going to stay away from our manuscripts forever and knock it back to them and not do the writing of our hearts. If we get comfortable, or more comfortable, nobody’s going to get comfortable with it. But if we get more comfortable with discomfort and being able to sit at the desk and look at the words that are just stupid, that sound wrong, that sound awful and realize, oh, they went, now it won’t be very good right now, but I can fix them later. I’m not going to fix them today. I’m going to fix them later when I’m in a fixing stage. And when we’re in that fixing stage and it feels bad and wrong and uncomfortable, we just know that that’s part of the process as a writer. That’s what it feels like. We just keep coming back and therefore things get done. We are not going to be comfortable as writers, but we are going to be living as writers. And I think that’s really, truly amazing.

[00:06:45] So that’s about what’s going on around here. I would love to hear what’s going on with you, how your writing is going. Please reach out to me. I will be releasing a couple of bonus episodes here, coming up, including the talk that I had when my book launched last week. I got the permission to do that and that’s going to be fun. And then I have a writer Q&A, for those of you who subscribe at the $5 and up level on Patreon. I’ve got some many questions, many answers coming at you. So hopefully I’ll get those out this week, but I wanted to make sure that this went out on Friday as always. And I’m going to wish you a very happy writing and I’m going to also wish you happy sleeping, perhaps listen to Kathryn’s dulcet tones as you go to sleep tonight. And let me know how that goes for you. You’re going to love the way she writes stories. Okay, my friends I’ll talk to you soon and happy writing.

[00:06:35] This episode is brought to you by my book Fast Draft Your Memoir. Write your life story in 45 hours, which is, by the way, totally doable. And I’ll tell you how. It’s the same class I teach in the continuing studies program at Stanford each year, and I’ll let you in on a secret. Even if you have no interest in writing a memoir, yet the book has everything I’ve ever learned about the process of writing, and of revision, and of story structure, and of just doing this thing that’s so hard and yet all we want to do. Pick it up today.

[00:07:11] Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show, Kathryn Nicolai. Hello, Kathryn!

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:07:16] Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:18] I am a little giddy. I’m a little starstruck. We were already connecting before this. Let me give you a little introduction for people who don’t know who you are yet. Kathryn Nicolai is the creator of the enormously successful podcast, Nothing Much Happens, and the author of the book of the same name. Nicolai is an architect of coziness, writing soothing stories that both ease the reader into peaceful sleep and teach the principles of mindfulness. So that waking hours likewise becomes sweet and serene. She leans on her years of experience as a yoga and meditation teacher to seamlessly blend storytelling with brain training techniques that build better sleep habits over time. She is the owner of Ethos Yoga. She lives in Michigan with her wife and three dogs. Welcome!

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:08:01] Thank you so much for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:04] So I found you by, probably the way everybody else finds you, which is, you know, searching sleep podcast. And I’m sure that yours was the first one that came up and I have tried everything to sleep over the course of my life, literally everything. And I swear to God, Kathryn. Yours is the only freaking thing that works.

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:08:23] I’m so glad that you’re getting sleep.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:25] It is amazing! I have been, I usually go to bed before my wife, but every once in a while she comes to bed at the same time. And she, and this is what I want to first start asking you here. Like, so my wife goes to sleep like four seconds before her head even hits the pillow and it’s incredibly irritating and I never sleep. So, I asked her the night that she came to bed recently at the same time as me. Do you mind if I play my friend’s story? And she goes, no, I’d love to hear what it sounds like. And she never even got past the introduction. So your story, how are you asleep? I’m dying to know

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:09:03] I do sleep really well because I’ve been doing this my whole life. One of my first memories being like four years old, was laying in bed at night and having that awareness of imagination where, oh, I can take my mind anywhere? Oh. And being like four years old and going, I could tell a story, you know, I was obsessed with stories even as a kid and especially audio stories. I can remember, I have a condition called aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize anything. I have no inner eye. So, I think I really have always responded to audio and I remember like I had a Peter Pan record, and I would play it over and over the story of Peter Pan. And then my dad got me in like my first books on tape and I ran that thing out. He had to check it out from the library, like every other week for the entire summer. And so stories were always big to me and so I’d always done this my whole life. And I remember the stories that I would tell myself as a kid. And so as I got older and I was meeting, you know, just paying attention to my yoga students, listening to my family and friends, hearing from so many people who kept saying, I can’t sleep, I feel anxious. I can’t settle down. And I kept thinking, how do I get this from me to you? Because I know how to do this. And that’s when I thought, oh, it’s a podcast.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:29] It’s the most brilliant podcast and it is the most brilliant book. So let me tell what my experience of this is, and then you can actually tell what you actually do. But my experience is that you tell me a story with really rich detail. And this is really why I wanted to have you on the show because with all writing detail, the more detail we are, the more specific we are, the more universal it becomes in terms of understanding what’s happening. And you give my brain a track to follow. Like right now we are in the middle of a move to New Zealand and I am anxious as hell. Like my brain just wants to follow every track on like, how are we going to have to get the house painted? What kind of suitcase should I buy? But you give me a different track and then you do this beautiful thing where you say, and if you wake up in the middle of the night, you can replay it. And I do, and it works. I’m like there was a lemon tree and then there was a pencil. How would you describe how you tell these stories?

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:11:29] Well, I always think of it sort of as a recipe, there are three factors that I always like to put together for a solid bedtime story. One is that the overall action or activity of the story should be soothing. So no off the bat, anything we’re going to do, it’s going to be enjoyable and soothing.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:45] There’s no bungee jumping in these stories, yeah.

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:11:48] There’s no suspense, there’s really very little in the way of action, but that’s kind of nice. As a reader, I always love the part of the book before the inciting incident, when the person is just moving through their life and I’m

Rachael Herron: [00:12:01] Status quo?

