Rachael Herron

(R.H. Herron)

Podcast Archives

Ep. 256: How To Create Plot Twists

In this bonus miniepisode, Rachael talks about how to create plot twists for a good mystery, and what should I do if I’m about to miss a deadline? 

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Rachael Herron: 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 #256 of “How do you Write?” This is a bonus mini episode. This is well, it’s for everybody and that’s the cool thing about these bonus mini episodes. But if you would like to send me questions, if you would like me to be your coach, you can send me any question you want about anything. If it’s dirty, I’m not going to answer it. But other than that, there’s nothing off limits. Preferably about writing, but whatever semi questions, that’s at the $5 a month and up level over at patreon.com/Rachael and you can become part of that. And I really, it really means a lot. Plus, you get all the essays that I write and sometimes I record them in there just for patrons. So you can go look at that, but in the meantime, let us jump into the two questions that we have here. 

[00:01:06] All right. First this is from Kate, and Kate says, “Hi, Rachael! I love your podcast. And so excited to be a new patron and able to get your advice. Thank you, Kate. I am working on my first manuscript, a middle grade kid, detective story. Side note, that sounds awesome. I’m having trouble with plotting out the story because I am simultaneously learning to craft a compelling story and trying to figure out how to write a mystery with clues and red herrings and twists and turns. There’s lots of resources out there for plotting story structure, and I’m using those as a guide, but I need advice on how to write an interesting mystery and layer in the clues and red herrings. I have a basic idea of who done it, but the story doesn’t feel very mysterious. It all seems really obvious who the bad guy is. I have had trouble finishing drafts. I’ve gotten halfway through five drafts now and back to outlining again because my previous mystery elements just weren’t working. And my biggest goal now is to actually finish a draft. I know some clues can be layered in later, but big tweak, twists seem like I need to know before I start writing because they affect story structure so much. Any advice you have on writing mysteries? Any resources you’d like to recommend to learn more? So I have advice and I have a strange resource for you. 

[00:02:24] First of all, congratulations on working on this. That sounds super exciting and so fun. I love that you’re writing it. Most of all, congratulations on determining that you will finish this. That is the number one thing that you have to do in a mystery or a thriller or any kind of suspense novel in order to figure out how to hide the stuff that you want to hide. And I know that you’re expecting me to say this, everyone listening to this who has ever heard me speak on any topic at all is expecting me to say this, but it all can be finished in revision. And more than that, it has to be finished and fixed in revision, inside revision, you are not going to get the great ideas about how to hide twists that you haven’t even thought of yet until you write the whole book. The answers to those questions will come to you as you are writing the crappy first draft. And the crappy first draft is the one that telegraphs to the entire world who the killer or the bad guy is for this. I’m not sure if you have a killer and, why I hope you do. That’d be fun. Ignore that. You can have one or not have one, but the person who did it, who did the bad thing, your first draft will have it pointed out like they’re lit up in neon. That is completely normal. I think I have told this story recently and I can’t remember where I told it, so excuse me, if I just told it on the podcast last week, but – I think it was in an interview. So you haven’t heard it yet. 

[00:04:04] For Hush Little Baby, the thriller that just came out. I wrote a full synopsis, a full treatment of everything that happened in it. And my agent went over it with me. My editor went over it with me, everyone approved, we all signed off on it. This was a great story. And it was going to be a complete mystery as to who the person was, who was the bad guy in this book. I wrote it, I wrote the first draft and it was the worst thing ever. And I wrote it to the synopsis that had been approved. And none of us, the three of us who are all professionals in the industry had not seen in the synopsis that what I was writing was an aero to the person who was the bad guy. It didn’t have the twists that I came up with after I wrote the first draft and knew what I was wrestling with. The final version had those twists, the final version had that person so well hid that I haven’t talked to anybody who figured it out. Early or easily, or at all when reading that book. But it took writing a terrible, terrible first draft that professionals had signed off on as a good idea. It was not a good idea.

[00:05:20] It was a bad idea. It was a bad draft. It was a terrible draft. I had to take it completely apart, put it back together again with a new twist, new surprises. I actually changed the person who it was after the book was written and believe it or not, I changed everything. And I had to, because I wrote, I wrote it badly. Our brains are not smart enough to come up with big twists, big surprises when we’re just sitting at our desk and plotting, we have to be writing the book. We have to be really, learning from the book that we want to write in order to come up with that kind of brilliant, surprising, you think of it in the shower after you spent an hour working on it that day. You have to write the book first. So getting to the end of this crappy first draft, that’s all you need to do and then start revising. And then you will be figuring out what to do, but as to resources, here’s the best resource possible. You can read all the books you want. There’s a ton of ’em out there. Those have never helped me. What has helped me with writing? Suspense fiction has been plot lunches with other writers. And what I mean by that, is it doesn’t have to be a lunch. It doesn’t have to- you don’t have to be in person. You can do this over zoom, but everybody who’s listening to this podcast needs a community of writers around them, that you know, personally and who know what you’re working on. Please don’t critique your work with them ever. You know how I feel about that first drafts and even second drafts are too or just too fragile to share with people.

[Read more…] about Ep. 256: How To Create Plot Twists

Ep. 255: Lisa Scottoline on How To Demystify Writing

Lisa Scottoline is the #1 bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of thirty-three novels. She has over thirty million copies of her books in print in the United States and has been published in thirty-five countries. Scottoline also writes a weekly column with her daughter, Francesca Serritella, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has been adapted into a series of memoirs. She has served as President of the Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, “Justice in Fiction,” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area. Eternal is her most recent novel. Set in Rome, it asserts that what war destroys, only love can heal.

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.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #255 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So thrilled that you are here with me today, I really, really am. I always am, but especially today, because I am talking to Lisa Scottoline. And let me tell you, I worship this woman, I did before we spoke. And then it was really hard to get our schedules to align, when her publicist reached out to me and, but I was determined. So I turned into that annoying pest, who was like, can we try again? Can we try again? It took months to get this interview and it has been months since I recorded it, since we’ve been moving and everything. But I am as excited about it as the day we spoke, she has, it’s such a dynamism and such an incredible way of looking at writing and how to satisfy the market that you create for your writing. And she kind of demystifies some aspects of writing, and I literally could have talked to her all day. So you are going to love that. 

