Rachael Herron's Blog, page 29

Take a Novel Writing Class at Berkeley (online) With Me!

Next week, on February 2, 2017, my class Developing the Novel starts at UC Berkeley Extension!

Explore the craft of longer fiction and how to meet its creative challenges. Each session includes a lecture on craft, supported by discussion of assigned readings and exercises to unlock the potential of your ideas. Learn how to develop characters, language, voice, pace, tone, theme and setting, and participate in a group critique of student work. Enrollment is limited.

– SIGN UP HERE – 

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Ep. 031: Gwenda Bond

Gwenda Bond writes YA and children’s fiction. Her novels include the Lois Lane series, which bring the iconic comic book character front and center in her own YA novels, and the Cirque American series, about daredevil heroines who discover magic and mystery lurking under the big top. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Locus Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and their unruly pets. There are rumors she escaped from a screwball comedy, and she might have a journalism degree because of her childhood love of Lois Lane.

Craft Tip: When you’re starting a scene, ground the audience in the scene, where the character is and what they’re doing, rather than in the character’s head.

Listen above or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

The post Ep. 031: Gwenda Bond appeared first on Rachael Herron.

Wrangling Time Like the Varmint It Is

[In the effort to blog more often, I might sometimes crosspost my emails meant for my writing group if they feel relevant to my life and are something I’d like to remember later. In that spirit, here’s this post on time management.]

I started tracking my time in earnest this month, and it’s had a huge effect on my life almost instantly. It’s like when I started using You Need a Budget – I’d never really understood money and debt until I started tracking it. TopTracker for time is doing the same thing to my brain, and I’m really thinking about the way I use my hours.

Biggest surprise so far?

A lot of time blocks I didn’t consider work actually are part of my work. Earlier this week, I had to send an international wire transfer to reserve a block of rooms for a Venice writing retreat. I found that my credit union had stopped doing them, and I had to literally switch banks in order to get it done. That was three hours that I would normally have just whined about, three hours lost from my work time.

That banking kerfuffle? That was work time.

Mind = blown.

Did you read the recent article, Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives?

Oy. To know that even Merlin Mann wishes he hadn’t gone quite so far down the productivity wormhole? That was rough to read.

I worship time management.

I bow at its altar and offer my pittance of minutes stolen from the recesses of my Midori Bullet Journal. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with time management, wringing every possible drop from the hours I was allotted. I loved Cheaper by the Dozen and its look at Frank Bunker Gilbreth Sr’s early study of time and motion. I walked around the house making sure to batch my trips. Going downstairs to get a snack? I’d carry two books that had to go to the living room and bring back upstairs both my snack and my laundry. (This was when I was about nine, mind you.)

So I listened with bated breath this week as Kim Werker told me about her foray into time management with the app Asana. Maybe this would be it! Maybe this would be the one thing that finally got my time whipped into shape.

Because I’ve been needing help.

I’ve always been good at managing my time. I’m not the kind of person who looks down at a pencil and looks up to find the sun is setting outside.

But I’ve been scheduling too much.

I’ve forgotten what I can and can’t do. I’m used to overreaching and just getting what I want right before I fall out of the tree, and I have to say, that method is exhausting and leaves bruises.

Every year, I choose a word that I’ll keep in mind for the next year. 2016’s word was BRAVE because I knew I’d have to be courageous to jump out of my day job (I didn’t know it would take bravery just to get through the damn year itself.)

2017 doesn’t seem to have a word for me. Instead, it has a phrase:

“Can I do less?”

This is totally contrary to what I’ve ever done.

But it feels right.

I’ll still do everything, don’t get me wrong. I have plans to write three (maybe four) books in 2017, and I’m releasing three. I have two podcasts.* I’m teaching at Stanford and Berkeley.* I will write essays for my Patreon (and will, every 6 weeks, hand to god!). I’m creating a new online class.

I can do all this, and still do less within a day. How?

While talking to Kim, she said her assistant had built her schedule for her, including buffer room.

Wiggle room!

I never give myself any of that. My days are constantly scheduled full, from top to bottom. I work right up to every deadline I’ve ever had. When I get a migraine and lose two days, my whole schedule is hosed, and I have to redo everything.

This year, no.

This year, I’m building wiggle room into:

My deadlines (two weeks of it)
My weeks (one day a week, unscheduled, to be filled as needed)
My days (TWO OPEN HOURS planned, every work day. That can be used to do the things I didn’t see coming (and there are always tons of those every week), or to read (part of the job!) or to nap (part of a good life!).)

I’m scheduling three hours of Deep Work (loved the book by Cal Newport) into each morning. That time is strictly to do writing of new words, and revision of old ones. The rest of my work hours are scheduled for tasks, the myriad things that keep my world turning ’round and money flowing in.