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:12:03] Just a little bit longer because I just want to hear like, what are they going to eat for lunch

Rachael Herron: [00:12:07] I love list of things. Like what did they put in their luggage? I want to know what goes in the luggage.

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:12:10] Yeah. I intentionally put a lot of lists into that

Rachael Herron: [00:12:13] yes,

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:12:14] Into the podcast and whenever I, you know, if the character goes to the farmer’s market or there’s going to be lists and lists and lists of everything. So call me an activity and then there needs to be this element of familiarity or nostalgia, where even if you haven’t had the experience, you can relate to it so easily and you know, that it would feel good. And then last is tons of sensory details. Cause that’s going to make you present. It’s going to keep you in that moment following that track and just on sort of the neuroscience level what’s happening in that moment, is that we are shifting you out of your default mode network and the default mode network is the place where everything spins, it’s sort of the background static. It’s what your brain does when it doesn’t have anything else to do. And we’re putting you instead into a task positive network. Task positive network means your brain now has a job

Rachael Herron: [00:13:07] interesting

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:13:08] you can sleep in task positive, but you cannot sleep in default. So that’s why it works to think through it in the middle of the night, even if it’s just, and usually it’ll happen in just a couple of seconds,

Rachael Herron: [00:13:17] A few seconds and then I’m gone again.

Kathryn Nicolai: [00:13:19] Yeah. Oh, I remember there was this I’m out because I got switched over in my brain network.

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Ep. 239: Kirsty Capes on Using Tips from Screenwriters to Write Novels

June 25, 2021

Kirsty Capes works in publishing and, as a care leaver, is an advocate for better representation for care-experienced people in the media. She recently completed her PhD which investigates female-centric care narratives in contemporary fiction, under the supervision of 2019 Booker prize-winner, Bernardine Evaristo. Careless is her first novel.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 239 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so thrilled that you’re here with me today. If you’re watching on the video, I am in a friend’s house who is out of town, housesitting for her, so that’s why it looks a little bit different. Might sound a little bit different, that might keep happening for a while on the show. As you know, today we are talking to Kirsty Capes, and we are talking about stealing or borrowing tips from screenwriters in order to write novels and she was, as all my guests are, delightful, so, I know that you will enjoy the interview, stick around for that.

[00:00:52] What’s going on around here? Well, moving is continuing a pace. It’s been a very exciting, very incredibly busy week. Probably the busiest we’ve had so far as we completed cleaning up the house, getting the interior painting done, getting the staging done. We, I just realized this morning when I was journaling that we are not homeless because we have a house, but we are without a home. Our home has gone. The staging is ridiculous. It is just ridiculous. If you look at my Twitter, I have linked, or on my Instagram too, I have posted pictures of what the stagers did to our house. It is so fancy. It is mid-century modern; it has clean lines; it has light colors. It’s white carpet. Oh, it’s white carpet. All of that has been done. All of that has been put in and as of yesterday, people are coming through the home and hopefully somebody will want to buy it as soon as possible. I’m here in this friend’s house for another few days, and then we will go back to the house and we will live in the staged furniture, which makes me very nervous, especially when it comes to my wife and her coffee cup on those white carpets so that’ll be interesting. I’m just planning on buying drop cloths, drop cloths and putting them absolutely everywhere because I don’t trust us, I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust her. So, it is a weird feeling. We have everything that is hours that we need for the next, however long with us. We have our clothes, we have our computer setups, everything that is not packed and ready to be put in a shipping container is with us, besides our kitchen stuff, we did leave a minimal amount of kitchen stuff in our kitchen because we are cooks and we will keep cooking and we will pack up the spices and our favorite two pots at the very last minute, right before we leave the country at the end of July.

[00:02:54] So, for the next two months, we are without a home, home. Without our home that we created together and have lived in together for the past 15 years. But what was home? What is home, really? Home is my people, my wife, my family. Home is my writing, home is reading. Home is talking to you all, home is thinking about writing. Home is teaching, home is being with my students, that is all home. That’s all the home that I need. Get back to me in six months and see how I feel about that statement. But it is pretty exciting right now. And I’m feeling, I’m pretty good, I really am. I’m glad that we rehomed our cat Waylon when we did, because he is settled in so beautifully and that makes me so happy. And my little dog dozy is actually going to be living in this home behind us until we can send for her, until we buy a home and can send for her. She’s going to be living with my friend Sophie, and that’s the house we’re in. So, it’s really pretty nice that we’re spending 10 days in this house, with the house with dozy so that she can get to know this as her new home as well. And, when it comes to writing, I can admit that it, except for the two hours, twice a week, where I’m in RachaelSaysWrite, where I’m writing, that’s about the only time I’m writing right now. It’s been, rough and that’s fine because I’m actually not on a deadline right now, I’m just doing different projects, finishing up some revisions of things. And I do get those four hours a week, but on the other days I have been, I’m not a step tracker, but my aura rank that I wear, that tracks my sleep, I am a sleep tracker because I have terrible sleep and this has really helped me to get better sleep. It also tracks my steps and I was really impressed when I started to get 11 and 12 and 13 and 15,000 steps a day as I was, you know, moving around the house, packing, moving, cleaning, doing all this stuff. But over this last weekend, I was getting 23, 24, 25,000 steps a day. Absolutely exhausted. So much to do. And it’s, it’s seemingly never ending. So, I think that now that the whole, the house is open for business and people are coming through, there’s really nothing left to do. There’s nothing left to pack. I would like a nice 5,000 step day where I just walk from the, this desk to the bathroom and back, and maybe out for a coffee.