[00:01:21] What’s been going on around here? Still in New Zealand, still in the same house, outside the town of Russell, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Like I said last week, we are on this little inlet in the bay of islands. There are four houses on the inlet and only one of them has a person living in it. Luckily, he’s next door and he also has a puppy. So we get to see a puppy sometimes. We get to play with a puppy and the puppy is darling. It’s a little border Collie-Springer-Spaniel mix named Fur. But otherwise, there’s no one around, we don’t really talk to Fur’s owner either, we just kind of wave at him. The only really object we’ve been talking to that is not each other is Fur. I have found, in captivity, that I really, really love long walks. And this is something I knew about myself, but where we lived in Oakland before for 15 years, there was no place to walk. I could walk, I could go down this one street and then up another street, and then I could kind of walk in circles around these blocks, but there were just a lot of places in my neighborhood that were not at all conducive to safe walking and I couldn’t. And I just can’t stand the idea of driving somewhere to go walk. And right now, legally in New Zealand, you can’t drive somewhere to go walk.  But here, I can just leave the house. We have this bush walk, if you’re looking at the YouTube video, there’s these stairs, you can see behind me. It goes straight up through the bush, just as big hill that we’re on the other side of, up to the main road. And then I just walk out on the main road. Most days that I walk, I don’t even see another car, let alone a person. I did see a person once and they had a dog named Marshmallow. Again, I don’t know the person’s name, don’t care, but the dog’s name was Marshmallow and she was adorable. And I’ve been taking these long walks in the middle of my workday. 

[00:03:14] I think I mentioned last week that I have this new improved schedule that allows me to take this long walk and a long lunch and 30 minutes to read in the middle of the day. And it’s just been feeling pretty wonderful, which is good because Auckland and North of Auckland, which is where we are, we’re in the Northland, has been put on, has, is going to remain on level four lockdown, the highest lockdown there is for at least the next two weeks. South of Auckland, they’re hoping to go to level three, which is the point at which restaurants can open and you can get takeout. So I’m very happy for the rest of New Zealand starting on Tuesday, that there’ll be able to get takeout again. That’s probably the thing I missed the most on lockdown. I can’t remember if I mentioned this last week, but it’s really interesting. We’re not spending any money except on rent and groceries, on our Airbnb rent and groceries. We cannot order anything online because we don’t have an address here. This house doesn’t have an address. We cannot go to restaurants, they’re all closed. We have no other bills, which is an amazing feeling. We have our cell phone bill and that is it. We paid cash for the car. We were paying rent to the Airbnb and we have our cell phone bill. And that’s pretty, it was really low because it’s cheap here and that’s it. That’s all we’re paying for. 

[00:04:36] So that’s been kind of nice and, and yeah, and we’re stuck legally. We cannot leave this house for at least another couple of weeks. And I have to say, that while my heart is broken, that New Zealand is struggling with this, and it is very expensive of the country. I read somewhere that it costs like a billion dollars a day to shut down, I can’t quite believe that. And I did see it on Twitter and it was not from, it was just from a person saying that to me, I have not researched that number, but it does cost New Zealand so much money to shut down like this, to lockdown like this at such a severe level. But that is how they got rid of COVID the first time they had it, and that’s why we’re doing it now. And the cool thing about it is that when they got rid of COVID the first time, and then had a more than a year of not having COVID, their economy rebounded completely to the place it was before. They didn’t have any kind of recession. They didn’t have any job loss over the long-term. It all came back. So, that’s hopefully what this nation is doing right now. And I’m really proud of it and I’m happy to be part of it. And there’s a tiny part of me that says, Oh, my gosh, Rachael, you’re so, no, there’s a huge part of me that says, oh my gosh, Rachael, you’re so lucky. And there’s a tiny part of me that says, should you be feeling this much joy and being able to walk by the ocean every day for weeks? And that tiny voice I would like to say, yes, it is okay that I feel joy about that. That is marvelous. How lucky are we to be in this position, in this amazing place? So, just feeling a lot of gratitude as usual. 

[00:06:17] Also, I’ve been getting my work done, people. I’m 18,000 words into the 90 Days to Done book. And it’s so fun to write, sometimes nonfiction, especially writing about craft, writing about writing. It doesn’t feel like writing to me. It just feels like play. Fiction is often hard for me. Memoir is often hard for me. Writing is just hard, period. It’s hard work. But writing about craft? So it’s just so yummy. I’m loving that. Really quickly, quick thanks to new patrons, Louisa Brooke Holland. I have Hollins and my family and my New Zealand family actually. So thank you, Louisa and Nene Cohen. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining over at Patreon and becoming a supporter of me and of the show. It means I get to write those essays about, right now, I’m writing about moving to New Zealand and there’s a new essay going to come out probably within a week or so on entering New Zealand for a week and then exiting New Zealand into the lockdown because it really does feel like we’re staying at a beach house in Mendocino. We are not interacting with new Zealanders except once a week, when one of us goes to get groceries at the grocery store. Otherwise, we could be anywhere. So did we move? I saw California coil on my walk the other day. That was like, did we move? Did we actually do it? Yes, we did. We also, I’ve seen so many birds, the Eastern Rosella, it looks like this little tiny parrot wearing a leopard print cape. Even if you’re not into birds, look up the Eastern Rosella, R-O-S-E-L-L-A, because it is the cutest thing!

[00:08:05] Okay, I’m not going to burn out on you. We’re going to talk about writing and we’re going to talk about it with Lisa Scottoline, and you are going to love her as much as I do. Please enjoy this interview and may it inspire perhaps a 15-minute or so burst of writing on your part. If you’re getting none done, if you’re getting a little done an extra 15 minutes, an extra 30 minutes, those little minutes, add up. I’m 18,000 words in. I started this book a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve just been doing three or four, 25-minute Pomodoros a day, less than two hours of writing. That’s what can happen when we reliably sit down and do our work. So, it’s not good work. It’s not great work. It’s actually bad work. It’s going to require lot of revision, but it’s words on a page and that’s our only goal. So let’s listen to Lisa talk about that and happy writing, my friends. 

[00:08:58] Do you wonder why you’re not getting your creative work done? Do you make a plan to write and then fail to follow through again? Well, my sweet friend, maybe you’d get a lot out of my Patreon. Each month, I write an essay on living your creative life as a creative person, which is way different than living as a person who binges Netflix 20 hours a week and I have lived both of those ways, so I know. You can get each essay and access to the whole back catalog of them for just a dollar a month, which is an amount that really truly helps support me at this here, writing desk. If you pledge at the $3 level, you’ll get motivating texts from me that you can respond to, and if you pledge at the $5 a month level, you get to ask me questions about your creative life that I’ll answer in the mini episodes. So basically, I’m your mini coach. Go to patreon.com/Rachael R-A-C-H-A-E-L, to get these perks and more. And thank you so much!

[00:09:57] Rachael Herron: Well, I could not be more thrilled to welcome to the show today, Lisa Scottoline. Hi, Lisa!

[00:10:02] Lisa Scottoline: Hello, thank you for having me. I’m so thrilled. 

[00:10:05] Rachael Herron: I have been looking forward to this for literally months. 

