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Why I Love Fall
I love fall because of the ache.
You know what I mean?
That deep, sweet upswell of nostalgia that comes with the dropping leaves is such an emotional push-pull of happiness tinged with sadness.
You know how there are the four flavors (sweet, salty, sour, bitter), and then there’s that extra one? It’s called umami. It’s that dark, rich, undertone of taste. You know it when you have it. Bacon, soy sauce, truffle mushrooms.
I’m declaring fall the umami season. It’s layered and complex. Spring and summer are happy! Bright! Literally, they are sunny (and god help the people with reverse S.A.D. which I sometimes wonder if I have. I’m not a fan of summer). Winter is bleak, and we need time for that, too.
But fall is both. It’s happy and sad. It looks ahead (new school year! getting older!) and it looks back at the same time. This year is winding to its close. For so many, this year has been so much worse than any of the years before. This fall will ache harder, more deeply.
It’s umami. It’s rich and deep. It’s compost turned into black earth. It’s fires, lit indoors for warmth instead of wildfires running the hills.
If light has a scent to me, it’s this: the smell of sycamore leaves dropping onto dusty ground in yellow sunshine. I have a million favorite scents, but this one might be in the top five, right up there with beach bonfire smoke, mothballs, wet wool, and cedar. (Oooh! All of those are umami, I think.)
This is my first fall as a full-time writer.
I have wanted this my whole life.
Every day I write at Mills College, lately at the library. I sit on the second floor and I open the window at my favorite carrel, and I set my apple carefully next to my coffee mug and my water bottle. (Basically, I’m Frances with her salt shaker.)
Today, as I walked on campus, I caught that scent, the dry sycamore leaves in sunshine one.
My heart nearly lifted right out of my chest.
This is what I’ve wanted.
I’ve got it.
I’m enough of a Buddhist to know I won’t keep it. Everything changes. Right now, this is my life. I am happy. Someday this won’t be my life. That makes me wistful, nostalgic for the very moment I’m standing in.
Fall is rich, and deep. Excitement and sadness. The light falls earlier, and we prepare to cocoon ourselves in our houses for winter.
But right now we’re outside, scuffing through the leaves, realizing that the sound of a leaf’s crunch remains the same, no matter how young or old we are—that sharp, satisfying KRICSHHH. We break something with our foot that hurts no one. We contribute to the leaf returning to dust.
The ache feels good, like a sore, used muscle.
It feels right, rich, and deep.
Happy first day of fall to you, my friends.
InstantPot Chicken Enchiladas
I read a bunch of enchilada recipes and then went off the road, and I want to make sure if I ever want to veer back this way, I can, because these are SO GOOD, yo.
In InstantPot (if you have one, otherwise just cook the chicken whatever way you want, it’s all good): Chop one onion, throw it in. Add in 6-7 boneless skinless chicken thighs. Drape 3 chipotle peppers artistically on top. Throw in some cumin (1tbsp?) and some salt. Close. Press Poultry button (15 min, medium). YES, I know there’s no liquid, no, the InstantPot won’t explode. The chicken makes plenty of liquid.
When cooked, preheat oven to 350. Remove chicken and peppers, shred both. Pour off liquid in pot, reserving the onions floating around. Add chicken/peppers to pot with onions, add can of corn.
Shred a 12oz block of pepper jack cheese. Add about a quarter of it to the hot chicken, along with a couple of great big dollops of sour cream. Mix. Taste and die a little with the wonder of it all.
Dredge corn tortillas (ours were still hot when I bought them earlier today) through green enchilada sauce. Fill with chicken mix. Roll and place in glass baking pan. When you’ve got as many as you can fit in your pan, pour the rest of the enchilada sauce over the top, and top the whole thing with the rest of the shredded cheese.
Bake uncovered for 30 min. Serve topped with more sour cream and cilantro, if you have it.
In Which I Write a Lot
A while ago, I had the idea that I’d put together a little book—pulled from blog posts—about moving from the desire to write to being a writer. I hired a person to go through my fourteen years of blog posts (that’s a lot of posts, a great many of them full of angst about wanting to write more and not doing it).
I’m still going to do the book, because I think it’s a fun project, but I realized I hadn’t edited it yet because I’m too busy writing. Same thing with not blogging more.
I used to write about wanting to write.
Now I’m too busy writing.
And that’s so awesome!
