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I’m thinking about pain a lot recently after triggering a couple of migraines, one that was possibly the worst one of my life. I have been doing a lot better! Lots! I’m averaging one every six weeks or so, which is so much better! But two 96-hour work weeks at the day job plus finishing a book to deadline makes a girl tired. You know?

So I’ve had a lot of time to sit with this particular pain and observe it. I got to the end of my medicinal arsenal with the bad one, and when the pain meds bottom out, there’s nothing to do BUT to sit with the pain (and by sit I mean lie perfectly still in the dark).

And this is what I did (when I could):

• Watched the pain
• Didn’t resist it
• Actively accepted it, without trying to hide from it

And THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED! (Seriously tempted to slap a click-bait title on this: You Won’t Believe The Fourth Thing on This List About Pain!)

Dude, the pain changed. For the first time in my life, I was able to make my brain do a sideways flip, and the pain literally turned into pleasure.

That sounds like some crazy BDSM whacky-slappy, right? IT WAS NOT THAT. But it freaked me right out, I tell you what.

You remember the dress? Yeah, I must have stared at this thing twenty times over the time of the furor it caused, only ever seeing blue and black. Then, on my phone, the image flipped and went white/gold, while my eyes were open and I was looking at it. The page did not reload. It was the same image.

I could literally feel the shift, a little click, in my brain.

Making the pain go from bad to good was like that. It felt, when I could hang on to it, as if I were scratching my itchy brain against something.

And then I could make the pain go all the way away. Well, to be clear, the pain was still there, but it didn’t feel good or bad, it just was. (This one I’ve actually been able to do for a while during migraines.)

Now, I’m no jedi (WHERE IS MY LIGHT SABER?). I could only do both of these things for maybe ten seconds at a time, at the very outside. Usually it was more like two or three seconds at a time. But I kept doing it, off and on, until I was out of migraine the next day.

And somehow, to know that by focusing I could get there did two things:

• It kept me interested.
• It kept me from despair.

Know what I attribute this ability to? Mindfulness. YEP THERE IT IS, THE HIPPIE SH*T YOU KNEW WAS COMING.

Blah meditation blah, the stuff works. I’ve touted Headspace before. I don’t use the app anymore, but it’s a great place to learn how (it’s pretty damn easy, actually, once the mystery is taken out and it’s just a how-to). The more I know how to focus (a gentle focus, like staring into the distance but knowing the clouds are moving) the better I get at it.

That’s a powerful motivator to keep practicing, I tell you what.

Oh! And in good news: GOODREADS GIVEAWAY of PACK UP THE MOON!

* Some pain I’m not going to talk about on the blog – one I love is sick. It’s pretty unbearable. Letting yourself sit with sadness helps. But only a little. And not enough, never enough. 

On Periscope today, Sonya Philip talked about mistakes and failures being problems to be solved and that they are not personal failings. (Of course, we’re talking about creativity here. If you critique poor old Aunt Helga’s fishnets in her hearing, that might be a mistake of gossip-location-choosing and maybe a failure to be compassionate. We’re talking about doing and learning your art.)

If you sew your dress together in the wrong order so that you can’t sew the shoulder seams, sure, that might be a technical failure, maybe. But it doesn’t mean you’re a failure, or even that you’re a bad seamstress. It means you’re working. Learning. Getting better.

If you write a book and fail to put in conflict (HELLO, MY SECOND NOVEL DRAFTS ONE THROUGH FIVE) it doesn’t make you a bad person or a failed writer. It just means you’re working.

A listener of Sonya’s Periscope mentioned that students love seeing instructors’ mistakes.

Now. You know I talk a big game about how utterly terrible my first drafts are. Every writer says that. I’ve seen other writers’ first drafts and they may have typos, but they’re fine, but I AM NOT LIKE THEM, MY DRAFTS ARE NOT FINE.

They are shit. (Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts spring to mind.)

I’m going to prove it. I’m going to plop down a piece of writing here to show you what a working, professional, well-reviewed writer’s early draft might look like.

