Rebecca Henderson

Once again I’ve entered into a new phase on my current work-in-progress, West Texas Interlude. Last week I made a firm step out of the research phase and into the draft writing season of the project.

It was almost two years ago that I began this phase on my first book, a middle grade novel based on the experiences of my friend Lydia in Yunnan. I’m finding, though, that this time around the writing phase is different. For one thing, I’ve been working full-time as a writer for two years now, and the day-in-day-out diligence of a writing schedule is perfectly normal to me now. When I first started writing the novel, I was staying with good friends who I would just as soon have sat around drinking coffee with all morning than hole up in their basement to type on my laptop. It was hard making myself work. Somehow, I don’t know how, that book was eventually written.

The other major difference I’ve noticed so far in writing West Texas Interlude is that the words come much easier because they are in my own voice. The novel was written from the perspective of a 13-year-old Bulang girl. I, as you might be aware, am not a 13-year-old Bulang girl. West Texas Interlude is a non-fiction project based on my own experiences and my family’s stories. It’s just me, writing, talking to my readers (whoever they may end up being). Kind of the same way I write these blog posts. I’ve been developing my voice and style long enough now that I don’t have to work to conjure them up. It’s a wonderfully refreshing feeling, fingertips to the keyboard, words popping up on the screen.

Just as I had the hospitality of several friends in Alaska and Fort Worth to give me living and office space while writing the novel, I have friends here in the Tri-Cities who have opened their homes to me to use while they are at their day jobs. I leave my apartment by 8am each day and head over to my friends’ house to set up my mobile writing office. It’s a great set-up. More so than when I’m working on freelance projects and magazine articles, I need that separation of space from my living quarters to help me feel like, ok, I’m at work now, time to get busy.

In addition to writing West Texas Interlude in the mornings, I’m also working on a new project in the afternoons. I won’t divulge all the details about it yet, but I’ll give you a photo hint from a previous post — way previous, like May 2009 previous.

Writing about family members is a terrifying venture.

I have spent the past 2 1/2 weeks asking my grandparents questions about their lives, recording their answers — while hovering near my grandmother as she sliced brisket to put in the freezer, while sitting on the ottoman at my grandfather’s feet as he flipped through photos on my iPad and recalled the locations and stories belonging to the images. I have attempted to piece together the equipment and techniques involved in land surveying as described by my father and grandfather, men who have known the ins and outs of the profession for decades, to the point that they no longer remember what is common knowledge to mankind and what is only known to surveyors. I don’t even know what it is I don’t know, and I have struggled at times to come up with interview questions. But now I’ve learned what a theodolite is, what a bearing is, how to turn an angle, how to identify a monument or find a corner, and next I will sort out the best way to describe it in the context of West Texas Interlude.

I have 15 hours of recordings from the first research trip and am daunted by the prospect of piecing together the information that belongs to each town, each photo. How will I decide which photos to include, which stories to write, which stories to summarize and which to elaborate upon? How will I organize it all? Which towns will I need to skim over and which ones will require intensive research? Should I focus more on the vacation spots featured in the photos, or on the little towns where the family may have lived for only a few weeks at a time?

But more daunting than any of that — the technical aspects and the artistic decisions — is the prospect of writing a story whose main characters are ones I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with every year. Ones who held me as an infant. Ones whose opinion and good favor I value more than just about anyone in the world. They are trusting me with their stories, and I will strive to do my best to write them well. I long to approach the stories and the background research with an objective mind, but I cannot deny that my own memories and impressions, my own point of view as a Henderson, color the picture that I lay out on paper. And since I’ve said from the beginning that the book will be a collection of Bob and Ann’s photos and stories combined with my own experience visiting the places they lived, I think it’s OK to allow my impressions to color the process. Still, I tremble at the thought of trying to capture the character of my family on paper, fearful of what they will think of my words, of what I include and what I leave out.

Last week I took an unexpected break from the blog, as some may have noticed. I have several topics lined up, several posts in various phases of almost-writtenness, but I have found myself caught up in the midst of other tasks. At times it’s easy for a self-employed writer to let the time during the day drift off into all sorts of good projects — volunteer work, small writing assignments to help out others, marketing and all the mundane aspects of trying to keep a freelance business (and life in general) afloat. All of these are good projects to be working on, yet they are not writing for my work-in-progress.

