Welcome to the third episode of Around the Writer’s Table: Conversations on Craft, Creativity, and Conscious Living! 

This episode is the final entry in our “meet your hosts!” triptych, featuring an interview with Melody, a Scout, who is the author of the book, Soul of the Seasons: Creating Balance, Resilience, and Connection by Tapping the Wisdom of the Natural World. She took nine years to write and edit this book, which she started during her time training with her plant spirit teacher, Eliot Cowan.

Melody shares with us a bit of her journey to becoming a published author and a lot about how the concepts of the five seasons and plant medicine intertwine with learning to live a creative live.

Expectations are premeditated resentments.

~ Robert Ohotto

Ep.03: An Interview with Melody, A Scout – TRANSCRIPT

0:02
Dave Hogan (Gina’s Pop!)
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

0:38
KimBoo York 
Welcome back to Around the Writer’s Table, and this week, I’m KimBoo, introducing the episode. We’ve got a really interesting episode lined up for you today. I’m really happy that we’re finally getting to this point, because I’ve been looking forward to it. We are interviewing one of our co-hosts yet again, part of our whole plan to get you familiar with who we are and what we like to talk about. 

Melody, A Scout is going to be giving us some insights into her own writing process, her views on writing as a creative endeavor, and wrapping that into her experiences with plant spirit medicine, which she is expert in. We’re going to get into that a little bit too and also talking about her experiences writing her book Soul of the Seasons. 

So a lot lined up on deck, I want to get to it as soon as possible, because we have some great questions for her. So I’m going to hand it over to our other co-host Gina Hogan Edwards. She’ll give us a little bit of insight into herself, and then we’ll just hit the ground running and get on with the show. Gina.

1:47
Gina Hogan Edwards 
Thank you, KimBoo. It’s great to be here today. Glad to have you all listening, I too have been super excited about this episode, to be able to introduce you to my friend Melody, A Scout, and for you to get some insights into the process that she engaged with in creating her wonderful book Soul of the Seasons.

So, Melody, the first question that I have for you today, I’m always really curious how writers first got into the practice and the process of writing. How old were you? Or what were the circumstances around you first deciding that you are going to be a writer or wanted to be a writer?

2:37
Melody 
So this is a curious question for me, because honestly, I really didn’t do any serious writing till I was well into my 40s. But when I looked back on it, I remembered being fascinated with the writing portion of my homework in grade school. I love the way my handwritten words felt on the paper, and that was really cool to me. I remember that spark about it. But I never thought I’m going to be a writer when I grew up. 

So the other time when I looked back was when I was in high school, and I was one of the writers on the school paper. And I even had a dream back then of being an investigative journalist. And that – poof – went by the wayside with marriage and babies and all that. And I just rediscovered that recently, of that long dream I had. So I would say it’s been hanging around me for a long time, but waiting for me to really be in the place where that was the craft that I wanted to pursue.

3:55
Gina 
I get that completely. Like you, that calling, that urge, desire, need – however you want to frame it – I felt was always swirling around me, and like you said, the circumstances had to be right. The timing had to be right. The inspiration had to be right. And so I’m glad that the inspiration hit you when it did. I have another question related to that. 

4:08
KimBoo 
[gasp] Two questions in a row? I’m not sure we can deal with that, Gina. 

4:12
Gina 
Yeah, I’m going to let you take it and I’ll come back to mine.

4:16
KimBoo 
All right, I’ll go ahead. So I’m kind of diving off of the urge to ride in into something else completely different but related, which is what your book is about, Soul of the Seasons. It is an explanation and a deep dive into your experiences with plant spirit medicine. And one of the things I’ve noticed, that when we talk about it, you just say, “Well, you know, and then I decided to study plant spirit medicine,” and it’s kind of like, “And then the Fire Nation attacked.” 

It’s like, just out of nowhere, you decided to devote your life to this. Okay… so I really want to know, what was the inspiration for you to basically give over to this very thing? You did intense study. This wasn’t like you got a book at a bookstore. You went and studied it. So give us a little bit of background on that and the reason you committed to it the way you did.