Matty, eleven years old, boards the city bus his mother drives:

Today, Matty stuck his fist out, though, and that was nice. The fistbump. It was almost the same as a kiss, Fern thought. At least on these streets, it was. Matty had picked it up at school, and she’d liked it.

“How was your day?”

“Fine,” he said.

Matty always said fine. Even when his eyes were tired, even when they got that hunted look that meant someone had been picking on him at recess NOT THAT SMART NOT THAT GOOD AT ANYTHING BUT LIKES PLANTS? , he still said it was fine. He swung himself into the seat that Fern always kept for him by putting her coat over it. Funny, how there was obviously no one in the seat.

HOLY CATBOX – SOMEONE TAKE MY PEN AWAY I DON’T DESERVE TO HOLD IT

This is the same scene, final draft (shameless plug, The Ones Who Matter Most, April, preorder your copy today!)

“Hey, kiddo. You didn’t answer. Only twelve stops left. Wanna get pizza with me?” So I can break your perfect hopeful heart. While keeping her eyes on the road and her left hand on the wheel, Fern stuck her right fist out behind her.

“Okay.” Matty leaned forward and fist-bumped her. He’d picked it up from Fern’s brother, Diego, and on these streets, it was as good as a kiss. Matty, her baby boy who wasn’t a baby anymore. He was eleven, and someday he’d be a man, and he’d want to go by “Matias” instead of “darling Matty” or “mijo,” and then he probably wouldn’t let her kiss him good night, but Fern had this idea that she’d sneak up into his house on a ladder like the mother in I’ll Love You Forever and kiss him good night. Grown-up Matias would never know she’d been there, but maybe he’d sleep better because she had.

But all she had right now was this minute, and that’s just about all she had, so with her boy tucked safely in his corner seat, Fern made her coach dance.

Yep. That’s my voice. It takes me wandering through a quagmire of dreck, pushing through a draft just to get to my truck draft (the one that could be published if I got hit by a truck).

We keep going. YOU keep going. And we get, there, eventually, because we screw up. Not in spite of it. Fail harder, my friends.

Innovation is just someone getting tired of doing something one way and doing it another. – Sonya Philip

(And omg, Sonya has a pants pattern now.)

I love Romi. She is literally the reason I was finally brave enough to knit lace. She kept telling me over and over again, in that calm, beautiful voice of hers, “You can do it. It’s actually easy. You can totally do it.”

I’m so excited that I get to give away a copy of her new book, New Lace Knitting. Details after the interview!

Hi there!!

Oh, my goodness, you smell good. Did you just bake cookies or something? Because damn. I’m glad you’re here.

And because mama loves a list:

1. I was sick this week with a cruddy chest and head cold and it served to remind me for the millionth time that I’m so bad at slowing down. I gave myself two days in bed, which was AGONY but it was also kind of fun. I had to do it. I wasn’t in pain like I am with a migraine, so I just flopped around the bed and threw used Kleenex like soggy confetti and read. Enforced lazy reading! I can get behind that. As long as I don’t have to take NyQuil anytime soon. That stuff is awful and I will never forget the dream in which my normal face melted off and I was left with a FunkoPop one.

1. This list thing is jacking me up and I think every single one of these is going to be #1 which is making me laugh and is just fine. You’re number one, too.

1. While in bed, I read a book in one day, something I can’t remember doing in a long time. It was LEAVING TIME by Jodi Picoult. People. If you like deep feeling books about mothers and daughters, grab it. Plus, there’s a mystery. And a psychic. And gorgeous prose. AND ELEPHANTS. I loved it so much.

1. Now reading: Shonda Rhimes’s memoir, Year of Yes, and it has to be one of the funniest books I’ve read since I was twelve and busting a gut over Erma Bombeck (don’t judge. At twelve, my life’s goal was to be a suburban housewife with four children, a husband, and a talent for cooking soufflés. I reveled in the Ladies Home Journals I boosted from the wineries my parents visited). Anyway, Shonda deserves to rule Thursday night (she’s the creator of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal (WHICH I LOVE but am behind in), and How to Get Away with Murder (which I haven’t tried yet).  I’m finding myself rereading pages just to see how she fits all the funny in. It’s her voice, but it’s also her timing, all of which comes across even on a sterile e-reader screen.