As this has happened in the last couple of weeks, I decided that the blog needed to pause for a week or so. I don’t make any income from this blog, and so there are times when I can’t justify spending a few hours a week working on it instead of working on things that will pay the bills or are directly related to my book projects. It makes me sad to pause, because I love the writing I get to do here, but I can’t work on it in good conscience when I should be sending out query letters or doing research instead.

Hopefully things will settle down in the next couple of days, and I will be able to start posting regularly again. I’m eager to flesh out a few topics I’ve been pondering, and I’m also eager to get this done before I begin traveling in mid-November. Look for posts over the next few weeks about giving and sharing, an update on what I’m learning through West Texas Interlude research, my reflections on Jane Eyre, a Quinault Community Garden update, and my plans for travel this fall to Texas for research and to China to visit friends (I’m going to China!!!!).

And now, back to work.

I’m not working on the writing for my West Texas project yet — these days I’m mostly writing about how I’m going to write about West Texas. Gotta do the ground work first, put the initial pieces together, see how the project takes shape. It’s a great place to be, in the dream phase of the project, the phase where I play around with different ideas and see where they go.

As I’m looking through the photos and plotting points on the map for my research trips, I find myself needing a little background music. And the obvious choice for me for this project, so far, has been Lyle Lovett. Yesterday, I smiled quite a bit over his version of “West Texas Highway” — I couldn’t find it on YouTube, though, so I’m posting another one that makes for a good soundtrack to my work, “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy”:

Comfort me, said she, / With your conversation, / With the cocktails / And the candlelight / In your eyes; / It’s funny how we hunger / For some inspiration, / And everything else / That money just won’t buy.

Simply put, Scrivener is my favorite application on my MacBook.

I have a distinct memory of sitting in the Mountain Cafe in Yunnan in 2009, some time during what passes for fall in the tropics, telling a couple of friends that I needed something software-ish to organize my research and writing. I was in the deepest throes of research for what has turned into my first novel, and if I wasn’t careful, my notes were about to become too chaotic. Both of my desktops — on my Mac and in my office —  were covered with scraps of paper, sticky notes, and files with snippets of info. It was an avalanche waiting to happen.

“If only I could find something where I could have these little notecards on my computer, you know, and I could move them around and arrange them as I go further into the project — something that would let me get rid of my actual 3×5 cards,” I told my friends.

Shortly afterwards, I stumbled across Scrivener on the downloads page on Apple’s site and soon knew that I had found the program I had described to my friends, except even better.

I’ve been using Scrivener for almost two years now, and I’ve come darn close to working in it every day of those two years. It’s just that wonderful and useful.

“Why?” you may ask. Well, here’s why.

* It was love at first sight for me and Scrivener because of the corkboard view mode. Scrivener lets me make notecards with a brief synopsis and arrange them on a corkboard with cute little pushpins and customizable background colors. I keep mine looking like lined white 3x5s, a traditionalist, I suppose. You can also mark the notecards with stamps that tell you the status of that part of your project.

* Soon, I got over my infatuation with Scrivener’s looks and realized that it’s super useful for organization beyond simple arrangement of my ideas in a certain order on a corkboard. I can click on each of those synopsis cards and go to a full document. The documents can be arranged in folders and the folders in a project binder that’s divided into sections for my research and for my draft. Way more levels of organization than I ever dreamed of. And I use them all.

* So, now that I had Scrivener up and running, what was I supposed to do with all my notes in Word docs? Import them! Super easy. Equally as easy to export when I want to go the other direction, too, and with several handy options for how I want the imports and exports divided or combined.

* Even cooler than importing from Word, though, is the fact that I can import web pages. I used the web page import feature a bunch when I was doing research about the persecution of the Chin people in Burma. I was reading through page after page of reports on human rights violations, and rather than going back and forth from my web browser to Scrivener to take notes, I could import the web page as a file and stay in Scrivener to take notes on a split screen.

* Same with photos — I can import photos onto those cute little notecards and arrange and rearrange to my heart’s content. I did this with scanned photos of Lydia’s family during research for my novel, and I’m doing it again with the photos for my West Texas project.