5:12
Melody 
Well, thank you for that question. And so “the Fire Nation attacked” actually is the perfect answer to your question. Because I did feel at the time, I opened a door when I read a book called Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan, that I stepped into a journey I could not step out of again. And recognizing that, as Eliot was fond of reminding us, “Everything has to do with everything.” And how he taught us, you know, I read the book. I said, “I’m gonna go find out about that, what that means,” because I’ve been a plant-lover my whole life. I’m a gardener. I’m a landscaper. I’m a landscape designer. Like, I can’t get away from plants. And if you want to get me going and not shut me up, just ask me a pointed question. 

6:19
KimBoo 
I’ll vouch for that. Oh, yeah, yeah.

6:21
Melody 
But this was something, a totally different approach. And Eliot based his plant spirit medicine practice on the Five Element medicine, which is an aspect of traditional Chinese medicine in its approach that says everything in life has a specific quality to it, a specific season to it, a specific color and tone. And those all rotate and go through their cycles throughout your life and your relationship and your jobs, and everything in life. 

Like the earth, everything in life is subject to the seasons of the earth. And so, in our inner lives, in our inner landscapes, we are also subject to the seasons of life. And that fascinated me, because I knew from when I was little, everything was connected. And I could see these patterns that connected nature with other aspects of nature, and how the trees and the plants work together, and how the wildlife depended on all that, and how we depend on all of the rest of it. But until I studied plant spirit medicine, I didn’t have a container, to hold that wisdom and to understand it in a way that made it not only satisfying intellectually for me, but it was grounded and practical. It made sense to me. 

And, honestly, I was still in the middle of my two-year training course, which was very rigorous, when I started to write Soul of the Seasons, because I thought the message was so important, not only for myself, but for the world.

8:25
KimBoo 
Really changed your paradigm of how you viewed the experiences you were having at the time?

8:31
Melody 
Oh, absolutely. It brought me a lot of comfort and peace, to be honest with you. Because I couldn’t make sense of: Why did this happen? And then when that happened, why did that happen? It all brings it all together and like, Oh, of course! Of course, spring moves into summer, and the element of wood moves into fire because it’s fuel for the fire, and why I feel angry, but then why do I feel happy when I let go of my anger? Ever heard of makeup sex? She had some wood on the fire and now you’re making up. So it all helped me make sense.

9:10
KimBoo 
When you put it that way, yeah.

[laughing]

9:17
Gina 
I had the privilege of being Melody’s editor through the process of getting that book out into the world, and Melody and I had so many conversations about the writing process as we were working through the revisions together. And so, I’ve got a million questions that I could ask you that I know that the listeners would be really interested in hearing about. And I think that some of those we can touch on in some of our future episodes when we’re speaking about the seasons. But one of the things that I know has come up, when you were first doing your book launch and as you’ve talked to people about the book is you wanted to take the information that you learned in your plant spirit medicine studies and distill it down to the things that the average person could use to apply to their own lives. And I think one of the challenging pieces of that is helping us understand the natural seasons compared to the seasons in our lives and recognizing that these are not necessarily running in parallel with each other. So can you speak to that a little bit?

10:33
Melody 
Sure. So if I’m understanding you correctly, for instance, if we’re in spring, you’re not necessarily coming up with things that have new beginnings and working through anger issues or setting good boundaries, and all of that, things that go in the season of spring. And that is true, because these seasonal passages, our seasonal passages, are ongoing And to be honest, they’re all going at the same time. If we are stuck in any one season exclusively, we will create imbalance. And so even in nature, however, there are seasons within the seasons. The season of spring is very different coming out of the January thaw than it is when it moves into the heat of summer. There’s a different space in there. 

Now, as far as going through these passages at the time of the year, I will have to affirm for myself, as I have been immersed in this medicine now for over 10 years, that I am going through some personal life passages in those particular seasons. And I think it is just a way of becoming at one with the natural world that we are all a part of. 

