Rachael Herron's Blog, page 31

Ep. 020: Holly Robinson

Novelist, journalist and celebrity ghost writer Holly Robinson is the author of the memoir The Gerbil farmer’s Daughter and many novels including most recently Folly Cove, from Penguin.  Her articles and essays appear frequently in The Huffington Post, More, Parents, Redbook and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. She and her husband have five children and a stubborn Pekingese. They divide their time between Massachusetts and Prince Edward Island, and are crazy enough to be fixing up old houses one shingle at a time in both places.

Craft Tip: Read your dialogue aloud and eliminate as many of the “He saids” and “She saids” as you possibly can. Communicate that with the business on the stage.

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Want to write in Venice with me?

You should.

Go HERE for more details.

Ep. 019: Larissa Brown

Larissa Brown writes books – about Vikings and about knitting – as well as creating designs for hand knitters. She writes historical, romantic, time travel fiction set in a fictional world in the White Woods of Iceland’s 10th century. Her first novel was Beautiful Wreck and her second novel just launched and is called So Wild a Dream. She lives in Portland with her husband and son.

Craft Tip: You already know what to do. You know what you should be writing.

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Ep. 018: Julia Skott

Julia Skott is a journalist and writer in Sweden. She’s published two non-fiction books called Body Panic and Shut Up I’m Counting. She also produces podcasts about knitting and romance literature and is working on a novel or two.

Craft Tip: Change the way you look at your work. Change the font, say the words out loud. You’ll suddenly see all your tics.

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Ep. 017: Jennifer Baker

Jennifer Baker received her MFA from The New School’s graduate program in Creative Writing. She works as a production editor, and  contributes to Bustle.com, and is the social media director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. Jennifer is a panel organizer for We Need Diverse Books, a non-profit organization that sprang to life from the #WeNeedDiverseBooks media campaign to increase minority representation (of all kinds) in literature. She is also the creator and host of the podcast Minorities in Publishing. Jennifer’s short story “The Pursuit of Happiness” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2017 and in December 2013, her young adult manuscript, The Facility, won the SCBWI On-the-Verge Emerging Voices Award for underrepresented voices in children’s literature.

Craft Tip: Use the Merriam-Webster’s word of the day. “If you’re stuck, write a story around it, or a poem around it. I think it’s a really good writing prompt.”

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Why I Love Fall

I love fall because of the ache.

You know what I mean?

That deep, sweet upswell of nostalgia that comes with the dropping leaves is such an emotional push-pull of happiness tinged with sadness.

You know how there are the four flavors (sweet, salty, sour, bitter), and then there’s that extra one? It’s called umami. It’s that dark, rich, undertone of taste. You know it when you have it. Bacon, soy sauce, truffle mushrooms.

I’m declaring fall the umami season. It’s layered and complex. Spring and summer are happy! Bright! Literally, they are sunny (and god help the people with reverse S.A.D. which I sometimes wonder if I have. I’m not a fan of summer). Winter is bleak, and we need time for that, too.

But fall is both. It’s happy and sad. It looks ahead (new school year! getting older!) and it looks back at the same time. This year is winding to its close. For so many, this year has been so much worse than any of the years before. This fall will ache harder, more deeply.

It’s umami. It’s rich and deep. It’s compost turned into black earth. It’s fires, lit indoors for warmth instead of wildfires running the hills.

If light has a scent to me, it’s this: the smell of sycamore leaves dropping onto dusty ground in yellow sunshine. I have a million favorite scents, but this one might be in the top five, right up there with beach bonfire smoke, mothballs, wet wool, and cedar. (Oooh! All of those are umami, I think.)

Mills, this morning

This is my first fall as a full-time writer.

I have wanted this my whole life.

Every day I write at Mills College, lately at the library. I sit on the second floor and I open the window at my favorite carrel, and I set my apple carefully next to my coffee mug and my water bottle. (Basically, I’m Frances with her salt shaker.)

Today, as I walked on campus, I caught that scent, the dry sycamore leaves in sunshine one.

My heart nearly lifted right out of my chest.

This is what I’ve wanted.

I’ve got it.

I’m enough of a Buddhist to know I won’t keep it. Everything changes. Right now, this is my life. I am happy. Someday this won’t be my life. That makes me wistful, nostalgic for the very moment I’m standing in.