[00:10:09] Lisa Scottoline: Well, I’m a fan of yours as I just told you. So this is just super and I’d love to, I really want to encourage people to write. So this is great to be talking in this way and hopefully we’ll be encouraging some people and get some new voices out there!

[00:10:21] Rachael Herron: Absolutely! Oh, you’re exactly the perfect person to be on the show.

[00:10:25] Lisa Scottoline: I am the perfect person! I keep telling everybody that. 

[00:10:30] Rachael Herron: Let me give an introduction for this perfect person because she is.

[00:10:33] Lisa Scottoline: Go ahead.

[00:10:34] Rachael Herron: Lisa Scottoline is the #1 bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of thirty-three novels. She has over thirty million copies of her books in print in the United States and has been published in thirty-five countries. Scottoline also writes a weekly column with her daughter, Francesca Serritella, for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which has been adapted into a series of memoirs. She has served as President of the Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, “Justice in Fiction,” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. And she lives in the Philadelphia area. Eternal is her most recent novel. Set in Rome, it asserts that what war destroys, only love can heal. And I have got to say, so. I have a few things to say. And then I’m just going to ask you so many questions.

[00:11:19] Lisa Scottoline: Go right ahead. Ask me anything. Poke away.

 [00:11:22] Rachael Herron: Number one. Again, thank you for that blurb that you gave for Hush Little Baby. It-

[00:11:28] Lisa Scottoline: It’s terrific book and you deserve it. 

[00:11:30] Rachael Herron: Thank you. Thank you. I’ll just say that. Thank you. Number two, Eternal. Holy cow! So Rome is one of my favorite cities in the world. Venice is my favourite city, but Rome, 

[00:11:41] Lisa Scottoline: Venice is super cool. Agree, agree.

[00:11:43] Rachael Herron: You just can’t, you just can’t not love.

[00:11:44] Lisa Scottoline: I know, I know, but kind of Leon has Venice, so I gotta get. 

[00:11:47] Rachael Herron: She sure does love Venice. But, Rome is one of those places that my mother actually taught me to fall in love with. I, we were there and I always kind of thought of Rome as a little bit dirty, a little rough around the edges. And we saw it that way, but in the most incredible way that on every level of every surface in Rome, there is history built in and you captured that so incredibly well.

[00:12:12] Lisa Scottoline: Thank you, thank you. Well, I really wanted to, and Rome is dirty on every surface. I love it! You got to love the grit, man. You can’t walk there in sandals because like you’re wearing Roman sandals and then you filth all over your toes, but I kinda love it. It’s, everything about it is so real deal. And I really wanted to capture that as a backdrop in Eternal, as you know, it’s a love story against the Italian fascism. So, but that’s about the book, but yes. 

[00:12:38] Rachael Herron: So how did you get to know Rome so well? Is it a place that you’ve lived for a long time and go back and forth through? Or did you?

[00:12:45] Lisa Scottoline: It was more than I knew about. I love it. I’m Italian-American. I’ve been there a couple of times. And when I found that about the sort of true life event that I felt really, 

[00:12:53] Rachael Herron: I don’t know anything about 

[00:12:55] Lisa Scottoline: I didn’t know anything about it either! And when I learned that I was like, this is like a story that needs to be told. And then I, for 30 years, it was eating me up. And, the Italian Holocaust I learned about in college. And then I said, I gotta write about this someday. So it was really more that the story needed to be told and that occurred in Rome which, you know, besides being the seed of Roman Catholicism is also home to the oldest, continuously existing Jewish community in Western civilization. I was like, okay, girl, you’re going to try to write historical fiction now. Go!

[Read more…] about Ep. 255: Lisa Scottoline on How To Demystify Writing

Ep. 254: Laura Hankin on How to Use Your Favorite Writing to Inspire Your Own

Laura Hankin is the author of Happy & You Know It. She has written for publications like McSweeney’s and HuffPost, while her musical comedy has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Funny or Die. She splits her time between NYC, where she has performed off-Broadway and acted onscreen, and Washington D.C., where she has sung to far too many babies. A Special Place for Women is her most recent release. 

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 #254 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. So glad you are here with me today, as we talk to Laura Hankin and kind of repurposing and looking at your own favorite writing in order to inspire your own. And even though it’s been a minute since I talked to her, these interviews are kind of stacked behind me. It was so enjoyable to talk to her. And I know that you’re going to enjoy this interview. So where am I, if you’re looking at me on the YouTube, I am holding the microphone because I cannot make my microphone stand work at this particular desk or I am. So I look like I’m about to break into song, which I promise you I will not, but I am excited to be able to use good audio again. Hopefully, this is sounding better than some of the past ones have sounded when I’ve been in some strange places, still in a strange place in a very strange place, indeed. I am in a Russell, New Zealand. I am not in a bathroom. I’m not locked in a cabinet somewhere. I’m in a gorgeous house, a big house. That’s on the water of the bay of islands. Well, let me tell you a little bit about it. 

[00:01:32] So this place is way out of our budget, way, way, way out of our budget. But the owners of this house also had a little apartment in the town of Russell and it looked gorgeous. It was within our price range. It had a hot tub, but when I asked the owner, if it had good wifi, because both my wife and I need good wifi, especially my wife, to do our work. He said, no, actually it doesn’t. And we haven’t gotten fiber there yet, but I do have a house that’s on the beach and nobody’s in it because there are no tourists who are allowed to enter New Zealand for the last year and a half. So no one’s in it. Why don’t you have it for the same price? So we have this gorgeous house on the water. It has no address. He just told us where to enter the beach, where to drive down onto the beach and turn left. There are five houses on this little Cove, where the fourth house or the one with the green roof. And you can only get to it when it is low enough tide to drive to otherwise, you can walk to it from the car park, which is not far away. And we tend to leave the car in the car park because who knows when we might want to use the car. However, what I will say is really using the car way less than we thought we would. We arrived last week. We had a couple of delicate days of walking the coast and we went and did some tours in Russell. We went to the old printery where the first books in New Zealand were ever printed. And we went to the white tangy treaty grounds. We did some touristy stuff, which feels weird again when you’re the only tourist around and then on Tuesday, right after I’d gone to the doctor to ascertain that, yes, I had broken two bones in my foot a month ago, right before we left that I had been completely ignoring.