* But the biggest time saver for me has been Scrivener’s ability to import audio files. I recorded dozens of hours of interviews with Lydia and was then able to import the audio into Scrivener and transcribe my notes without having to leave Scrivener. Before, when I had ethnographic interviews that I needed to transcribe or translate, I would listen to the file in iTunes or on my iPod while I typed, which is a huge pain. Every few seconds I would have to take my hands away from the keyboard to click the pause button in iTunes or mess with my iPod. But Scrivener has a function that allows me to start and stop audio files with a keystroke, so that I can keep typing fluidly without taking my hands off the keyboard. So very, very awesome. Seriously, I would have gone crazy trying to do all those hours of transcription without it.

* There are tons of other features that I hardly ever use, mostly because I haven’t taken the time to learn them well. Notes and meta-data and keywords and comment tracking and referencing and footnotes that export nicely into Word. Scrivener is just a delight for writerly people who have large projects to manage. I have several binders going at any given time — including one for this blog, as I mentioned a few weeks back.

When I wrote that post about how I blog, I intended to follow up in further detail about why I love Scrivener. Since that time, I learned that I could become an affiliate seller of Scrivener through my website. So if you’re interested in trying out this super handy tool, whether it’s for class notes or writing projects or whatever, I’d love it if you would use my referral. Thanks!

 Buy Scrivener 2.x for Mac OS X (Regular Licence)

When I last posted two-and-a-half weeks ago, I was taking a break from social media and blogging, in order to focus on starting my new writing project off on the right foot. It has been a wonderfully creative time for me, and I’m trying to make the benefits of it continue into the future by not going back to the same place as before — namely, the place where I am spending way too much time each day trying to keep up with Facebook and blog reading. I don’t hang out on Twitter all day anyway, and I think the benefits of my writing two or three regular blog posts per week outweigh any time constraints I feel from them. But reading blogs had begun to eat away at my mornings, and Facebook was something I found myself turning to several times throughout the day, when I had two or three minutes here or there, which always drags out to ten or fifteen minutes. Not good.

Honestly, I haven’t missed most of the blogs I stopped reading these past two weeks. A very select few (I’m talking less than five) still pique my curiosity enough that I check them every couple of days. But I am not missing the 25 or 30 others that I’ve taken off my regular reading schedule. Most of those are related to publishing, writing, freelancing, etc. I know it’s considered good practice to stay up on industry news through blogs, but I just can’t do it any more, not every day, not in those numbers.

So, what have I been up to in all the wonderful and glorious time I’ve inherited by making this decision?

* I’ve been on a lot of long runs. Running is one way that I am able to get my mind loose and relaxed so that I can think through things — and this past couple of weeks I can really tell that it’s helped me feel healthier (both mentally and physically), which also helps me feel more creative. On a side note, all this extra running has led me to start training for a half-marathon at the end of September.

* I have stared at the living room ceiling a lot. No kidding, this is a great way for me to come up with ideas, lying on the floor, being still and quiet and just thinking. Last week I came up with a name for my new project by lying on the floor for about twenty minutes — and titles are one of the more difficult things for me to write. It sounds crazy, I know, and if I ever get a roommate she’ll probably think I’m nuts when I explain that this method can be part of what I mean when I say “I work at home.”

* I’ve read a lot of books, particularly ones from the publisher I’m interested in for my young adult novel. Reading is the best thing I can do to improve my writing. (Note how I cut down on reading blogs in order to read more books. A good trade off, I firmly believe.)

* I made first contact with above-mentioned publisher. A big step for me. And now the waiting begins.

* I’ve done a ton of research on successful Kickstarter campaigns. I’ve read articles, looked through successful project descriptions, watched sample videos, analyzed successful reward offers. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right.

* And I guess I’m going to do it, because my project was approved by Kickstarter. Now I’m writing my project’s narrative, editing my video, planning rewards for my backers. More to come on this in the next couple of weeks. Lots more to come.

* I froze the blueberries I picked at Bill’s Berry Farm, and I picked a bunch of peaches at Ray French Orchard. Fresh fruit in season is one of life’s greatest pleasures.