1. There’s a lot of shit happening in this world. Hug someone you love. Kiss someone, too. Vote. Protest. Send letters. Talk to your friends. (Oh! Recently we saw W. Kamau Bell speak and, in answer to “What can allied white people do to try to help this broken, systemically racist country?” he said, “Talk to your white friends. Have difficult, awkward conversations. Then do it some more.” Keep talking, friends.)

1. Also: Fuck Trump, painting almost ONE THIRD of the world as less-than, other, and criminal.

1. Trello. It’s an app/website for project management, and it’s free, and it’s apparently everything I ever wanted. I love my Bullet Journal but my life with two full-time jobs and a part-time volunteer job has exploded past paper lists. My Moleskine journal croaks in fear when I enter my office. Trello makes it all pretty and I want to smooch it with all the smooches I have.

1. Except for some that I will save for The Smartyboo. <– WHY have I never called her this before, WHY?

1. Speaking of two jobs, I gotta say that I’ve been working two full-time gigs now since 2008. And that’s cool. Most of the time I’ve got the energy for both. I’ve been published since 2010, and I just turned in my tenth contracted book. 2016 will be a year of lots of things for you to read by me, should you happen to enjoy that sort of thing.

1. Speaking of writing, I love sending out my tinyletter email. This isn’t a plug for you to join it (though it would be great if you did) but I think I’m going to backdate and post my missives here (so now you don’t actually have to) because in them, I’m as real as I am here at the blog, and honestly, I use the blog as a way to remember things. Those emails feel important to me. I’m glad so many of you are getting so much out of them. I love your email responses. They’re like secret blog comments that only I can read. Delicious.

1. Patreon. Damn. Humbled. Thank you.

1. I’ve been knitting a lot, and I promise to show you things soon. It’s not even secret holiday knitting — I’m just too lazy to take photos of things in progress.

1. My sister Bethany (whose sweater is almost done) went with me to my work holiday party and we had a grand time. I’m so lucky to have all this: my family, my friends, my jobs. I have Issues with what we’re sometimes Obliged To Feel this time of year, but the fact that sometimes we notice things more–that’s just good, plain and simple.

* Affiliate links above because a girl has to buy ink. 

(If you’re on my subscriber list, you already got this email! Thanks for ALREADY BEING AWESOME!)

I write a lot (you might have noticed). I write all the time: on planes, trains, and I would write on automobiles, but I get car sick and the quality of the work would suffer along with my equilibrium. As you know, I write books! I write novels about families torn apart and repaired with hope. I write love stories about couples who can’t be together but who must (and do) find a way to love.

In the past, I’ve written essays, too. I wrote a whole book of them, in fact! A Life in Stitches is one of the books I’m most proud of, and it’s about living the knitting life. They’re true stories, told with my heart wide open.

I want to do more of this, and I want to do it BIGGER. I want to write essays about not just writing or knitting, but about how we manage to cobble together a creative life in one that’s already full of errands and family and jobs and worries. Essays on finding art inside the chaos of every day.

More writing takes more time, which is something I don’t have much of. So I’m asking for support to do it. ALL THE DETAILS ARE HERE at my Patreon page. There’s a short video of me talking about it, the nerves audible in my voice. You can read about the perks you can get (from receiving text messages from me, encouraging YOU to get going on your creative dreams, all the way up to one-on-one creativity coaching with me!).

And now that I’ve been Very Brave and posted this, I’m closing the computer and opening my notebook. In this noisy cafe, and in the long autumn morning light, I’m plotting the romance I’ll start tomorrow (oh, my gosh, next year is so happily book-heavy! The Darling Songbirds, the start of a new romance series, comes out in March! A women’s fiction novel, The Ones Who Matter Most, launches in April! The second romance in the new series will be out in September! <– this is the one I start tomorrow, so I’d better get moving on it).

I’d love it if you watched the short video on my Patreon page.

I love writing.
I love that you believe in me. It truly means the world to me.

with thanks and newly sharpened pencils,
Rachael