[00:03:21] And which apparently I only need to continue ignoring, which I was hoping was true. Right after I went to the doctor, we were alerted to the first case of COVID in the country, in the community for a very long time. New Zealand shutdown in 2020 for about eight weeks. And it’s been open since then. They shut it down. They didn’t let people move around. And they took care of it. So this community case was a very big deal and they shut the country down that day. They locked it down. We were at lockdown level four, and for people who have not been at levels like America, level four, mean to don’t do crap. You do not do crap. Every business has shut down except for essential services like supermarkets, gas stations and doctors, hospitals, testing sites, those kinds of places. It’s not like in the United States when we’re talking about essential workers, it seems like that there were a lot of essential workers here, there are fewer. It’s not like there are any restaurants that are open. There’s no takeout food. There’s no cafes. There’s no nothing. There’s just the grocery store, just the gas station. And you are not allowed to move. You are not allowed to drive. You’re not allowed to walk out to someplace unless you are going to the grocery store or to the doctor. Other than that, you can walk in your area, safely distance from others. But you must stay in your bubble. You must not drive anywhere. You can’t cross regions. You can’t, you’re really locked down. They’re serious about eradicating this. And indeed, this was Tuesday and we got the first case and by Friday, it was a Delta case. It came in from New South Wales, Australia, by Friday. We have 32 cases now in the country. So it’s kind of a panic crisis moment. We’re expecting more, a hundred or 200 cases to show up because, some of the vector sites were one was a church. One was a bar. Most of the people who have it are in their twenties and thirties, and they were all hanging out and going out late and doing stuff, which is why they got around so much.

[00:05:31] So we are locked down. We are unable to move. We are unable to go to our next Airbnb place. And no one is available, no one is able to come to this Airbnb place. So the host just said as he has to say, but he was awesome. Said stay as long as you like. So we are here for the duration of the lockdown, at least while we’re on level four and maybe when we’re in level three, I’ve done a bunch of reading about driving, being able to drive during level three. And I’m not quite sure of the things. This is a little bit of a splurge for us still. A little bit higher than we wanted to pay, even though it’s not at its actual rate. So I would like to move at some point just to save a little money, but in the meantime, the house, all the windows, just look out on the water, this particular bedroom that I’m recording in is the only room I’ve been in without a view. When I’m in the bathroom, I’m looking at the empty moored sail boats on the water. We’re watching birds. There’s nothing else to watch. There’s nobody who comes on our beach. There’s a guy who lives next door and he has a little border Collie slash Springer spaniel puppy. So we get to watch him walk and that’s about it. We’ve, I’ve seen one woman walking on the beach. I think she lives further down the road and that’s it. We are alone here and we can’t go anywhere. So it’s been honestly a delic. It delic, I wish that this was not happening. This is a terrible thing that is happening, but where we got stuck is heaven and I am so freaking grateful that we get to do this. So this is the end of a workweek as I’m recording this, I forgot to release this yesterday because time zones and days have me all messed up. So I apologize for that. But that means that at the end of today, it’s our weekend and we can’t go be touristy. We can’t drive around and look at things.

[00:07:30] We are not even supposed to kayak. We have kayaks here and the water’s really still, but you’re not supposed to boat or hike or do anything that may bring emergency services to you that may, that you may need emergency services to get out of. So even though I have been kayaking here before the lockdown, I don’t think I’m going to do it. Cause I feel morally torn about that. I definitely, who plans on needing emergency services. That’s the thing. If I go out on the water, I’m not planning on needing emergency services. I’ve kayaked a million times, but yeah, so we’re walking, we’re walking around the bay and looking at the things that the tide washes up and throwing clams that are tightly closed back into the water. The shores are just covered with clams and birds who eat the clams. And I dunno, maybe you can hear my voice that I’m just tickled and delighted and happy to be in such a safe and gorgeous location. I’m trying to pretend while we’re here, that we live here, that this is my house and I’m doing a really good job of it.

[00:08:38] So, what else has been going on? I had been writing every day, I came up with a new way, you know, I love a new way to me, of keeping track of if I’m getting stuff done, because with all the upset and turmoil and moving and stuff that we’ve been doing, it’s been easy for me to let days go without getting things done that I really need to do, like connecting with the people that I love, like meditation, like getting my deep work done, like getting work done on my secondary project. So I made myself a little chart. And I have all these boxes I can fill in during the day and I get a hundred points per box. And so I put this in my email that I sent out yesterday. So if you’re not on my email list, you want to be on that. You can go to RachaelHerron.com/Write and then I can send you the example of what this looks like, but I put some interesting things on there on my list of things that I want to do, that I get a hundred points for. I get a hundred points if I spend 30 minutes a day reading a book for pleasure during my work day. And by knowing that I can so easily get a hundred points, I have been doing it. I have been leaving work to go read on the couch, even though to me, it feels like you’re not getting enough done. You’re not checking off the to-do list. That is really important for me to do, I get a hundred points if I stopped working by 5:00 PM. Guess what has been making me close my computer at 4:59? I wanted those hundred points. So I stopped working. I don’t know. It’s been really awesome. So I’ve been getting a ton done and also relaxing cause there’s really nothing else to do.

[00:10:11] So that is what has been going on around here. Kind of a lot of things and also nothing. So, I just wanted to give a quick “Thank you” to new patrons, Nikki Woolfolk. Hello, Nik! Marie and Claire both edited their pledge up. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much. It always makes me feel like a million dollars when you do that. So thank you to Claire Cutler and Marie. And a bumper crop of Jennifer’s came in this morning, Jennifer Flanker and Jennifer Zeitler. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I hope that you enjoy the essays that I’m writing right now about this big move and this big change. And yes, there will be one on lockdown and how different it feels to be here under a government that really, really cares about its residents, and does the right thing to protect them and to get business back on track. New Zealand lost a ton of money. There’s a technical financial way to do that. They went into great financial distress when they shut down for eight weeks, this last time. And they gained up all of it. All of the money back. On the very first day of this new lockdown, they already had the business forms in place for companies who could apply to pay their employees. The very first day, everything is in place here and it, it made me cry the first day when just Cindy, the prime minister, went on the news. She goes on the news every day. Every single day at 1:00 PM and talks to the nation and takes all the questions. And if she doesn’t have an answer, she comes back the next day with the answer. If she didn’t have it the day before she goes on there with her health minister and they just talk every day to the nation, it made me cry to see this happened with so much concern and so much care and people doing this for the right reasons, shutting down for the right reasons in order to save lives. 

[00:12:07] And it just makes me feel like I did the right thing by moving here. And I’m so happy and privileged, and I feel so patriotic to my country of New Zealand when something like this happens when I listened to her. So that’s been awesome. That’s been truly awesome. So let us jump into the interview now. I know that you’re going to enjoy this one. And in the meantime, I hope that you are getting even a little bit of writing done. A little bit every day adds up. And interestingly, if you do 10 minutes a day, and 15 minutes tomorrow, the next day you’re probably want to spend 20 minutes on it. It’s a, it’s pretty awesome how it grows. So do that, come back, find me online, tell me what you’re up to. I just glanced back at the video. If you never watched me on YouTube, don’t worry about it. But if you are watching on YouTube, the light in here is very strange. So anyway, happy writing to you all, I’m so glad to be in contact with you and to be part of your writing community, it means so much to me that you let me in to your ears and you let me talk to you and you let me talk to you about writing and about life and about how all of this feeds and informs our writing. So keep it up. Happy writing. We’ll talk soon. 