[00:05:20] So, that, because Sophie lives in a place where there is walkable, I have to tell you, this is one of our dreams, is to someday live, where we can walk to things. For 15 years, we have lived in a place in east Oakland. There is nothing to walk to, even the liquor store is closed. There’s literally nothing to walk to at all. Here, at Sophie’s house, there is a Trader Joe’s, there is a Pete’s, coffee shop. There is a Chipotle, there’s 31 flavors. There’s a comic book shop, like literally two blocks away. So, someday in New Zealand, we would love to move someplace where we can walk to some place. Walking to a cafe, isn’t that amazing? And we’re entering a time where, perhaps, you’re getting closer to being able to write in cafes again. In New Zealand, of course, we’ll be able to write in cafes because they’ve been opened since last June of 2020. But all of us in the United States, too, we’re getting to a place where perhaps the writers are going to be able to go out and write again. And for a lot of us, that’s kind of a big deal. However, we have gotten used to writing at home, haven’t we? So that’s been something that’s one of those silver linings of the pandemic. Perhaps we all had to learn how to write and revise in our homes, which is something that I’ve heard from a lot of writers, is something that we were really bad at, a lot of us were really bad at. So, that’s exciting. I’m just going to jump in to the interview right now. I’ve updated you on all the important things. So please enjoy this. Please get some of your own writing done, whether that’s in your home or in your car, or on one of those car lap desks like I have. And then come find me where I am on the internet and tell me about it. I really, really love hearing from you all about where and what kind of writing you’re doing, what you’re struggling with. Please, let me know. I will be doing a mini episode soon, probably within this next week. So, if you have any questions, I have a couple of questions that are waiting in the queue that I will get out in that mini episode and I really love doing those. So, if you are at patron at the level at which I am your mini coach, which is $5 a month, lay some questions on me. Let’s get some good ones in there. There are already good ones in there. Let’s get some great, a great selection to do a mini episode on and thank you all for listening. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for being writers cause you’re amazing. Okay. Bye.

[00:07:41] Hey, is resistance keeping you from writing? Are you looking for an actual writing community in which you can make a calls and be held accountable for them? Join RachaelSaysWrite, like twice weekly, two hour writing session on zoom. You can bop in and out of the writing room as your schedule needs, but for just $39 a month, you can write up to 4 hours a week. With our wonderful little community, in which you’ll actually get to know your writing peers. We write from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM on Tuesdays and 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM on Thursdays and that’s US Pacific Standard Time. Go to RachaelHerron.com/Write to find out more.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:21] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Kirsty Capes. Hello, Kirsty!

Kristy Capes: [00:08:26] Hi! Thank you so much for having me, so lovely to meet you, Rachael.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:29] It’s a thrill to have you on the show and I’m so happy to talk about writing today. Let me give you a little introduction. Kirsty Capes works in publishing and, as a care leaver, is an advocate for better representation for care-experienced people in the media. She recently completed her PhD, congratulations, which investigates female-centric care narratives in contemporary fiction, under the supervision of 2019 Booker prize-winner, Bernardine Evaristo. Careless is her first novel. And when this releases, it will have just, the book will have just released. So, congratulations on that.

Kristy Capes: [00:09:05] Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:07] Have you, we don’t have a term that I can think of, and it may be a blind spot in my vocabulary. And I shouldn’t even say the word blind spot, but using more sensitive language, but we don’t have, we don’t use the term care leaver here in the states, as far as I know. Can you explain what a care leaver is?

Kristy Capes: [00:09:25] So a care leaver is anyone who has spent time in the care system at any time in their life. I think generally, from like a policy governmental perspective, it’s six months in the care system. Although I might be wrong on that, it might be three months. And they have left the care system. So, you know, they’ve either aged out or they’ve left whatever care situation they were in.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:59] I feel like here, at least there, people, I hear conversation, people talking about there should be a term. We should have a term. Instead, we just have foster kids who’ve aged out and that’s, I mean, there might be a better phrase for that, but I love that you are an advocate for this and talk to me a little bit about how your first novel is about this subject. Did you always want to do this or is this just kind of what came out of your body as a care leaver yourself?

Kristy Capes: [00:10:25] Yeah, so I think there was definitely a part of it that it just came out of my body as you say. So, I grew up in foster care myself and I always wanted to write. I always wanted to be a writer. I was a really big reader as a kid and I had, I went to university and I did creative writing at university. And a lot of the creative writing that I was doing, were kind of short stories and poems and things like that, that were kind of influenced by my own experience growing up in care. So, I had all of these kinds of bits and pieces of writing, where I was kind of looking at the care experience, dealing with my own care experience, kind of working through some of that. And I got to the point where, I was, I felt as though I was ready to start writing a book and it seemed very natural for me to write something about care because I’d been through it myself. I had so much firsthand experience of it. I had a lot of writing already on the care experience and it felt like it was something that I needed to do for myself to kind of have some sort of catharsis maybe to, you know, kind of deal with some of the sort of unresolved bits of my own experience. And also, you know, I was very, very aware that when I was growing up in care, there were very few representations of people like me in the books that I was reading. And as such a big reader, especially as a child, it was so it felt very important to me to write something that felt very true to my own experience, but also felt more of a positive and hopeful representation, of someone who’s been in foster care. And that’s kind of where Careless came from it.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:28] It, I’m not done with it yet, cause I just started it the other day a little bit late, but it is beautiful.

Kristy Capes: [00:12:34] Oh, thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:35] Your writing is just sublime and it deserves all of the accolades that you are getting. I’m so excited to read more of it. Let’s talk a little bit about what your writing process is like. How do you get it done? Do you have a full-time day job? Are you working around that? Are you working on the next book? Tell us all about that.