There’s a lot of hustle in this self-employed game, I’ll tell you that much. I’m constantly plotting, both literally and figuratively. I’m writing a book that’s due in a month to Random House Australia (the third Songbird book!), and then I’m going to write a book (newish genre!) for my agent to sell, and then I’m going to write another Ballard Brother book, so the next six or seven months of fiction writing are occupied. (That’s the way I think about it. FULLY BOOKED. Like the hotel I used to work at, the shingle is out: No Occupancy. I get ideas and shuffle them into a file in Scrivener. No time for you now, come back later. Book your brain reservation early.)
I’m happy with the side gig I’ve recently made for myself, formatting the interior of print books for self-publishers. It’s bringing in a little cash, and while Lala’s still unemployed, that’s welcome money. Another thing I really like about it is that it’s not creative. At all. I plug manuscripts in. I format them. I collect money for doing it. It’s like doing the budget: I put numbers in and move them around, and it feels good. My word brain rests.
It’s nice to rest the brain. I’m still very bad at relaxing, and it’s perhaps possible I’ve gotten worse at it, now that I feel that all my time at home should be Productive, but I’m working on it. Later today, I promise to spin a little bit. Spinning while watching TV is something that never fails to soothe my spirit and brain.
What will you do today to soothe your brain? (And thanks, as always, for reading. You’re the reason I do this. YOU.)
(Also! I’m trying to be more active on Pinterest. Turns out that it’s a good place for resting the brain, too. Come join me?)
The Songbird’s Call
Darlingest reader,
I used to spend quite a bit of time in Bolinas, a tiny one-horse town just north of San Francisco. I fell in love with Smiley’s Schooner Hotel, and I have to admit that the saloon and cafe and hotel in Darling Bay are directly stolen from that delightful property. (Yep, writers are thieves, magpies collecting shiny real objects to tuck into our story nests. A couple of years ago, the property was for sale, and I still dream of buying it sometimes.)
One New Year’s Eve, we drove into town through a storm so big it closed the roads behind us, washing them out. The power went out all over town, and we ate that night in the cafe, lit by candlelight. The cook had worked overseas and was good at cooking on propane. They cranked up the Victrola near the front door, and our table was so merry that our laughter rung from the wooden beams overhead. That night, we rang the new year in while listening to the Whoreshoes play “Easy Like Saturday Night” in the saloon (which had a generator, so the amps and speakers worked, along with the many strands of twinkling white lights which shone as the only light in town).
We danced and whooped and reveled inside the old beach saloon, and it was perfect.
Another time, when a big group of us were given the large room over the saloon, we chose to sleep on an air mattress on the veranda that hung over the saloon’s front door. We fell asleep tipsy and happy, waking up just as happy but also quite damp in the early ocean fog which soaked our sleeping bags.
And last year, one of my sisters rented a cottage there for Christmas, and the three Herron girls converged on Bolinas with our loved ones. (Okay, yes. There are three sisters in my family, just like in this series. We all have good singing voices, and we harmonize beautifully. However, we’ve never been a famous country girl band, and the characters are not based on us, I swear. I could never do the love we share justice, though I often borrow its flavor to bring into my books.) We all splashed our way through the rain to the cafe where we ate huge quesadillas and drank bottomless cups of coffee.
Darling Bay is my way of honoring Bolinas’s spirit. There really is a town poet laureate. Rangy black dogs run on the sand, barking at sand pipers. Patchouli incense wafts over the town as fragrantly as the other burning weed that’s ever popular in small-town Northern California.
BUY LINKS FOR US/Canada (also available world-wide!
Amazon | Kobo | iBooks | Barnes & Noble | Google Play
BUY LINKS for Australia/New Zealand
Amazon Australia |iBooks AU | Google Australia | Booktopia | QBD | Angus & Robertson
I hope you like it. Please tell me what you think? It always means the world to me.
love,
Rachael
BONUS:
- Want to see what Darling Bay looks like? I’ve started a Pinterest board – find Bolinas photos there! (I found a picture of me singing there. I’d forgotten that entirely.)
- Are you a writer or think about trying to write? Subscribe to my podcast How Do You Write on iTunes or Stitcher!
New Days
This morning, I lamented on Twitter how I don’t blog as much anymore, and was immediately smacked upside the head with the obvious answer: I could just blog more.
The problem is a good one: I’m not blogging because I’m writing so much. This new life, my friends. It really suits me. I write books and essays, I tweet, I Facebook, I send my emails. I’m writing ALL the time, and it’s rad.
I was talking to some friends the other day, and I realized that I’m finally over not feeling worthy of this.
I do deserve this.
I’ve written so much, and I’ve written so hard, and I’ve dedicated my life to this. Now I get to sit around and work even harder, and I love it.