[00:13:23] 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. 

[00:13:41] Rachael Herron: All right. Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show today, Laura Hankin. Hello, Laura!

[00:13:45] Laura Hankin:  Hi! Thank you for having me. 

[00:13:47] Rachael Herron: I’m thrilled to have you, let me give you a little bit of an introduction here. Laura Hankin is the author of Happy & You Know It, and she has written for publications like McSweeney’s and HuffPost, while her musical comedy has been featured in the New York Times, The Washington Post and Funny or Die. She splits her time between New York City, where she has performed off-Broadway and acted onscreen, and Washington D.C., where she has sung to far too many babies. A Special Place for Women is her most recent release. And I have just got to tell you how much I enjoyed your book. I had a recent complaint from somebody who’s like, Rachael, we never believe you because you always enjoy people’s books. But the thing is I don’t interview people whose books I don’t love. But that’s how it goes. And yours was just such a treat. And I saw somewhere, I can’t remember where I saw it. But it was like, maybe you said it somewhere now, what I’m saying? Like it was kind of almost, it touches on like a mashup of secret history meets practical magic, which I couldn’t let go of like two of my favorite books of all time. And you’re so funny and it’s so, but yet I’m settling in spooky and all of those things. So I just can’t recommend A Special Place for Women more. And I would love to talk to you about the writing of it and when, so this is show for writers about process. How do you write on a daily basis?

[00:15:17] Laura Hankin: Okay, well, there’s, you know, my ideal writing in a day and there’s like, what actually happened.

[00:15:24] Rachael Herron: I would love to hear about both. Yeah. Great. 

[00:15:28] Laura Hankin: So yeah, on a good writing day, I wake up in the morning, I like don’t look at my phone too much. I go for a nice long walk with a thermos of coffee. I leave my phone at home for it and so all I do is just like think my thoughts and get a little bored, and then I come, yeah. I mean, I know it’s like a luxury to also have the time and space to do that, but then I come back and I try to turn off my internet and write for the rest of the morning with a few wi-fi breaks and I aim to get out about a thousand words a day that way. And recently I’ve been trying to do it like Monday through Friday and then do whatever other stuff I have to do in the afternoon. And then actually let myself have weekends because, you know, as a writer, it can be very easy to be like, I need to write all the time, otherwise, what am I doing? 

[00:16:18] Rachael Herron: Yeah. I kind of binged between like writing none of the time and then writing all the time to deadline. So, and thousand words a day, five days a week is just sounds perfect. So what is the actual writing look like? 

[00:16:31] Laura Hankin: If I’m blocked for whatever reason or if there’s something else going on in my life, that’s taking a lot of my focus, sometimes it’s more like 200 words in a day and they’re really just kind of outlining or like free writing. And then occasionally the moments that I love the most are when I get like go away for a few days when I am able to make my schedule work in this way, where I can get like a cheap, cheap Airbnb or stay at a friend’s or something like that. And just know that for two or three days, my job is to write as much as I possibly can. And that’s when I like knock-out, you know, 7,000 words and a few days, and be like, I am a writing god!

[00:17:20] Rachael Herron: Have you had the chance to get away during the pandemic? Have you been able to sneak away a few times or? 

[00:17:25] Laura Hankin: I have, I found it a couple of really remote Airbnbs and been able to just like go to the country and not really see anybody and do that and I will say, you know, it’s interesting because I have written as my full-time job, like that’s what I’m doing now. And I feel very, very lucky to have that. And then I’ve also written while working a bunch of day jobs and had to like fit it all in there and it’s a lot tougher that way. 

[Read more…] about Ep. 254: Laura Hankin on How to Use Your Favorite Writing to Inspire Your Own

Ep. 253: Catriona Turner On How to Write the Miraculous in the Everyday

Catriona Turner is a writer and editor currently living in Esbjerg, Denmark. A veteran of six international moves since leaving Scotland 12 years ago, she’s also lived with her family in France, Uganda, and the Republic of Congo. At her website, The Frustrated Nester, she writes about Danish living, travel, and the expat life. She has contributed a regular column to a magazine for internationals in Denmark, and her writing has featured in anthologies about international living. She also works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader. With a couple of to-be-completed novels on the shelf, she’s currently working on a memoir, due for publication in early 2022, while preparing for her family’s next big move.

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.

[00:00:15] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #253 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I am so pleased you’re with me here today, because today we are talking to Catriona Turner, who is a friend of mine, but she is also an amazing editor and she is a writer and she is basically a professional expat. So in this interview, you will hear me pick her brain about moving as well as writing. And I have to say that I was just handling some of her edits that she did for a rereleased book that I’m working on right now. And she’s just brilliant. She really, really is. She’s completely delightful. And in this episode, we talk about looking for the everyday in the miraculous-ness of writing, and I know that you are going to enjoy it.

[00:01:09] So, before we get into that, what’s going on around here? Well, so goddamn much. Holy crap! We’re out of MIQ, which was managed isolation/quarantine. We are out of it, and we are, I’m recording this on Friday, we have been living in Auckland for four days since Monday, and this is temporary. Actually, we leave on Sunday to go up north to a place called Russel where apparently we’re going to have a house which you can’t always drive to. You can only drive to it when it is low tide. So if it is high tide, you got to leave your car at the car park and perhaps wade through the ocean water to get to the house. So that’s going to be super cool and exciting. And I can’t wait to tell you about that, but that’s not right now. Right now, is Auckland. We have an apartment pretty, right between the central business district in Ponsonby. I’ve got a great view of the sky tower from our apartment, and we have just been doing so much stuff. We bought a car. In order to buy a car, we needed to set up a bank account. In order to set up a bank account, we had to do a million different things.  It’s difficult to do any of these things, to do any of this red tape stuff when you don’t have an address. And when you don’t plan on having an address for a long time, how do you get a social security number? or here, they are known as IRD numbers. How do you get that without a permanent address? What you do is you talk the bank into accepting your old address, even though you don’t own that home anymore, and you are above board and you tell everybody what you’re doing. In the states, I can pretty much predict that the, somebody in those government official entity positions would say, nope, sorry, can’t do it. Here, they’re like, oh, okay, let’s make it work. If we do this and this, and then you cross off this and then I pull this for you, can you wait for 10 minutes? I’m going to go handle this. Okay. I’m back with you. I fixed it. That’s how new Zealanders handle things and it’s been wonderful and exciting. But it has just been a lot, a lot, a lot, and I’m not tired, I’m excited. 