* I bought a gorgeous hanging basket with verbena and petunias and ivy from Selph Landing Nursery. Flowers on my patio are another of life’s greatest pleasures. I bask in that pleasure each day now, as I water and snip at and admire my huge basket of flowers. It’s equally as relaxing as running.

Last November and December when I was in Texas before moving to Washington, I spent some time with my grandmother, learning to make the cream pies she’s been bringing to family events for as long as I can remember. Part of my goal for the time was to learn to make the pies — part of my goal was to hear her tell stories. Man, does she love to tell stories (you can read some of those stories in Passing Down Pie Heritage, a new article I recently had published at Texas Cooking).

I’ve heard quite a few stories from her over the years, some of them related to the time she and my grandfather spent in West Texas during their early years of marriage. I’ve also heard quite a bit about that time from my dad and my aunt, especially in preparation for my West Texas camping trip with friends last October. And especially since my aunt and her husband had been diligently scanning and labeling the 800+ family slides from the 1950s, many of them taken in West Texas.

West Texas and those slides have hovered in the background of my imagination for months. I’ve looked at the photos, mesmerized by the scenes they depict. Cowboys and wide open landscapes.

My dad and his siblings as shiny faced kids in 1950s clothes and hair styles.

My grandmother sitting on a swing in a park, the background opening wide behind her.

My grandfather working out in the oil field with his survey crew buddies. (The colors on this photo haven’t been altered — that’s what the slide looked like when they scanned it!)

Those slides are precious to me because they hold family — and they hold the land that made us who we are, the land that captivated me last October. The slides are also precious as a glimpse into that era and that place. West Texas in the 1950s is the same time and place that shaped George W. and Laura Bush, and I was also captivated by Laura Bush’s descriptions of it in her autobiography.

And so, I’ve felt the stirring to do more with the slides and with my family’s stories than let them sit and simmer under the surface of my imagination. My grandparents, well, they’re not young, and if I’m going to document their stories of that time period and put them together with the images they made, I believe the time is now. Funny how this idea took full shape once I moved across the country to the opposite border, but I also believe this scenario isn’t a mistake. It will take some careful planning, careful budgeting, and most likely an upcoming project fundraising campaign on Kickstarter, but I think it can all come together to do the research, organizing, and writing of my first nonfiction book here in the Tri-Cities area, with a few trips back to Texas.

Another thing I’m sure of as I type out this idea on this blog (making something public is so very scary!) is that I need to spend some focused time making sure I’m headed in the right direction with this project. First, I want to seek God deliberately on this issue — I’ve been doing that all along, but I want to step back and make absolutely sure. Also, I want to spend some deliberate creative time on the first stages of the project, including what the scope of it will be and what it will take to get the funding. I’m at the point of wrapping up my novel revisions and sending that book out in search of a publisher — now I’m figuring out how to move forward with the next project.

In order to do that, I feel like I need to take a social media break. A bit of a fast, if you will. I’m not throwing off social media for good, just for a while. I want to use the time that I normally spend each day (and it’s spread throughout the day, not just in one blob) to be quiet, to be creative, to pray, to make sure I’m hearing things correctly. I feel so inundated with information from the internet most days, and I contribute my own voice to share in that cacophony. I need to step away for a while and not post or read blogs, Facebook, or twitter. I don’t know how long I will do this, at least a week or two. And hopefully when I come back, I’ll have great news to share with you about the next big project and how you can be involved!

Until then, email me if you need me…

It never fails that I have my best ideas for a new story or essay (or recently, an entire book) while I’m running, driving, or taking a shower — times when it’s not so easy to jot down a few notes. I don’t know why it happens that way, but it’s like something in my brain kicks into creative gear when my subconscious is aware that I can’t easily write.

More and more, though, I’m convinced that to stay sharp as a creator (whether it’s as a writer, artist, musician, technology developer, or whatever) we must have good conversation with other creators. For an introvert like myself, this is a surprising discovery, to realize that interaction with other creative friends is just as important for me as alone time with my thoughts. So much can happen in the moments when you’re bouncing ideas back and forth, when you hear someone else’s take on your project from a different angle.

