Rebecca Henderson

It seems to be the thing to do in the blogging world to make a list of your top posts for the year — and since I need a little more time to put together my post on favorite books from the year, I thought I would go ahead and follow the crowd with this list. I think the list puts together a nice medley of the topics that I try to cover on this blog — writing, thoughts on life, and travel.

Starting with the greatest number of hits, here are the top 10 most viewed blog entries from 2011:

1. Ode to the Joys of Scrivener — Top blog of the year and of all time, thanks to a retweet on Twitter by the folks at Scrivener.

2. Couchless — You’d be shocked how many people type “couchless living room” into a search engine. My roommate brought a couch with her when she moved in in October, but I still find myself mostly sitting on the floor. Old habits die hard.

3. Capilano Suspension Bridge — A trip to Vancouver never seemed so terrifying.

4. New Project and Social Media Fast — The best summary of my current work-in-progress, West Texas Interlude, to be found on this website.

5. Pictographs at Paint Rock, TX — Glad to see another travel post in the top 10 (hey, top 5!), as well as one that was just posted five weeks ago.

6. How I Blog — Thoughts on the process of putting together these entries.

7. Shabby Chic — Another post on the furniture in my new apartment — who knew furniture was so popular? Maybe there’s an idea for a niche blog-in-the-making…

8. End of the Year of Spare Bedrooms — Wrapping up a year of writing on the road, transitioning to apartment life in Kennewick.

9. Caffeinated in the Northwest — Yes, the stereotypes about coffee and the Northwest are true. Thank goodness.

10. Refugee Mentoring — A look at volunteering with World Relief to work with Karen refugees from Burma.

Honorable mention goes to previous years’ posts Burmese Days: Shan Noodles, Marfa, and Burmese Days: Chaung Tha, which were actually the #2, 3, and 4 most viewed posts in 2011, thank you Google and other search engines

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 ate a piece of chocolate cake made by a 90-year-old lady who baked the 6-tier wedding cake for Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

No kidding. A few weeks ago, several friends and I were hanging out on a lazy Saturday morning, and the subject of grandparents came up. And one of my friends says, “I haven’t visited my grandpa and his wife in a while.”

“How far away do they live?” I asked.

“About an hour.”

“Oh, you should definitely go.” Pause. “I’d go with you.”

Pause. “Would you?” My friend brightened up a bit. “Yeah, you should meet Ruby. She’s a great cook — she baked Elvis’s wedding cake.”

Excuse me, what? And why haven’t you told me before now that the lady who baked Elvis’s wedding cake lives an hour from here, and she’s married to your grandfather? But I guess these things don’t always come up in normal conversation.

So, we called up Grandpa and Ruby and drove out to their house for a nice Saturday afternoon visit.

Ruby happened to have made a chocolate cake earlier in the day. Maybe it’s because we called to let her know we were coming. Or maybe she just loves baking cakes that much that there’s always one around. Either way, Elvis was right to have hired her as his wedding cake baker.

Ruby is a talker, and she’s got 90 years worth of experiences to talk about. I didn’t think it would be polite to pull out my notebook and take notes, but man, I wish I had. Or even better, wish I had brought along my voice recorder. Another day.

The best part of the afternoon was that it came during my social media fast. Any other time, I would have sat there on the couch, crumbs from Ruby’s chocolate cake still on the plate in my hands, one ear half listening to her fascinating stories of working as a chef in Las Vegas hotels, the other half of my brain composing a Facebook status to be posted 30 seconds after I got home and got on the computer.

Instead, I knew I wouldn’t be posting on Facebook any time soon, so what would be the point in silently composing a status? Rather than obsessing over the cleverest way to write a line that would gain me the most “likes” or comments of “no way! that’s so cool!” — I was able to be in the moment. To enjoy hearing Ruby’s story. And to think in bigger writerly ways than just a throw-away Facebook status. I could enjoy Ruby, and I could pay attention to her intonation, to how she would say things like, “Oh Janie, now this will stop your clock” before she launched into another story. To how she lowered her voice to say sweet things about Grandpa when he stepped out of the room. I walked away from the afternoon having enjoyed the day for what it was, not for the opportunity to get a one sentence post out of the experience.

That’s the reason I stayed off social media for a couple of weeks — to see if I could retrain my mind to think in the bigger picture, to get out of the habit of thinking in 140 character blurbs that are designed to draw attention. I don’t think Facebook and Twitter are bad, but I don’t want to lose my ability to think and write and express ideas that can’t be reduced to one sentence, ideas that will last beyond the next 48 hours worth of newsfeed.

And really, if you’re going to eat cake baked by Elvis’s favorite baker, it’s much better to blog about it than post a Facebook status.

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…

My mom flew into the Tri-Cities this week, and we’re leaving on Friday to drive to Calgary. It’s an 11+ hour drive, and Banff National Park is between here and there — so of course we’re not driving straight through in one day!