[00:03:32] Every day, we get out and walk around. As soon as I record this, we’re going to go walk down to the promenade on the water and explore that area and it’s just been pretty great. Last night, it was for the first time in months, I cooked a meal in the kitchen that we have here. We have been subsisting on takeout before we moved. And then when we were in quarantine, they delivered our meals to us three times a day. So we didn’t even have to think about it. We just had to eat as often as possible, which was good and bad. But last night, I made a gorgeous salmon with radishes and peas in a Miso Dijon, caper sauce, lots of butter and it was delicious. Also, I’m very much enjoying grazing, again, you know, for breakfast might be a handful of peanuts and an apple kind of thing, rather than having a full meal delivered to you three times a day. And I’m one of those people who I just, it’s very hard for me to throw out a whole meal, a hot meal. So, it’s kind of nice not to have to eat that often, to be very honest.

[00:04:37] What else? Oh, in terms of work, it’s been great. I’ve been getting stuff done. I have picked the next project that I am really focused on. And, I don’t know if I’ve said it on the air yet, but I am writing the book, 90 Days to Done, based on the class I teach. My goal is to have eventually a book, at a book price, and then a walk yourself through, a do it yourself, evergreen course at an evergreen course price. And then my hold you by the hand and take you through it, which is what I do nowadays at the higher price, so all three price points in the market for 90 Days to Done because I love teaching it. And I love nothing more than watching people finish their books, especially people who are finishing their books for the very first time and I want to help more people do that. So that is what I am focusing on right now. Hopefully get the first draft done in a couple of months. I could probably do it faster, but I don’t want to. We are in New Zealand to try to embrace some of their famous work-life balance and it is almost 3:30, so my day’s almost over. Cause that’s when I’m trying to finish right now, I don’t think I’m going to finish in the next two minutes. I’ll still have to upload this thing, but you know, I’m trying to not work until six and seven at night, which is what I did in the states. And I don’t want to do that here.

[00:05:58] So, it’s been quite great. I love it. And it just feels good. It feels like the right choice and that is a huge relief and I’m sure that we will have ups and downs, times that we will think what the hell did we do. But right now we’re both really enjoying it. I want to shout out and quickly thank new patrons. Thank you to Lynette Carter and Elizabeth Adams and Isabel Peringue. I’m guessing on that name, beautiful. And Kate Havroq, thank you so much, you all for joining over at patreon.com/Rachael. Over there, you can get all the essays that I’ve written about living your creative life and right now I’m writing about doing something big, like making a move like this. And also, if you’re at the $5 level, which Kate came in at, then you get me for a mini coach, Kate. Thank you for your question. And I will be getting to that very soon. So, let’s jump into the interview with Katrina, cause it’s a little longer than most because I adore her. And you will too. She is delightful. Plus, she’s got that incredible accent. So please enjoy, please do your writing.  I got a couple emails this week from people who say, okay, Rachael, you always want me to email you and tell you how I’m doing with my writing and here I’m doing it. And I love them. You can always reach out to me, Rachael, at RachaelHerron.com. You got to spell it right, but that’s the only bar, that’s the only barrier to entry. Please email me, tell me how your writing is going. Please be kind to yourself, be gentle to yourself. If you’re not writing, forgive yourself for every moment you’ve ever not written in your whole entire life. Forgive yourself right now. It’s all fine. It’s exactly right. It’s you’re in exactly the right place where you are supposed to be. And why don’t you fit in 10 or 15 minutes tonight or tomorrow morning? Don’t put it off anymore. Do a little bit of it. And then email me, tell me how it went. Okay. I know I’m speaking quickly because, got to get off the clock. Okay. Enjoy the interview, my friends, and we’ll talk soon. 

[00:07:54] 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.

[00:08:26] Rachael Herron: Okay. Well, I could not be more pleased today to welcome to the show, my friend, Catriona Turner. Hello, Catriona!

[00:08:33] Catriona Turner: Hi, Rachael! Oh my goodness, the honor is entirely mine.

[00:08:36] Rachael Herron: No.

[00:08:37] Catriona Turner: This was like an author bucket list thing that I was going to do like in two or three years, but you invited me today. So,  

[00:08:44] Rachael Herron: I invited you and I’m also like strong-arming you into being here, just a bit.

[00:08:50] Catriona Turner: Coaxing me, you coaxed me.

[00:08:52] Rachael Herron: So let me give you a little bit of an introduction for people. Catriona Turner is a writer and editor currently living in Esbjerg, I already forgot how to say it, Denmark. A veteran of six international moves since leaving Scotland 12 years ago, she’s also lived with her family in France, Uganda, and the Republic of Congo. At her website, The Frustrated Nester, she writes about Danish living, travel, and the expat life. She has contributed a regular column to a magazine for internationals in Denmark, and her writing has featured in anthologies about international living. She also works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader. With a couple of to-be-completed novels on the shelf, she’s currently working on a memoir, due for publication in early 2022, while preparing for her family’s next big move. And everyone listening, I want you to know that Katrina and I have spent time together in Venice, Italy, and that’s how we really got to know each other. But it’s the honor has been mine and getting to watch and read your writing. You are a beautiful writer.

[00:10:00] Catriona Turner: Thank you.

[00:10:02] Rachael Herron: The way you write about your family and about the international living, when you made it official that you were going to write this memoir that you were writing this memoir, I was so pleased. So first of all, I want to ask about that. How is it going? How is the work going?

[00:10:18] Catriona Turner: Okay. It’s going, so my mantra is inching onwards.

[00:10:24] Rachael Herron: That is wonderful.

[Read more…] about Ep. 253: Catriona Turner On How to Write the Miraculous in the Everyday

Ep 252: What If I Can’t Fit Everything Into My Book?

In this bonus mini-episode, Rachael talk about when to have multiple POVs, and also tackles the question, What if I can’t cram everything I want to into this book?

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Rachael Herron: 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.

[00:00:18] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #252 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. This is a bonus real quick mini episode. I am still in the bathroom in Auckland, New Zealand in our managed isolation still on day 10 of 14. This is coming. I’m recording this right after I recorded the last podcast. So I’m still in the same place. Still with the same lipstick on that could use a refresh if you’re watching on YouTube. So let’s get into a couple of questions from people who pledged to Patreon at the $5 a month level. I am your mini coach. You can ask me any damn thing you want. I will probably respond to anything you ask, unless it is absolutely outside, how do they say that outside the pail, but otherwise I’m going to answer it and I’m going to answer it on the air. So let’s go. 