At one point in my life (probably not so long ago), I feared this back and forth. I took every hint of criticism as a personal rejection rather than a suggestion for ways to sharpen my craft. I see now how prideful that fear was. I was afraid that people would see me as less than perfect, afraid that maybe I am less than perfect. A stupid fear, because duh — of course I’m less than perfect. It’s obvious. Move on to something more nuanced to deliberate over…

Recently I had the opportunity to receive feedback from someone who writes young adult fiction and is an experienced critiquer. She went through my entire manuscript and sent invaluable comments and suggestions for places to change the pacing of the story, the chapter divisions, sentence structure, grammar errors. I was ecstatic to hear back from her. I’ve looked at the manuscript of this novel so many times now, there are some things I will probably never see because my eyes just skip over it at this point. To be able to dialogue with her about the places I need to improve was a tremendous experience for me (and it proves to me that I’ve outgrown that silly prideful fear).

In providence’s strange way, my first week in Kennewick I met a group of friends who I still hang out with on a regular basis. Others in that group are also in the early stages of starting businesses and learning what it takes to become self-employed. I’ve gained so much in bouncing ideas around with them, sitting around the living room after dinner, talking about ideas for books or Android apps or Kickstarter projects or whatever.

“What do you think about…?”

“Yeah, or maybe you could….”

“Have you ever looked into…?”

“What if you tried to….”

One thing leads to another, and soon I have enough momentum to think my way into my next big project. Conversation is powerful.

Since it was my third bloggiversary last week, I thought I would take the opportunity to say a few things about the way that I go about writing and posting on the blog. Sometimes I get questions about it — a while back, a friend asked me, “Are you getting up at like 3am to write and post your blog?” The time stamp on the entries makes it look like that, but it’s not the case. If she wondered that, I figured others might be curious too.

When I first started the blog, I would write a story and post it immediately. Somewhere along the line (I think it was in early 2010) I started using Scrivener to organize my writing, including blog entries. Around that time, I began developing my own editorial calendar for the blog. Within Scrivener, I keep a list of ideas for potential future blogs. Sometimes I just write two or three words, and that’s the entire document — I have a document that says “West Texas slides” that has been in my idea queue for months. Other times, I jot down a few more notes than that. Or a more detailed outline. Or a full post. It just depends on how fully formed the idea is when I get it — and how likely I am to forget it.

I don’t always plan ahead, though. Sometimes I get an idea, and I need to post it within a day or two because it’s so fresh and important to me (like Badger Mountain Sunrise). Sometimes I need to get the conversation out there, get some feedback from others, just let others know what is on my mind and heart that day.

Rarely, though, do I write an entry and post it immediately anymore, for a couple of reasons. One, I think it’s good to let things sit a while before broadcasting them. I don’t have an editor, just me, so sometimes I need the distance of time to help me realize that certain sentences need to be rephrased — or that entire entries need to be scrapped.

The other reason is purely practical. I’ve read in several places (and I’ve seen from the evidence of my own blog stats) that people read blogs, check Facebook, do online stuff in general at certain times of the day more than others and on certain days of the week more than others. So, I typically write a post in Scrivener, get it all formatted and nice in WordPress, and then I schedule it to post automatically on the day I want it to post, usually every Tuesday and Thursday. I schedule it to post on the website between 5 and 6am Pacific time, and then I try to be online to post a link to the entry on Facebook between 8 and 9am Central time. That way, the link is up when people are checking Facebook during the morning in Texas or on the east coast. My blog stats tell me that 50-70% of my traffic comes through Facebook on the days when I make new posts, so those links are important. Because, after all, my point in posting these blog entries is to get people to read them.

As I said in my summer reading post, I’ve picked back up on reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I’m remembering now why I put it down in the first place. She has some really thoughtful essays on writing and creativity that I enjoy and find to be motivating, but she also gets a little too Zen a little too much of the time, at least for my preferences. Anyway, I love this quote from the book and feel that it sums up my life right now:

“Now, let’s understand — writers do like money; artists, contrary to popular belief, do like to eat. It’s only that money isn’t the driving force. I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work. Think of it. Employers pay salaries for time. That is the basic commodity that human beings have that is valuable. We exchange our time in life for money. Writers stay with the first step — their time — and feel it is valuable even before they get money for it.”