Kristy Capes: [00:12:56] Well it’s interesting that this podcast has fallen when it has, because I just sent my second book to my editor yesterday, first draft.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:08] Like, and as we’re recording this, I think your book comes out in about a month. Is that right?

Kristy Capes: [00:13:13] Yeah. About three weeks. Yeah.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:15] That’s exactly the timeframe I had for my first two books. And I hated turning in my second book before the first one had come out. It was also,

Kristy Capes: [00:13:22] Yeah, it was really insane. So, yeah, I mean, it’s all at the front of my head at the moment, so I can tell you all about it. But, I had, I do have a full-time job. I have a nine to five. I work for HarperCollins, funnily enough. For mills and boon, which I think in the states is called Harlequin. So, lots of lovely romance.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:46] I’m also a romance writer, so

Kristy Capes: [00:13:49] Oh, amazing! So yeah, I do my nine to five there. And,

Rachael Herron: [00:13:55] What do you do there?

Kristy Capes: [00:13:56] I do marketing, which is loads of fun. I love working there. It’s just the best. So yeah, so it’s been, it was quite intense. And I think originally when I got my book deal, back last year, in February last year, they kind of asked me when I would be able to deliver book two. And originally, they wanted January, 2021. And I was also doing a PhD at the time last year as well. So,

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Ep. 238: Meghan Scott Molin on How To Write When Life is Just Too Busy

June 25, 2021

Meghan Scott Molin comes to writing by way of a Masters in Architecture, a minor in Opera, a professional career as a barn manager, and five years crash course as a mother. She currently resides in Colorado with her fellow zookeeper (husband), sons, horse, adopted stray cats, and corgi. She is an avid lover of everything nerdy from Wars to Trek, Hobbits, Who, and beyond. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, dreaming of travel, coveting more corgis, and listening to audiobooks while hanging out at the barn.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, hello writers, welcome to episode number, I have no idea. And this is going to be the shortest intro ever, because I’ve only got a few minutes and it has been an enormous week. I am not even sure who you’re going to hear in the interview next. I honestly am not, usually I look it up, but I’m, you know, usually several months ahead of time. So, I need to look it up and remind myself about what we talked about. I don’t even have time to do that. So, I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it. I’m sure it’s going to be fabulous. So please stick around and enjoy that. What is going on around here? Literally everything. Hush Little Baby came out. Yay! I have a book launch party today as a sub, so it drops on May 14th. So, if you get those in time, you can come to Murder by the Book, to my book launch. And if you’re a writer, you may want to kind of see what an online book launch looks like. You can find the info for that at murderbooks.com/herron. My last name H E R R O N.

[00:01:17] Also, the house is torn apart, empty. Vacant as of today, if you’re looking at me on the podcast, on the YouTube, I am wearing overalls because it’s that kind of day. I am so grubby. I should not be allowed in my coworking space honestly, if they knew what I had done today. It’s been pretty insane. Like there’s, now we have no furniture as of right now, but last night, you know, we’re sleeping on the floor on a blow-up air mattress. Tonight, we’ve got a couple of nights at a hotel because we have nothing in the house and then it’ll get staged. But basically, everything that needs to happen, has been happening at the very last minute. Quite an intense experience. And, you know, then we moved to New Zealand in 10 weeks. But the go time, the actual go-time has been this week, and just before I drove to the coworking space today, I drove with my wife, with our cars full of the final boxes to put in our teeny tiny pod, which we will then repack and send on a pallet or two overseas. But it’s doing that kind of thing and I’m freaking out a little bit. I’m also really happy and excited, kind of to step into this brand-new adventure and also be launching a book at the same time is super, super awesome and super exhausting. I don’t think I’ve had more than five hours sleep for the last four or five days. So, tonight I’m hoping to sleep. I have done zero writing for it, for about seven days, not even, I think I have journaled twice and I normally do my morning pages. If you have never done morning pages, I encourage you to try if you have never done The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which is where the morning pages idea comes from. I always encourage people to try that. It is, three pages, handwritten first thing in the morning, and honestly, it is a life-changing exercise. And I basically do my morning pages every day, and I have now for several years. I kind of go in and out of the morning pages, but I’ve been deeply in them. And the fact that I haven’t even been doing that is very strange and feels very odd in my body. So, I’m hoping to get back to that tomorrow, because tomorrow they’re just going to be laying floor, flooring and carpet, and I can’t help with that. I can just unlock the house and let them do that. So, that’s where I am.

[00:04:00] I feel silly and giddy and excited and very glad and honored that you are here with me listening to the show even on a day when I’m giddy and excited and weird. And, I have no idea who you’re about to listen to. Please enjoy. Please come find me on the socials, and tell me how your writing is going. I really, really care. I really love to hear this from you. So, that is all. Next week, I’ll have more information on everything about the podcast, but this week we don’t have it. So, and that is just goes to show. We can have a shitty first draft and move forward with our writing lives. I don’t think this metaphor is working, but, normally, you know, my metaphors are a little bit better. They’ll be better in the future. This does feel like a first draft podcast. Here we go. Enjoy the interview. Happy writing, my friends.

Rachael Herron: [00:04:53] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Meghan Scott Molin. Hello, Meghan!

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:04:58] Hi. How are you?