There’s a lot of joy in spring for me too. It’s one of my favorite seasons. I love the new growth. It’s like a Christmas present every day when I go outside and see the plants and “Oh, this one’s blooming and that one’s got new leaves and I can cut this back.” It’s all filled with joy for me as well. But each season has something to teach us. And when we are in balance, we hold all those seasons equally, all moving with each other. I don’t know if that makes sense to you.

12:51
Gina 
Yeah, the main thing that I wanted the listeners to understand because again, when this was first coming out and you were first starting to talk about it, I know that I got questions from folks about, “Well, you know, it’s spring right now. Outside it’s spring. And so shouldn’t I be feeling joy? And I’m not feeling joy.” And that’s because what’s going on with them and their inner landscape is much different. They’re in a different season internally than what’s going on in the external world. And that happens. There’s not a defined parallel consistently with that.

13:30
KimBoo 
Is it also possible? I mean, it sounds like it is, but I’m new to it. I did not help with the editing and the birth of this book. So I’ve read it as it has appeared, to be a complete work. But that there may be different elements of your life that are in different seasons? Like your love life may be in one season, but your relationship with your families might be in another season. And your career. And, I mean, is that part of the idea of this?

13:59
Melody 
Well, to be honest with you, I think we’re often connected to the seasons in all areas of our life as it’s happening, but we just don’t recognize that’s what’s going on. I mean, it’s very complex. It’s elegant and beautiful, but it’s a complex system, just as how nature works is very complex. There’s lots of layers to it. Everything, the little bacteria and mushrooms and they support a whole bunch of other things which support a whole bunch of other things. And then the weather has to do with it. There’s a lot of layers to what’s going on at once. And the thing that it helped me understand was the complexity of our inner lives and to accept and understand that. And the mystery of it is really a big factor too, accepting the mystery. It’s okay that I don’t understand all of it.

14:58
KimBoo 
That’s hard for people to know. Like, people want solid answers. Yeah.

15:03
Melody 
Yeah. They believe that once they understand, somehow that magically makes everything better and, poof, the problems go away. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience. I actually never have. I’ve gotten understanding on a lot of things early on. And it did not save me from going through the difficult passages. I didn’t get to skip over them. I didn’t get a free pass to the next section of life. I still had to do the work. I know.

15:48
KimBoo 
That’s hard. Dash all my hopes right there. But this actually leads into, I mean, I appreciate Gina asking that and putting us on this particular path in this conversation, because that does lead to my next question. And I know you got a peek at this question. So hopefully, you’ve got an answer already to go for me. But you do talk about the interconnectedness of things, and how the seasons affect each other. I thought your example of the spring being different in early spring than what it is in late spring, you’d say that of every single season. But I do wonder, how did that affect you as a writer while you were writing the book? You think of all these interconnections and all the different things that you had to say and trying to write. Because I think a lot of writers like us tend to get into that place where we get overwhelmed, because everything is connected, and it all matters and everything’s just very important. So what did you do? How’d you handle it? What was your thoughts on it? 

16:53
Melody 
Well, the Fire Nation attacked!

[laughing]

Had I known – this is happening with more of my writer friends than I know – had I known what this would ask of me before I started, might not have jumped in with both feet quite so enthusiastically because it couldn’t help but work me and show me where all my imbalances and misperceptions and misunderstandings about life, about my relationships, about my work, about my own value and self worth. It just peeled back the layers and showed me exactly how things were. Anybody who’s been through those life passages kind of knows that is really baptism by fire. 

It landed with such a deep anchor inside of me. The medicine did. I realized recently, I just absolutely fell in love with the medicine when I met it. I never had that kind of relationship with a modality before. And I was hooked. 

I went through shit. I moved five times during the writing of the book I had, was uprooted constantly. I lost 75 percent of my income within the first three weeks of starting my two-year training process. So I had financial challenges the whole time. And I kept saying and I kept praying about it every time it would seem to be a new obstacle, a hoop to jump through, “Are you sure you just don’t want me to go be a gardener somewhere? I could just do that. I’m okay, really.” I’ll have to get the big message.

19:13
KimBoo 
I’ll eat salad. I mean, things are great. What more do we need?

19:16
Melody 
Yeah, I’m good, really. And the answer would always come back, “Don’t you have a book to write? It doesn’t cost anything to write.”