Thanks to a suggestion from my mastermind group, I’m going to try to keep one day a week completely unscheduled (besides the deep work time). As it stands right now, that may be a different day each week, but that day can catch some of the flotsam and jetsam of the rest of the week.

I’m going to use a combination of Asana (for the reminders it sends) and my Midori to track my time.

(Above: Midori, with glitter washi tape! I don’t list the deep work on it, only the To Dos. See Thursday for a “free day” during which I’ll do both deep work and regular work, but I have no specific scheduled tasks that day.)

I’m going to give myself more time.

I’m going to schedule down time, every day.

I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes. How about you? How do you plan out your time? I’d love to hear.

xo, Rachael

***

The world is testing me. As I’m writing this to you, I just got asked to teach a paying gig that is right up my alley, but I do. not. have. time, and I’m going to have to say no to people I care about. Augh.
I realize that I’m whining about time management when writing is my full time job. I understand the place of privilege I’m in, and boy, do I appreciate it and never take it for granted.
I have a new writing podcast, did you know? J. Thorn and I are talking about making the transition to writing full time over at The Petal to the Metal. Come listen. We’re funny.
At Berkeley, one of the classes I’m teaching is in the Extension program and it’s online, so YOU can take it if you want to. It’s called Developing the Novel, and registration is open now. The class starts in two weeks, limited to 20 students.

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Ep. 030: Aya de Leon

Aya de Leon directs the Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley. Kensington Books published her debut feminist heist novel, UPTOWN THIEF, in July 2016. Her writing and performance work has received acclaim in the Village Voice, Washington Post, Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, SF Bay Guardian and the East Bay Express. A graduate of Harvard College, with an MFA from Antioch University, Aya has been an artist in residence at Stanford University, a Cave Canem poetry fellow, and a slam poetry champion. She publicly married herself in the 90s, and from 1995 to 2012 hosted an annual Valentine’s Day show that focused on self-love. She also blogs and tweets about culture, gender, and race.

Craft Tip: Adopt NaNoWriMo as a lifestyle. The more you write, the better you get.

Listen above or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

The post Ep. 030: Aya de Leon appeared first on Rachael Herron.

Back in the Saddle

I often find myself whinging that I don’t blog more often. Well, applying what I know of my personal best processes, in order to get that done, I just have to DO IT.

I have to sit my butt down (or in this case, stand my butt up at the awesome standing desk Lala got me for Christmas) and write something to put on the blog.

So here I am. I’m making a pledge to show up here on Mondays and write. I won’t regret it later. In fact, I know the only time I’ll regret it is on Mondays when I have to write something.

It’s truly weird, the way writers hate to write. Lala and I talk about it a lot. She’s an artist, and there’s very little she likes more than drawing. She sometimes has a tiny bit of reluctance to get in her chair, but it’s the kind of reluctance someone would have about getting up and crossing the room to get the Reese’s Peanut Butter cup. “Oh, okay. Here I go.”

She loves drawing. She loves making her art.

Writers just aren’t like that, for the most part. (There are some, yes, who love every part of writing including the writing itself, but I honestly don’t quite buy into it. What’s in their water? I worry.)

Most writers love thinking about writing. They love having written. But getting the damn butt in chair is often a lot harder than it should be. And, problematically, when the butt is in the chair is when the writer is on her computer. And what’s inside her computer?

THE INTERNET.

I look back on writers of old, pre-internet days, and I marvel at the fact they, too, say they had the same trouble getting to the writing part. What on earth was preventing them? Phone calls? Solicitors at the door?

What did they distract themselves with? The newspaper? Were they unable to look away, like I am sometimes with Twitter? The book on their nightstand? Cleaning?

I worship at the shrine of Freedom, and have said it often – I use it to take myself off the internet for any amount of time I need it to. I couldn’t write books without it.

Oh, here’s my New Year’s podcast in Youtube form, if you’d like to hear some frank talk about money and goals.

So yes, I plan to reconnect with the blog. My blog and I have grown apart. I’m going to woo it a bit. Check back here on Mondays, and I’ll try to have a new little catch up for you.

(Thanks for reading for so long, friends. Some of you have been here since the dark ages, when the internet still ran on hamster-power, and I love you for it. New readers, I hug you, too.)

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Ep. 029: New Year Goals with Me!

Special New Year’s episode! I intend to make this an annual episode, and I loved recording this because it made me sit and really think. In this episode, I go back over last year’s goals and whether I hit them or not. I talk about my goals for 2017 (big! awesome! also do less!), including some open, frank talk about financials. Enjoy!