Rachael Herron: [00:05:00] I’m good. I, we were just talking for a second before the show. I know you just ran in from the barn where the horse is sick.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:05] Yes.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:06] Is the horse going to be okay?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:08] Horse is going to be okay. Kids are over the norovirus. This is my life.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:14] And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:15] It’s chaos! Pure chaos.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:18] Writing it around the chaos. Awesome. Let me give you a little bio for you. Meghan Scott Molin comes to writing by way of a Masters in Architecture, a minor in Opera, a professional career as a barn manager, and, barn, I sounded like I said bar there. Different. And five years crash course as a mother. She currently resides in Colorado with her fellow zookeeper (husband), sons, horse, adopted stray cats, and corgi. She is an avid lover of everything nerdy from Wars to Trek, Hobbits, Who, and beyond. When she’s not writing, she’s cooking, dreaming of travel, coveting more corgis, and listening to audiobooks while hanging out at the barn. Welcome!

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:05:54] Thank you so much for having me. I absolutely love your podcast. It keeps me going.

Rachael Herron: [00:05:59] Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to me. Doing the podcast and speaking to people like you is what keeps me going. So, I want to talk to you about your process because how the hell do you do it all? That’s what I would like to know. Cause you are, how old are your kids?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:06:16] Two and five. So, in theory this year, I would have had kindergarten to help me out, but not so much. Now I’m a kindergarten teacher.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:28] That should also go on your amazing bio. Unofficial kindergarten teacher. What a fricking year. So, let’s talk about your writing process. How do you get it done? I want to know like how and where, when, all of it.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:06:45] Well, I wish I could say that I had some sort of process that looked great on Instagram and that I was elated about. But I think the reason I reached out to you is that I’m operating in a land of middle grounds and a land of not ideals and I don’t think that I’m the only one. And I think so many of us do look at social media and do listen to interviews and think that everybody has it all together. I wanted to offer a realistic view of how someone is getting writing done, even though, it does not look great on Insta.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:21] I love that. I absolutely love that. So, because it’s so it’s such an easy fallacy to fall into believing. So, what does writing look like to you on a day-to-day basis?

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:07:33] So I, because of this last year, I had to find something that was sustainable. And in my head, I had this picture of what being at home with little kids would look like, with writing and, my corgi is coming to say, hi, sorry. Hopefully he doesn’t get in the shot.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:48] Great. My dog’s probably going to bark in a second. So yeah.

Meghan Scott Molin: [00:07:51] So I, I just think that, rather than that, that clip art of the mom with the computer and her kid, I really had to be realistic about what my life looked like, what my kids were. And my kids are very light sleepers, very early morning risers and working in the mornings is really tricky for me. So, I write in my closet on a floor chair, and I have pictures on my Instagram if anybody ever wants to take a look at my, really not illustrious setup. But I ninja out of bed about 30 to 45 minutes before my kids get up and I have to do it like super silently. I can’t get tea. I can’t go look out the window. I can’t work at my desk. I take my laptop and I sit literally in a dark corner where I can’t wake up my husband and I turn off the internet and I do write. And it’s,

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Ep. 237: Kristin Beck on How to Shut Up Your Inner Editor

June 25, 2021

Kristin Beck first learned about World War II from her grandmother, who served as a Canadian army nurse, fell in love with an American soldier in Belgium, and married him shortly after VE Day. Kristin thus grew up hearing stories about the war, and has been captivated by the often unsung roles of women in history ever since. A former teacher, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Teaching from Western Washington University. Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. This is her first novel.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #237 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So thrilled that you’re here with me today, as we are talking to Kristin Beck, who was a delight. And she is talking about that perennial question that we all have on quietening or quieting, depending on whether you are using American or British pronunciation, spelling, quieting that inner editor. We all need to work on doing that. We all have to learn how to do it. It is something that never goes away. So, I know you’re going to enjoy this delightful interview. All right. What is going on around here? As I was preparing to record, I was like, there’s just nothing going on around here, writing wise. I remember coming from a migraine, so this will be quick. That’s why the podcast is late. Yesterday, when I normally would have done it, I just had to cancel everything and go to bed and I felt very grateful to be self-employed that I could do that. Although if I was, if I put you out in any way, I apologize for that. I had to do that to a few people as I, as the migraine knocked me out.

[00:01:24] However, the migraine is also making my brain slow and I forgot that I have a book coming out this week as you listen to this episode. It comes out on Tuesday, May 11th. It is called “Hush Little Baby” and I think it’s my best book yet. It is scary. It is intense. I was just texting with a book seller who loved it and we happen to be friends, so we were texting and he said it was incredibly tense and really stressed them out in a good way. It’s so fun! It’s so fun. And I’m very proud of this book. It has a little tiny bit of sobriety in it, which I am pleased with, but it’s just about a character who happens to be sober. It’s also about a character who happens to be queer. This is definitely not me in this book, but we always put pieces of ourselves in our books. And I’m proud of this book. I hope that you like it. Also, I would like to invite you to something. Yes, you. You, wherever you’re sitting, wherever you’re listening. If you hear this in time, I would love you to come to the virtual launch party. I’m so excited about the launch party because, for all of the books in my career that I have written, my launch parties are in person, and they are in the bay area, and friends come, fans come. It’s fantastic. But it’s the bay area. I am restricted geographically. This time for the first time, we are not restricted geographically. And my launch party, which is on Friday night, Friday, May 14th. If you’re listening to this, 2021, I will be in conversation with Sarah Shepherd of Pretty Little Liars at Murder by the Book, which is just the most wonderful thriller, murder, mystery, crime fiction bookstore in Houston, Texas. And it’s really one of my top two bookstores in the world. And, the other one that I love is, Diesel Books or East Bay Booksellers, and that’s because it happens to be my local bookseller, but otherwise it would be Murder by the Book for sure. And, I’m so pleased to be doing my launch with them. So, if you want to come, I would love it.