Fall is rich, and deep. Excitement and sadness. The light falls earlier, and we prepare to cocoon ourselves in our houses for winter.

But right now we’re outside, scuffing through the leaves, realizing that the sound of a leaf’s crunch remains the same, no matter how young or old we are—that sharp, satisfying KRICSHHH. We break something with our foot that hurts no one. We contribute to the leaf returning to dust.

The ache feels good, like a sore, used muscle.

It feels right, rich, and deep.

Happy first day of fall to you, my friends.

Ep. 016: Dana Kaye

Dana Kaye received her B.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. After college, she worked as a freelance writer and book critic. This experience has been crucial to her publicity career: She is known for her innovative ideas and knowledge of current trends.

She frequently speaks on the topics of social media, branding, and publishing trends, and her commentary has been featured on websites like The Huffington Post, Little Pink Book, andNBC Chicago.

She is also the author of Your Book, Your Brand: A Step-By-Step Guide to Launching Your Book and Boosting Sales, available 9/20/16 from Diversion Books.

Craft tip – On revision: “I need someone to tell me that something isn’t working. THEN I can make it better.” 

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Link to Scrivener mini-course mentioned HERE.

Catch Dana’s first standup act here!

Ep. 015: Chris Baty

Chris Baty accidentally founded National Novel Writing Month in 1999, and oversaw the event’s growth from 21 friends to more than 300,000 writers in 90 countries. Chris now serves as a Board Member Emeritus for NaNoWriMo, and spends his days teaching classes at Stanford University’s Writer’s Studio, giving talks about writing and creativity, helping companies with content strategy, and endlessly revising his own novels. He’s the author of No Plot? No Problem! and the co-author of Ready, Set, Novel. His quest for the perfect cup of coffee is ongoing, and will likely kill him someday.

Craft tip: “When I start a second draft, I don’t ever go back to that first draft that I wrote…I’m in a new draft. I don’t copy things over. It’s all fresh.”

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InstantPot Chicken Enchiladas

I read a bunch of enchilada recipes and then went off the road, and I want to make sure if I ever want to veer back this way, I can, because these are SO GOOD, yo.

In InstantPot (if you have one, otherwise just cook the chicken whatever way you want, it’s all good): Chop one onion, throw it in. Add in 6-7 boneless skinless chicken thighs. Drape 3 chipotle peppers artistically on top. Throw in some cumin (1tbsp?) and some salt. Close. Press Poultry button (15 min, medium). YES, I know there’s no liquid, no, the InstantPot won’t explode. The chicken makes plenty of liquid.

When cooked, preheat oven to 350. Remove chicken and peppers, shred both. Pour off liquid in pot, reserving the onions floating around. Add chicken/peppers to pot with onions, add can of corn.

Shred a 12oz block of pepper jack cheese. Add about a quarter of it to the hot chicken, along with a couple of great big dollops of sour cream. Mix. Taste and die a little with the wonder of it all.

Dredge corn tortillas (ours were still hot when I bought them earlier today) through green enchilada sauce. Fill with chicken mix. Roll and place in glass baking pan. When you’ve got as many as you can fit in your pan, pour the rest of the enchilada sauce over the top, and top the whole thing with the rest of the shredded cheese.

Bake uncovered for 30 min. Serve topped with more sour cream and cilantro, if you have it.

Ep. 014: Cat Rambo

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and edits in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in such places as Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. She was the fiction editor of award-winning Fantasy Magazine and appeared on the World Fantasy Award ballot in 2012 for that work. Her story “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” was a 2012 Nebula Award finalist. She has worked as a programmer-writer for Microsoft and a Tarot card reader, professions which, she claims, both involve a certain combination of technical knowledge and willingness to go with the flow. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and Clarion West, she also works with Armageddon MUD, and writes gaming articles. A frequent volunteer with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, she is currently its president.

Craft Tip: Think about being inside your POV character’s head. You can think about it in terms of a camera. You can have the camera back a few inches, watching (and that’s where you have things like “she thought”), as opposed to putting it right behind your character’s eyes. That’s one of the things you have control over, how deeply you’re immersed in your character’s head, and honestly, the more deeply you’re immersed, the better.

Subscribe to her newsletter to get first crack at her classes!

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