Once we get to Calgary, we’ll be joining a group from Texas to help at a kids’ summer program with a local church planter who is a long time friend, and then we’ll help with the children’s program at the Canadian National Baptist Convention’s annual meeting.

I’m taking a break from the blog until we get back to Washington. Everyone needs a summer break, right?

In the meantime, here are a few links to past entries you might enjoy:

Most popular in terms of hits: Thoughts on “Love Tells the Story”

Most popular in terms of comments: Refugee Mentoring and End of the Year of Spare Bedrooms

A favorite essay on glorifying God in our work: Whether I eat or drink

A favorite quote about writing: Other People’s Thoughts: Gilead

A favorite essay from Alaska: Berry Picking and Life

A favorite story about Lydia: Bat and Lydia’s Version

A description of a favorite spot in the U.S.: Guadalupe Mountains

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.

Three years of blogging today! According to my WordPress dashboard, I’ve made 282 posts and received 408 comments (not counting the ones I lost when I made the shift from my iWeb site, sniff sniff). Last year on my second bloggiversary, I wrote about the evolution of the blog to its current state. I mentioned that “Writing for the blog is a way that I can keep my confidence up on those days when the novel overwhelms me.”

I find that a year later, with the manuscript of my first novel in decent shape and ready for me to begin looking for a publisher, with a growing list of clients hiring me to do freelance writing work, the same still holds true about the blog. I love writing pieces for it a couple of times a week, love the freedom to choose my own topics and dictate my own editorial calendar, love the interaction with others that comes from the comments, love knowing that my blog is truly a success on my own terms. I don’t have a super high number of followers or commenters or daily hits. But I have a good amount for me, and I have the satisfaction of 282 posts of stories, reviews, essays, quotes, and other musings, all content that I have poured my heart into and am proud of as an accomplishment.

Thank you for joining me in the conversation. You do more listening than talking, but I always love to hear from you in the comments.

For years — no, decades — I knew on some level that I wanted to be a writer. I’ve always written, have stacks of filled journals to prove it. I have distinct memories of being outside for recess in the fourth grade and forming sentences in my mind, narrating my own experience as I played with my friends.

If I hadn’t been too chicken, I would have taken writing classes in college and gone straight into publishing afterwards. But I was terrified of a lot of things at that point in my life, and having my writing judged by others was the least of those things. It took 15 years’ worth of transformation by God to bring me to the point of not being scared any more. And so, I get up each morning and write. For a living.

Some days I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I want to write. This blog has been a good way for me to work through some of those issues. I can experiment a bit here, and I can talk through ways that I’m learning and growing. I’ve blogged about the nuances involved in being an artist who follows Jesus, and I’ve felt such encouragement from readers as I’ve worked on my first book (just the fact that I have readers is an encouragement!).

Since I’ve been doing freelance work to earn money for bills the last several months, I’ve encountered a new set of issues with trying to figure out who I am as a writer. I know better who I am as a book writer now, but what kind of freelance work is best for me? Grant writing? Web content? Newspaper? Magazine? Technical? Academic?

A few weeks back I was given some great advice by a potential client. We were communicating about my possibly working on the content for her photography website, and I knew that I was really trying to force the issue on the job. I really wanted it. But it wasn’t for me. In the end, after a few emails back and forth, she said that she thought I was a good writer and that there were clients out there who needed my skills — but our styles just didn’t match. She said that she had been working as a freelance photographer for many years now and that it had been a process for her, as well, to find her niche. But she found it. And now she doesn’t try to go outside of it. For one thing, she doesn’t do weddings — that’s not her type of gig. She advised me to find my style, my tone, my niche, not try to force it, and then set limits to what I seek to do professionally, what I will do professionally for those who want to hire me.

It was truly the nicest rejection I’ve ever received. I’ve thought about her words several times in the last few weeks, and I feel a great deal of freedom as I look at jobs now.

I wrote a while back about the lessons in faith that God is teaching me as I build a freelance business. I’m convinced now that, in addition to providing jobs for me that will pay my bills, God also really cares about the types of jobs I do. He is providing jobs (slowly, but it’s happening) that are interesting to me, that I get excited about. Jobs that I can sit down to work on and become so engrossed in that I don’t realize three hours have gone by. I enjoy my work.

Right now I have two main projects that I’m working on (besides the ongoing work of my book). The first is a fitness and nutrition newsletter for a website that will be launched later this summer. I get to make up recipes, cook, take photos of my dinner, and write about my experience as a runner. And I get paid for it. Seriously.

The second is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity that came up a couple of weeks ago. I’m writing for a group of local home builders — a couple of them came up with this cool idea to start a magazine, something that would feature beautiful photography of local homes, and they did an online search for a writer and found…me. I love that I get to work with a group of people who just started with an idea, a dream, and then figured out a way to make it work. And I love that I get to interview people in the community, that I get to write profiles of local non-profits, that I get to be involved with a magazine in such detail.

One of the things they said to me in our first meeting was that they were looking for creative collaborators who have fun with their work, who have a passion for doing their work. Passion and fun. Our work really should involve those two things.