[00:03:44] We’re just going to be chatting about books. We’re going to be talking about writing. We are going to be talking about this particular book and it is at 5:00 PM Pacific time, on Friday, May 14th. And the link that you can go to, to go, to watch for free is murderbooks.com/herron. Murderbooks.com/H E R R O N. All the information is there. I would really love it if you came, plus I’m really nervous that nobody will show up and then Murder by the Book will be unhappy with me. But I hope that doesn’t happen. Also, if you buy your book from them, pre-order it, or order it that day, I will send you a signed book plate, signed, made out to whoever you want, and it’s an awesome book plate Dutton designed it for me and it’s covered with blood spatter. You can actually see it in my Instagram stories or on my TikTok, if you want to go find me there. But it is the best book plate that I’ve ever seen and you want it, even if you get the book in, e-version send me proof of receipt in whatever way you want to Rachael @RachaelHerron.com and I will send you a book plate. So, but I’d really love to have you come, hear me talk to John at Murder Books and Sarah Shepherd, who is an amazing writer, and it’s going to be fun. Friday, May 14th, 7:00 PM Central, 5:00 PM Pacific, 8:00 PM Eastern. You should come, murderbooks.com/herron.

[00:05:10] All right, that’s my, push for that. Also, this week, I- my Fast Draft Your Memoir came out in German. So, if you’re a German speaker and you’d like to read that, please go do that, that’s available. And that was exciting, also working on Fast Draft Your Memoir workbook questions or I’m doing, a brand-new workbook that goes along with that book, we’re kind of optimizing what we can, I’m doing that with my assistant ed who is wonderful. But the thing that’s really exciting this week is the release of Hush Little Baby. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you, oh, if you’re looking at it, at me on the YouTube, if you’re one of the few people who do that, most people do consume this with their ears, not their eyes, but the posters behind me and it’s such a good cover, I love it. So, that is all the news that I have for you today. Let us jump into the interview with Kristin Beck. I know you’re going to enjoy it. I hope that your writing is going well. I hope that you do not have a migraine and that there is no migraine in your future. And I believe in you, I believe in your writing in your book. So please get a little writing done and come find me on the internet and tell me how it went. Okay, my friends. Bye.

[00:06:30] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:49] All right. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Kristin Beck. Hi Kristin!

Kristin Beck: [00:06:53] Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Rachael Herron: [00:06:55] I am delighted to have you, let me give you a little bit of an intro before we get started. Kristin Beck first learned about World War II from her grandmother, who served as a Canadian army nurse, fell in love with an American soldier in Belgium, and married him shortly after VE Day. Kristin thus grew up hearing stories about the war, and has been captivated by the often unsung roles of women in history ever since. A former teacher, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Washington and a Master’s in Teaching from Western Washington University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. So welcome to the show! We are talking about writing and its process. Your first novel just came out, right?

Kristin Beck: [00:07:38] No, it’s coming out actually in a few weeks. It’s April 13th is the update.

Rachael Herron: [00:07:42] So by the time this show goes live, it will be out. Will you tell us the title and just a little bit about your book?

Kristin Beck: [00:07:49] Sure. So, the book is called Courage, My Love, and it is about, two women in the Italian resistance who led very different lives. And, when the German occupation takes over in Rome, they’re both pulled into the resistance and decided that they need to fight back.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:06] I am in love with all things Italian. So, when I was asked about this, but I’m only about halfway done with the book right now, but I am loving it. And it’s just so fun and beautiful. Where did this idea come to you from, for these women?

Kristin Beck: [00:08:22] Well, so when I was in my twenties, I lived in Italy two different times.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:27] Where?

Kristin Beck: [00:08:29] Once in Sienna.

Rachael Herron: [00:08:29] Oh, I love Sienna.

Kristin Beck: [00:08:31] And then just outside of Venice as a teacher for a semester. So yeah, so it was, it was pretty dreamy. So, I’ve always loved all things Italian as well. And I was looking, I was actually just sort of looking into women and the resistance in general during the war. Not totally searching for ideas for books, just sort of interested. And I came across a newspaper article of the staffette, which were women couriers during the war in Italy. And I was just sort of, captivated by that. I hadn’t heard much about them. And so, I started reading, and kind of delved in the way historical nerds do. And, after a few weeks of reading about them, I just thought I would really like to write a book about these women

Rachael Herron: [00:09:16] And you did.

Kristin Beck: [00:09:18] And yes, and then I did, and here we are.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:21] And how does this, so this, this is a podcast about process and how we get the work done. How did you fit this into your life and around your life? Where does, where does writing fit?

Kristin Beck: [00:09:32] So my writing schedule tends to revolve around school schedules, because I,

Rachael Herron: [00:09:36] How, how old are the kids?

Kristin Beck: [00:09:38] They are nearly 9 and 11.

Rachael Herron: [00:09:40] Okay.

Kristin Beck: [00:09:41] So, not super young anymore. But I tend to write when they are at school, so I kind of get everyone packed off for the day. And then I sit down and I work for as many hours as I can, which on the good days is until it’s pickup time. And then other days I have other business things to do for writing.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:02] So what are you doing now? Are you working on the next book?

Kristin Beck: [00:10:05] I’m actually working on the third book. I, so I had a two-book contract when I sold Courage and wrote that second book last year, during well, it’s still the pandemic, but really during the pandemic and so that one is in editing right now and I am working on number three.

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Ep. 236: Kathleen West On Deliberately Writing Scenes You Won’t Use

June 25, 2021

Kathleen West’s novels, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes and Are We There Yet?, have been best books picks by Real Simple, Newsweek, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, Pop Sugar, and the New York Post. A teacher for 20 years before she published her first novel, Kathleen is particularly interested in the topics of motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, and the elusiveness of work-life balance. She is a life-long Minnesotan and lives in Minneapolis with her family.

Join Rachael’s Slack channel, Onward Writers!