Listen above or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

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2016, The Good Stuff

[View the story “2016 Recap, the Good Things” on Storify]

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Ep. 028: Mridu Khullar Relph

[image error]Mridu Khullar Relph is the founder of The International Freelancer. She has written for The New York Times, TIME, CNN, ABC, The Christian Science Monitor, Ms., Marie Claire, and many more in a career spanning over 13 years. My assignments have required her to trek up and down the tsunami-ravaged coast of India, live with Tibetan nuns, interview coffin makers in Ghana, learn how mobile phones are designed in the US, and much more.

Craft Tip: Whatever you do for your career, do it consistently.

Listen above or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

The post Ep. 028: Mridu Khullar Relph appeared first on Rachael Herron.

How to Write a Little More Before the Year Ends

Hello, writers!

Hey, where do you write?

Your house? The kitchen? A friend’s living room? It’s not so much about having a room of one’s own, it’s more about knowing how to carve out a mental space within a physical one.

Me? I have to get out of the house to create brand-new words. I can revise just about anywhere–the plane, my home office, the front seat of my car. But to capture new ideas, I have to be out of the house.

It’s a little frustrating, actually. I have an amazing office. I’ve spent a lot of time setting it up, just so. I have a beautiful roll top desk, and the drawers hold everything from writing gum to hair elastics. My setup is ergonomic, and my chair is comfortable.

But brand-new words don’t come when I’m inside the house. Instead, the dogs distract me. The cats whine for food (silly cats, always needing “nutrition”). The dishes should probably be done, and is the washing machine really leaking? (It is.) That stack of unread writer magazines should probably be recycled or read, so I might as well read a couple of ’em quickly.

So in order to get a first draft, I leave.

For a long time, I went to a local café. But honestly, I grew resentful about spending five dollars on a simple Americano. I’m cheap that way, and I like the coffee we drink at home. So I started pouring my coffee into my travel mug and writing at my old college, Mills, which is around the corner from where we live.

Home-brewed coffee. Big tables. And best of all, I no longer have a working Wi-Fi password for the campus.

So I go. I sit. I stare at the screen. And eventually, I get bored enough to write. There’s absolutely nothing else to do. It’s a trick, I know. But my brain is kind of dumb when it comes to tricks. The same trick, ten years down the road, still works.

What about you?

Is there a local library near you where you can go to work? Can you try a new café and not ask for the Wi-Fi password? Or set up a program like Freedom which removes you from the internet for whatever amount of time you set?(I love Freedom so much I’ve dedicated a couple of books to it, no lie.)

(No, you don’t need the internet to write. Need to do research? Guess at it. Put in an asterisk, and fill in the research later.)

It always, always helps to have a plan.

Do you have one for this coming week? Yep, Christmas is almost here. The relatives are descending, and you’re stressed out about the shopping you still need to do, not to mention the wrapping (my family says it looks like I wrap presents with my feet, but I swear to god I’m trying as hard as I can. Me and Scotch tape just don’t work well together).

But do you have an extra day off work this week? Can you write on your calendar a block of time that you’ll use to write, to get some words done? Even one hour is wonderful. Two stolen hours feel even better. But if you can’t get that, aim for grabbing even 15 minutes. I’ve written whole books in 15-minute increments. Sometimes that’s just how we have to do it to get ‘er done.

So block off some time. Figure out where you’ll write.

(And then tell me how it went. I’d love to hear.)

I’m on vacation next week (huzzah!) so the next time we chat it’ll be the turn of the new year. Start thinking now about the collection of words you’ll create next year (exciting!). And if you haven’t written enough this year, get just a few more words in before the calendar turns.

I know you can do it.

Onward!

xo, Rachael

***

I just finished revising an essay about the Cult of Creativity, based on an amazingly and hilariously bad “creativity” conference I attended earlier this year. (Oh, the scent of glue and desperation.) You can get it (and the others) for as little as a buck an essay, right HERE.
I’m enjoying the new book, Story Genius, by Lisa Cron. I disagree with a few things, but I love her idea of the third rail of writing. If you’re having trouble plotting, you might like it, too.
Related to nothing except my general excitement, we scored tickets to the San Francisco production of Hamilton, next June. I can’t stand it! WHY ISN’T IT JUNE?

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Ep. 027: Joanna Penn

J.F.Penn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers on the edge, as well as bestselling non-fiction for authors published under Joanna Penn. Joanna’s site for writers, TheCreativePenn.com has been voted one of the Top 10 sites for writers three years running. She is a professional speaker on creative entrepreneurship, digital publishing and internet marketing, and was voted one of The Guardian UK Top 100 creative professionals 2013.

Craft Tip: Balance consumption with creation.

Listen above or subscribe on:

iTunes | Stitcher | Youtube | Facebook

Sign up for Rachael’s FREE weekly email in which she encourages you to do the thing you want most in the world. You’ll also get her Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use now to get some writing done (free).

The post Ep. 027: Joanna Penn appeared first on Rachael Herron.