19:27
KimBoo 
Does it though?

19:32
Melody 
Yeah, dollars. “And look! All this free time you have because you’re not employed any longer. You don’t have an excuse.” So I don’t know how that answered your question. But yes, it worked me over in a significant way and changed me.

19:51
KimBoo 
I think it addressed the question because I was asking you about the interconnectedness and how that you related to that while the writing of the book, and I think your answer is really talking to us about the experience of writing, in general. I think a lot of us have been through that exactly, where you’re feeling changed by the material you are creating. And yeah, that’s the very definition of interconnectedness, I think.

20:19
Melody 
I mean, it was both – what’s the word I’m reaching for – it was grounding to me to learn this and work this. And it was also uprooting, but the groundedness was much stronger. I mean, you know, when you know, when you know, and when you are connected to truth.

20:37
Gina 
In some of our future episodes, I know we’re going to talk more about these individual seasons that we go through. But I wondered real quickly, just for folks who might not be familiar with Five Element theory and plant spirit medicine, to share with them some things from the back of the book, just to give them a better perspective of what your book and what your work is about. 

So just briefly: Soul of the Seasons offers timely and practical ways to gain fluency and the language and the expression of the emotions, create powerful ways to correct old patterns and form new habits, build inner trust, resiliency, and self confidence, find and embrace your authentic self, and identify and shift emotional, psychological, and spiritual blocks. 

So what you do in your book, Melody, is distill down these teachings from plant spirit medicine from Five Element theory, even from practices like acupuncture, if I’m not mistaken, and apply these to our emotions to our inner landscape to the existential experience that we’re having here on this planet.

21:58
Melody 
Absolutely. And going back to, circling back to the question at the beginning, it’s hard to give your ninety-second elevator pitch about plant spirit medicine. 

22:15
KimBoo 
I keep trying to get you to do that.

22:16
Melody 
It encompasses–  I know! And I could just say, like Eliot used to, “Everything has to do with everything.” End of story. But its richness and diversity and complexity is also what drew me into it. And it is gentle yet powerful. It is subtle but awe inspiring. And so I do get tongue tied. And you know, honestly, I don’t know how it all works. It’s pretty amazing. The plants don’t tell me everything. They tell me some things, but they don’t tell me everything. And I’m okay with that. That is one of the, I think, biggest improvements in my life: I’m okay with not knowing everything.

23:16
KimBoo 
Comfort zone that you have to kind of work yourself into everything. 

23:19
Melody
Yeah.

23:21
Gina 
So I think it would be useful for listeners to know the timeframe that it took you to write the book.

23:28
Kimboo York
Oh, that’s a good one. 

23:29
Gina
As you share about that, I would love to know what your favorite excuse during that process was for not writing.

23:39
Melody 
Wow. How long do we have? So my favorite excuse, depending on where my line of sight landed, could be cleaning, organizing, which I’m terrible at and I hate. But suddenly, you know… Eating. I needed to cook, I needed to cook huge meals. I was alone most of the time, by the way. And, you know “Squirrel!” Whatever it was, I found myself self-distracting from the process at hand. It took me nine years, over nine years, from when I started the book to when it was in print. When it first started, I thought I’m just gonna write an outline. This will be a great little booklet. Six years in I’ve got over 100,000 words and, holy crap, you aren’t going to be able to carry this home from the bookstore. So that was a big challenge for me.

25:01
Gina 
I was curious if… because your life has been so enriched by nature, I just wondered if sometimes, In the guise of research – like we can often go down rabbit holes – if maybe hiking or just being outdoors, especially since you were in a place at one point where I know you had a lot of weather changes and snow and that kind of thing. So I wondered if sometimes the outdoors were actually a distraction for you in terms of your writing?

25:28
Melody 
Well, I tended to think of them that way. Because, in my organizational mind, I thought, I’m going to write. I’m gonna get up. I was in this lovely farmhouse. It was quite isolated. And in rural Maryland. It was winter. There was lots of snow. And I kept thinking, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna write. I’m gonna get up, make coffee, write X amount of hours, have lunch, take a break, write again. This was going to be my schedule. 