Transcript:

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode # 236 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so thrilled that you’re here with me today. As I talked to Kathleen West, who was an absolute delight. She was one of those people that I just wanted to adopt into my life immediately. We had a great chat and she has this great craft tip on deliberately writing scenes you’re not going to use. And I loved it and I’m trying it actually at the moment. So I know you’re going to get a lot out of the interview, stick around for that. What’s going on around here? Well, if you watch on YouTube, you can see that I’m in a completely different space. I am in a co-working space because my office is blown apart. So I apologize if the sound quality isn’t quite up to what you’re used to. I won’t be able to bring my big boom mic and I mean, I could, it would look really weird getting it here on Bart. But for the next few months I will probably be recording quite a bit in here. I will definitely be teaching in here. Because it is not comfortable to be at my house when people are inside the house, working on it, doing things, painting, and I needed a place to escape. And it just kind of wanted to mention it because this is me taking my job seriously. This is me giving myself a place to work that is quiet. That is mine. That is not in the middle of chaos.

[00:01:52] So, it was exciting. This is my very first time being in here. I took Bart and took the train to get here, which was incredibly nerve wracking. I did not know my nerves would be so wrecked to be on Bart for the first time in more than a year, I am vaccinated, fully vaccinated. You know, it’s been more than a month, but still on the train, you can’t get more than six feet away from people. Even, I, you know, I came over at like two o’clock and not rush hour and still you’re right next to people. So that was a little weird and I didn’t feel comfortable also getting here was a little weird. I just want to say and honor the fact that anytime we do something for the first time or doing something for the first time and it’s hard and it’s nerve-wracking, you can just walk in here, you know, figuring out the path to get to this building. I’m up on the sixth floor, I’m looking at the Oakland federal building, the double towers, there’s a pale blue sky and light blue clouds. And I’m looking at the Skyway walk over. This is downtown Oakland. It’s really a place that I love. And I love that this is the view I have right now, in this co-working space, I can ‘rent’ or ‘borrow’ privately offices whenever I want, which is actually what I’m going to be doing the whole time I’m here because I still don’t want to be sitting out in the co-working space. So I’m going to just be grabbing these private offices to be in. I’m feeling very grateful, very lucky, and also pretty darn sensible for taking myself and my job seriously. This is what I’m going to be doing when we get to New Zealand after we get out of quarantine. I was super stressed trying to find Airbnbs cause we don’t know where we’re going to be living. We don’t know what city we’re going to be in. You know, trying to find rentals that had three bedrooms because my wife needs an office. I need an office and I realized, oh, or will you just do co-working spaces? And that’s such a relief and it’s just a business expense. And yeah, honestly, I’m pretty stoked about it. I’m supposed to be sitting on the other side of the desk with my back to the window, but why would I do that? Because what an incredible view. So also it’s very bright, so you can see me in all the full glory on YouTube. I usually- there is no ring light needed in this office. I must tell you that.

[00:04:17] What else is going on? Yeah. Waylon our cat, who we rehomed is settling in beautifully. He loves the kids. He’s getting petted all the time and he’s getting a lot of love so that, does our hearts very, very good. We needed to hear that. The move itself is coming along. However, I will say that we are entering a couple of weeks of the hardest stuff, you know, moving all of the boxes that we have filled out into the pod and then from the pod into organizing it onto the pallet, which will go onto the container ship, which will take our stuff. We’re only taking one pallets worth of goods, unless we take two because it just seems like not enough space for the boxes that we have. They assure us it’s all going to fit on one pallet, there are people who are shipping it on the container ship, so we shall see, we can always order another pallet. It’s not very expensive. Thank goodness. So, but that’s the kind of thing we’re doing. We’re doing pretty big and ups-upsetting. I’m using the word upsetting deliberately because it is upsetting the status quo, the normal every day. And I just wanted to mention that yesterday, I had a meeting with my mastermind’s group and this is a group of writers. We’ve been meeting probably off and on for a year or so maybe more. Most of them are urban fantasy writers. All of them- no, we kind of, we kind of run the gamut, but there are a couple of urban fantasy writers and these are all people who have been in the business as long as I have. We all entered around 2009, 2010, and they are so important to me.

[00:06:00] We don’t meet that often, maybe once a month, once every two months. But when I sat down yesterday, we do a hot seat row, you know, just, we rotate through all the way through all five of us. Everybody gets a turn to talk about what they’re struggling with, and what I said I was struggling with was trying to figure out what to write, how to write working on how many books are in process right now, something like five or six plus re-releases of at least six. I know I had the numbers. I think the last time I was on the podcast, but the numbers are high. How do I focus? How do I get things done? I did finish the faster after memoir workbook. The German edition will be coming out soon. So things are getting completed because I am choosing to focus on one thing at a time and getting them off of my desk. But what my mastermind group said was Rachael, for the love of God, why don’t you cut yourself some slack and just move. I love that advice. I can’t take that advice because I’m Rachael. But I can take a little bit of that advice. I can take it for in the spirit, with which it was meant, which means I can understand that I am not going to get as much done as I usually do when I have a home office. And I go there in the morning and I leave at night. Everything is up in the air and it’s okay if I’m up in the air too, I need to remember to treat myself with gentleness, understand that I’m still and always will be a writer. I could do a little bit less. And this is what I tell my students when they are in the throws of the hard stuff in life. And we’re talking the hard stuff we’re talking, moving divorce, loss, death, grief, a pandemic. I’m not being lazy.