[00:01:10] This one comes from Lamar Dixon, hello Lamar. Okay. So Lamar says, so my question is I have this story I want to do. But it’s been so long since I had to actually write for school or college. And I feel as if my skills have diminished and I’m not competent. And as for my story, I don’t know if I should write or make a comic out of it. I can’t draw, but I can do the writing part. But for the book aspect of it, I feel like I can’t cram everything into it, but I don’t know. Thank you for your help. Okay. So Lamar, I love this question because it is really broad and a lot of people are going to be feeling exactly like you are. And there is a simple, simple answer. You just have to start writing. If you are the kind of person who is listening, who needs a plan of action before they write, that’s absolutely fine, but give yourself a time limit and don’t let yourself have more than a week of maybe an hour and a Monday and an hour on a Friday. There you go. There’s your week. You’ve thought about it, you planned, now start writing, or you could use the whole week. You could use every day to do a little bit of plotting and planning, but don’t give yourself more than a week for me. I don’t give myself more than two days to do that because I will get into a loop in my head and most writers do. We start spiraling. We start wondering every single thing we think of is a great idea until we think about it a little bit harder and write about it a little bit more, you know, for journaling about it. And we realize, no, that’s a terrible idea. And here’s why I need to start all over. And I thought it was, this was great, but, it’s the worst thing that’s ever been thought of. And we can do that for days, weeks, months, years as we try to come up with the absolute best plan of action. 

[00:02:55] So give yourself a time limit. One week is good. And then after that, you just start writing and you are not ready, but here’s the thing: you never will be ready. We will never be ready to write the books we want to write or to write the essays or to write the memoir, whatever it is that you were writing or to write the graphic novel, we’re never going to be ready. We just have to write a terrible first draft. And I mean, Terrible first draft. I think it is at rachelheron.com/SFD, which stands for a Shitty First Draft. If you want to look at an example of a page of mine, that is a first draft. It is terrible. I’m missing whole words and ideas. I’m talking to myself on the page. That’s all that first draft is, is it’s us thinking about what we might wanna do, putting it on the page, realizing it’s awful, getting confused, and being kind to ourselves anyway, continuing to move forward into continuing to put more direct onto the page. That’s our job as a writer. So the worry that you have, that you have too much stuff to put into one book, you might be right. Another really common worry is that, I don’t have enough to put into a book and you might be right about that too, but you will never know until you write the book and when you write the book and it has too much stuff, guess what? Then you get to choose what to take out. And if you write the book and it’s not long enough, and it doesn’t have enough substance, then you get to figure out what to add, but you cannot decide those things before you write the book and it tells you what it wants to be.

[00:04:34] Because no matter what, no matter how smart we think we are about our books, they have different plans and they would like to tell you about them. And the only way they are going to be able to do that is if you let them, if you put down some terrible sentences, let them be terrible and learn from them. And come back to them later and fix them and change them and move them and delete them and add to them. But the terrible writing has to be done first. So thank you for asking the question that I love to answer over and over and over and over again. I don’t think we can talk about it enough that we have to lower our expectations for our own writing and right down to the floor and then dig a basement. We have to be comfortable with the bad writing. The good writing will come later. I promise, but the bad writing has to come first. Even if you’ve written 30 books still has to happen in that order. So thank you for that. Next question is from, here it is from Michelle. She says I, is there a sort of pro versus con to having two points of view in a story? I’m trying to write two points of view, but sometimes I get annoyed at books with more than one point of view because I like a certain character best.

[Read more…] about Ep 252: What If I Can’t Fit Everything Into My Book?

Ep. 251: Mark A. Alvarez II on How to Write Scars and Vulnerability

Mark A. Alvarez II is Hispanic-American born in Houston, Texas. He’s a graduate of Texas State University, where he studied Public Relations and Mass Communications. He is a graduate of the NEW Apprenticeship, the first tech-apprenticeship program accredited by the United States Department of Labor. He is the CEO and Founder of Light Wings Promotions LLC, a digital marketing and creative branding agency based in San Antonio, Texas, where Mark currently resides. Dutybound is his first novel. 

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 # 251 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. I’m so pleased that you’re here with me today in New Zealand as I record this intro. Today, we are talking to Mark A. Alvarez II. When we spoke, I was not in New Zealand, so you’re going to be flashing back and forth in time as you hear these things. If you watch on the YouTube channel, you will see me in my old office and in different places for the next couple of months because I stacked up so many episodes in order to give myself a little bit of breathing room, so that’s happening. But, Mark was really, really awesome to talk to. We talk about our own scars and how to show them in our writing. Basically, we talk about writing with the vulnerability, that means we are actually writing with truth and with honesty, with the kind of voice that readers lean in to listen to.

[00:01:16] So I know you’re going to enjoy the interview, just a little catch up around here. Again, if you are watching on the YouTube channel, number one, did you know there’s a YouTube channel? Number two: Did you know that you should subscribe to it? I think it’s YouTube, just google it YouTube Rachael Herron (RachaelHerron) or RachaelHerronWrites and it comes right up. Trying to do a little bit more with the YouTube channel these days. So if you did want to watch over there or put it on in the background while you’re doing something else, I would love that. But if you’re watching on it, you get to see what the inside of a New Zealand bathroom in a hotel looks like. And let me tell you, it is like nothing you have ever seen before, except it is actually like every other bathroom you’ve ever seen before. 

[00:01:54] Lala, my wife, made a very funny joke on Twitter yesterday, which nobody seemed to think was as funny as I did, but she said that she’s starting to get Stockholm syndrome because she finally understands how all the faucets and taps work. You know how, when you’re in a hotel room, you can never figure it out. By the time you start working it out, you’re leaving the hotel room. Well, we are in here long enough to figure out how to work every single little thing in this hotel. Including all the knobs of taps in the shower bath, which is where we are spending a lot of time because out there, it’s basically a 10×10 room with a queen size bed in the middle, a tiny desk that I have given to Lala because she is a web developer and she codes and she needs a couple of screens and I’m a writer. I can curl up in a corner, I can curl up on the bed. I have a standing desk, that is what I am at right now, in the bathroom. I’m so glad that I packed it in my suitcase and didn’t throw it out a million times. Also, I have like a little riser stand for my computer. And a friend sent to the hotel a little lap desk which is fantastic when I’m in bed.

[00:03:01] So I am set up when it comes to that, but the room is tiny. And if I’m talking at this volume, I’m going to annoy everybody. And also, if my wife is talking on a meeting at this level, she’s going to annoy me. So we repair into the bathroom at this time when we’re doing these kinds of things, which is pretty hilarious to me. But, we are spending a lot of time in this bathroom because there’s no place to get away from each other. And I was talking to her yesterday and actually I’m writing about this for my next Patreon essay, but, I’m not tired of her. I don’t want to get away from her. She doesn’t want to get away from me. It’s weird. This is day 10 of 14, trapped in a room. They bring us all our meals to the door. We open the meals after they’ve left, wearing our mask, bring them inside, eat them on the floor, cause the desk is too small, but yeah, we’re just not tired of each other yet. 