Let me tell you about my days now. You know I’m the kind of person who unpacks in a tent, I love routine that much. So it took me just a few weeks to set up my new routine, which, for the last four months (four MONTHS of being self-employed!), has brought me so much joy.
I wake up. Whenever I want. I don’t set alarms anymore. I usually get up between 6 and 8, but I wait till my brain clicks on and I want to get up.
I shower. Sometimes. Not always.
I do yoga. Mondays tend be brisk yoga, which leads to gentler yoga on Tuesday and Wednesday, longer sessions on Thursday and Friday again. I say long, but I don’t go over 30 minutes, because that seems long to me. Daily is the trick for my success.
Then I get a cup of coffee, and this is the big change: Without looking at my phone, Twitter, or email, I quickly go over the words I wrote the day before. I’m not really revising, because that comes later, but I’m reminding myself what I wrote. I make notes about the plot in my sentence outline. I futz with words if I feel like it. Then I turn to my Midori Traveler’s Notebook (oh, how I love thee) and I plot out the words I’m going to write that day.
These two things, the going over yesterday’s words and plotting out today’s, have made writing so much easier for me.
I’m hitting 3,000 words a day without pain. Okay, it doesn’t hurt very much. First drafts are always hard for me, no matter what, but this one, the first book I’m writing as a full-time writer, is flowing. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that when I was working the 48-hour shifts at the fire station, I spent my days off in various states of recovery and battling migraines. Add working extra 24-hour shifts on trades, and I don’t know how I got anything written at all. I really don’t. I could revise a little in the middle of the night there, but I couldn’t work on anything serious.
This writing full-time thing? Let me say it again. It’s a-freaking-mazing.
After I plot, I let myself Check Things. I respond to emails. I look at Facebook. I tweet. I have breakfast and play with dogs a bit.
Then, at about ten, I start writing, and I don’t stop until I’ve hit my word goal for the day, which has been 3000 lately. 3k is a brisk pace to step through a book, but not so fast I lose control of the reins. I do this either on my writing couch, or at Mills, depending on whether or not I have plans for the rest of the day. If I have to go out later, I might as well write at the college, which feels still feels like a magical place to write (I lost my cafe when their prices went up so high I couldn’t justify a coffee). And lately I realized that not only does the library allow drinks, but it has carrels with electricity, good for my old computer which only gets about an hour of use without needing to be plugged in. I love it there. And I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of that degree I earned there.
Then I’m FREE!
And by that, I mean I’m free to write other things. Like this blog. After I write this today, I’m going to work on an essay I’m writing for Clara Parkes (NAME DROPPING, yes, I just did that). After that, I’ll think about working on my new Patreon essay. I can easily keep myself working till 6pm, and often, till 9 or 10 at night. I’m really trying to be more balanced, though, so I try to walk away at 6. I fail most nights, but someday I’ll get it.
And I’ve been doing SO MUCH FUN STUFF.
I’m formatting book interiors, for those of you interested in going from a digital book to a print book. I’m good and I’m as cheap as you’ll find. (Did I mention Lala’s now unemployed? She’s unemployed. I should be panicking more, but I’m not. It’s just going to work out. It has to. But hey, if you know any front-end web developer jobs, let us know.)
I’m hosting two (TWO!) podcasts. My solo project is How Do You Write, and on it, I talk to working writers about their process (I love to think about process. See above.) And I’m cohosting The Business of Writing in Romance with Carolyn Jewel, and that’s so much fun, too. I’ve discovered that I really love doing the production for these. Lala says it’s just that I spent so many years being on a radio (fire/police radios) that I’m addicted to it now. (She might have something there.)
In fact, the Patreon essays on creativity are going to be a podcast, too. Interested? Get early access to them a month ahead of time by pledging as little as a buck an essay. I’m calling them Creativity Field Notes, because I really do feel as if I’m actively studying creativity, taking notes and reporting back.
Oh, my god, PLUS, I have a book coming out in two weeks. It’s getting awesome reviews on GoodReads, so add it to your list! Preorders available on all platforms. I love this series about sisters, small town, and love. Hopefully you will, too.
Best part about all this? I’ve been able to be present in my life. I see my friends. I hang out with my sisters. I walk the dogs. I am HERE.
I am so lucky. Yes. Absolutely. But it’s not just luck.
It was also damn hard work that got me here. I’m going to keep on working damn hard, and hell, if I need to get a part time job at some point, I’ll do that, no problem. But knowing that I can do this? That I can trust myself to work harder at making this work than anything else I’ve ever done leaves me feeling proud of myself.
That feels really freaking great.