[00:07:47] I’m always worried that I’m being lazy, which is something you might identify with in this work-obsessed productivity, obsessed culture. And I freely admit that I am just as obsessed with productivity as the next person, if not more, but we have to remember to give ourselves a break when stuff is hard. And stuff is a little bit hard for me right now. It’s good. It’s all chosen stuff. So that makes it feel good, better but I still have to go gentle. So I just thought, I would say that in case you’re dealing with some hard stuff or some big life changes, if you’re beating yourself up in any way, I want you to knock it off. No, beating yourself up, do a little bit of writing, do what you can, and then pat yourself on the back really hard. Give yourself that California granola hug, like literally put your arms around your shoulders and give yourself a squeeze because you’re amazing. You’re amazing. And look, you’re here. You’re thinking about writing. You want to think about writing. I thank you for spending this time with me. It really means a lot to me. And I’m so glad that you’re here. I just want to take a second to thank new Patreon members. I don’t think I thank them last week. Helen Conway and Rita Zelos, thank you so, so, so much. If anyone is ever interested in supporting me over on Patreon it eally makes a huge difference in my life. It allows me to write these essays on right now, I’m writing chapters of the book about moving to New Zealand. You can always look at that @patreon.com/Rachael R A C H A E L. And a new essay will be coming out tomorrow on the day that this podcast goes live. So if you’d like to read about moving to New Zealand, that’s the place to do it. All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. And I know you’re going to enjoy this interview with Kathleen West. Please keep doing your writing. You’re the only, I know it sounds like a cliché. It sounds trite, but I really, really mean it. If you don’t write your book, no one will write your book and we will lose your book or your books. And we need those. We need those in the round. So, do you writing friends. Do a little bit, come find me on the internet and then tell me all about it. I’d love to hear that and happy writing.

[00:10:00] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:18] Well, I could not be more pleased to have on the show today, Kathleen West. Welcome, Kathleen!

Kathleen West: [00:10:22] Thank you so much, Rachael, I’m so happy to be here.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:25] I am thrilled to talk to you. I’m loving your book. I’m right smack dab in the middle of it. So I’m not sure what’s going to happen yet. So it’s kind of the sweet spot of being in a book. Anyway, let me give you a little introduction. Kathleen West novels, Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes and Are We There Yet? have been best book picks by Real Simple, Newsweek, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning, America, Pop Sugar, and the New York Post. A teacher for 20 years before she published her first novel, Kathleen is particularly interested in the topics of motherhood, ambition, competitive parenting, Ooh that’s all in this book. And the elusiveness of work-life balance. She’s a life-long, Minnesotan and lives in Minneapolis with her family. So welcome. This show is for writers and we talk about writing, but I would love to know, are you still teaching or are you full-time writing now?

Kathleen West: [00:11:16] Well, I was full-time writing last school year, 2019-2020. And this fall, I taught third grade full-time in the fall. So just, I really found myself missing teaching during the pandemic, which sounds crazy, but I really

Rachael Herron: [00:11:35] It does.

Kathleen West: [00:11:36] I realized that teaching is really a coping mechanism for me. Like if I have to be like the adult in charge in front of a classroom of kids, like that helps me deal with our realities. So I, it was a perfect opportunity, the woman who replaced me had a baby this fall, so same classroom, same colleagues. I just dashed back in for a semester. I felt like I was doing a great thing for myself and for the kids. And then I was back to writing full-time in December.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:05] Wow. So were you doing on zoom or were you in the classroom at that point?

Kathleen West: [00:12:08] I was in person with them, I had half the kids every day. So 10 were with me and then 10 were with my assistant and then we would alternate day by day and then in November, when everything peaked, we were online for between like the week before Thanksgiving and then until winter break.

Rachael Herron: [00:12:26] Wow! And it seems like, I mean, you have such a cheerful aspect about doing that. It seems like you enjoyed it.

Kathleen West: [00:12:31] I did, you know, I really loved my students this year. They were like a lovely group of kids, really adaptable and flexible. And I love the other third grade teacher that I worked with at school. So really nice to be back with her and to kind of engage in that friendship again and then I also knew I was going to be done. So,

Rachael Herron: [00:12:53] I love that. Yeah. And it had a timeline on it. Yeah. So, when you- now, and so now you’re back full time writing. Can you tell us a little bit about your process? How do you get work done? Are you a morning writer? Are you a binge writer? What, how does that work for you?

Kathleen West: [00:13:08] Yeah, when I first started writing seriously, not that long ago, like 2015. I worked really early in the morning before school, so I’d get up at like 5 o’clock, 4:45 when I was working on a project work until 6:15, and that was that like, that was the time of day that I was I’m awake and free to do my stuff. So, that’s what I did. And now that I am more flexible with writing as more of a bigger, bigger part of my real career, I don’t tend to get up that early anymore. I don’t, you know, I get up at 6 or whatever, you know, between

Rachael Herron: [00:13:43] That’s still damn early

Kathleen West: [00:13:45] I start writing usually until everybody settled, you know, like I might do email or other tasks and then in terms of like binge writing, et cetera, when I’m in the drafting phase, it’s very painful. Like first draft I can- it’s I can hardly do it. It hurts my body,

Rachael Herron: [00:14:02] Me too

Kathleen West: [00:14:03] Put the words down on the way. So I have to just make very small goals, like 200 words, and you can have a coffee. 200 more words, and you can go on Twitter. If you hit 800, you can walk the dog, you know, like, so just like little chunks and now, like I have a book due next week. I know like the convergence of the launch of my new book and this due date is really my own fault. It’s because of the teaching this fall. And then I didn’t finish by March 1st when I said I was going to so

Rachael Herron: [00:14:31] That’s so difficult though.

Kathleen West: [00:14:33] Yes. But this feels like the last revision, like I can really disappear into that work for hours and hours. But other than that, I really can’t. I don’t know. I’m very distractible.

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