[00:03:53] However, we are both people who value alone time, more than anybody else we’ve ever met. So I don’t want to get away from her, but I want to be alone. So this bath tub has been saving us. I’ve been taking like a two-hour bath a day. She’s taking a two, two and a half hour bath a day. That adds up to four hours alone, four and a half hours alone when we do that. So that’s been awesome, a lot of tub time. What else has been going on? Really nothing’s been good on because I’ve been trapped in this room for 10 days. And I say, trapped, we are allowed at once a day if we make an appointment. And there’s a little yard, there’s a parking lot, small parking lot that you can walk in circles in, if you make an appointment and so we can go out there once a day. Today, my walkies are at 6:00 PM and I will definitely be utilizing that. I usually put a podcast or an audio book in my ears, and I just walk around and around and around and around and around, and I’m wearing a mask. So I can’t even smell New Zealand.

[00:04:55] It’s this really strange liminal space we’re at that we are in New Zealand, but we’re actually not in New Zealand. I’m recording this on a Thursday. On Monday, we get out and we move to an apartment for a week in Auckland. And we’re going to be able to walk around, no masks cause there’s no COVID here, not quit. And just live, we’ll be able to live. And I’m super, super, super excited about that. So I will keep you posted on how that is going. Everything else is continuing a pace I’m actually managing to get work done in the hotel room. I dunno, I said actually, there’s not much else to do, so of course I’m getting work done. It’s a pretty great environment for that. I wanted to quickly thank some new patrons cause I haven’t done that in a while, I think. Penelope Penn, my friend Penn. Thank you Penn. Very much. Melody Maclntyre, Kaye Neil, thank you. Thank you, Catherine Van Auken. Thank you, Kiersten Saxton. Yay Kiersten! and Julie H, thank you, thank you! And Juliet Martin, lovely person edited her pledge up to the $3 level, which is where you get texts from me. So, Juliet help that you have signed up for that. If you have not just going to Patreon and look at any of the essays and it tells you in there how to sign up for those text messages from me, which people like getting, and you can text me back and that’s, I really, really enjoy doing that. So thank you, thank you to everyone who follows along on Patreon. I hope you are enjoying the essays about moving to New Zealand and about existentially a little bit bigger than that. Like what the hell does it mean to make such a big move at midlife? And we bind everything that you know. 

[00:06:41] Thank God for writing. How do non-writers get through the world? How do they get through a life without writing? I was super upset, a very, very, very small thing. It was not matrimonial. It was an outside issue. And when I say super upset, like I was annoyed. For me, that’s pretty upset. And I went to bed annoyed and I went to bed thinking I cannot wait to write my journal because I’ll fix it then. And in the morning, I was still annoyed and I wrote in my journal and I realized, oh, there’s nothing to be upset about. Writing about it got me to understand the thing I hadn’t been able to understand to make it not annoying anymore. How do people function without that? So I think that we are just a very, very cool subsection of people that get that extra tool.

[00:07:30] So I hope that you are using your tool that you are putting it into service of your life, of your heart, of your happiness, only you can do that. If you’re not doing it, don’t beat yourself up. That’s the worst thing you can do. If you are not writing, stop beating yourself up and just write for 10 minutes. Write something terrible, something awful, terrible words that will let you down. That is fine. That’s what they’re supposed to do. That’s normal. Write for 10 minutes and then you get to feel smug that you did a little bit of writing and it will make you happier. So, that’s my prescription to you today from the inside of a bathroom. The next time we talk, who knows where I’ll be? I think I’ll be an Auckland, in an apartment but, anything could change. So, happy writing, my friends. Please enjoy this interview with Mark and we’ll talk to you soon. 

[00:08:18] 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: [00:8:36] Well, I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show, Mark A. Alvarez II. Hello, Mark!

Mark A. Alvarez II: [00:08:42] Hi. How are you doing? Thanks for having me today. 

Rachael Herron: [00:08:44] I’m so excited to have you, so excited to talk to you. Let me get you a little introduction here. Mark A. Alvarez II is Hispanic-American born in Houston, Texas and I have a lot of friends in Texas, in Houston, actually. He’s a graduate of Texas State University, where he studied Public Relations and Mass Communications. He is a graduate of the NEW Apprenticeship, the first tech-apprenticeship program accredited by the United States Department of Labor. And he is the CEO and Founder of Light Wings Promotions LLC, a digital marketing and creative branding agency based in San Antonio, Texas, where Mark currently resides, and Dutybound is his first novel. So welcome to the show! Congratulations on your release. Tell me again, when it came out. 

Mark A. Alvarez II: [00:09:32] It actually, it’s not out yet. It’s coming out in June 22nd. We’re taking pre-orders right now. You can, you know, you can go and find it on my website. We’ll get to that in a little bit. 

Rachael Herron: [00:09:44] I also saw it over on Amazon and by the time this podcast goes live, because I’m pretty booked out right now, your book will be live and you will be an author already. So how does it feel to have your first book coming out?

Mark A. Alvarez II: [00:10:00] It feels absolutely amazing just because, you know, I spent so much time on it. I mean, I’ve been working on this and it’s really hard to believe. I’ve been working on this book since I was a kid. I was about 14 when I started writing it. Even, you can even say before then, because I had some source material, like I was actually like sort of dreaming of designing a video game whenever I was younger. But it was the day I finished reading Harry Potter and Deadly Hallows that I decided that I wanted to write this book. And I remember that day, cause like, as soon as I closed the book, I was like, I can’t believe it’s over. Like my Harry Potter journey is over. And I was like I need to start my own. And that’s how Dutybound, all the seeds for Dutybound started. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:46] I love that and all these years later. So what are you going to do to celebrate when you’re book comes out? 

Mark A. Alvarez II: [00:10:52] Well, my mom is planning a small get-together. It’s a little launch party for me with close friends and family. I’m inviting some people from my, you know, high school and some people that I grew up with, things, people that haven’t caught up with in the long time because you know, it’s like a homecoming. I left home and did what I was sought out to do and, coming home, you know, finally fulfilled, finally reached the dream. And, you know, there’s still much more work to do, but that’s the way I’m treating it is, you know, a homecoming and, you know, I finally, I’m a champion and triumphant, victorious.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:30] I love that.

[Read more…] about Ep. 251: Mark A. Alvarez II on How to Write Scars and Vulnerability