I have always been horrible at discipline and schedules. It’s not how I roll. And absolutely, the outside would distract me. However, I find everything has to do with everything. And that if nature is calling me, I need to answer to that. So we had just gotten a lovely 12-inch snowfall outside the previous day, gorgeous, beautiful snowfall. And in the morning, it had cleared off, and it was dazzling. The sun on the snowflakes out there, just begged me to come out. And so I went out. I said, “Okay, enough with schedules. My soul is calling me to do this.” 

So out I went, and I trudged along, in just the wonderment and awe, and went was a curious mind. And let go of the judgment of not getting in my writing hours. Yada Yada. And that experience taught me about death and life. I included a chapter about it in my book, in the season of winter. It was a profound experience for me to listen to what my soul was calling me to do. And it strengthened my writing and made it better, I feel.

27:35
Gina
Beautiful. 

27:36
KimBoo 
Yes. And being friends with you and talking about writing with you has really pushed me in a lot of ways to be more accepting of those kinds of experiences, where… I don’t want to say necessarily letting go entirely, but letting go of expectations, letting go of the guilt, the feeling of obligation that, oh, I should be doing this. And I should be doing that. And, of course, there are times in our lives when we absolutely should be doing something that maybe we don’t want to do. But a lot of times for writers, I think that’s self-imposed. Unless you’ve got a book deal and a deadline, it’s self-imposed. It’s like, I should be hitting this many words a day, I should be on chapter seven, but I’m only on chapter five. Talking with you about the seasons has taught me a lot about that. Because when I’ve run into situations where I’m feeling forced, or I’m feeling very, I don’t know what… a bottled-up energy, like getting ready to explode, I’ll just think: maybe just step back and see how you’re really feeling about this instead of just layering it over with these external or even internal expectations. 

So it’s been a very valuable experience for me to hear about your experiences with writing this book, because, I know a lot of writers will look at that and go like, “Nine years to write a book.” Well, sometimes that’s just what’s gonna happen. Sometimes you can write a book in six months, and sometimes you can write a book in 16 years. It’s just a matter of what the creative process is happening inside of you. So, just to say that I’ve really valued learning that from you as we’ve gotten to know each other.

29:19
Melody 
Well, thank you so much, Kimboo. 

29:21
Gina 
I would like to build on that too, in terms of some of the things that I have learned from being around you and around your knowledge of plants and your experience of plants, and helping me appreciate what we have in the physical world in terms of nature, in a much more deeply appreciative way than I used to, and also acknowledging the wisdom that the plants hold and what they have to share with us. And, also, the inner nature that we have, what KimBoo was talking to. Both of those things have enriched my life from knowing you, but I especially want to acknowledge that connection with nature that you’ve helped create for me and how much it has begun to inform my own writing process, giving myself permission to be in nature and the quiet, and connecting with the plants in a way that I would have never known how to do if it hadn’t been for experiencing you and the information in your book.

30:32
Melody 
Well, thank you both so much. That really touches my heart because that’s part of my personal motto and goal in life. It’s my goal of medicine, and my teaching, is to inspire others to be better and do better within themselves and live within their own integrity. So that’s really wonderful to hear. One of my favorite authors and teachers Robert Ohotto said, “Expectations are premeditated resentments.”

31:11
KimBoo 
Oh! I don’t like that. 

[groaning]

31:21
Melody 
Well, so…

31:22
KimBoo 
I think that quote’s going on the show notes.

31:25
Melody 
Yeah. And I think also, they’re creativity killers. I mean nothing puts a damper on your creative process more than placing huge expectations on yourself. One of the most exciting, for me, aspects of plant medicine – this actually was instilled in me by my parents – is having an open, curious mind. And I do that best with plants, because I’m always like, they’re my little friends: “So good to see you again. And look at you. Oh, I love what you’re doing here.” But how often do we look at our personal challenges in life with that same curiosity? You know: “Oh, look at you being frustrated today. What do you think that’s about? What do you need? Really? What would land with you and feel good with you, concerning that frustration? What is it trying to tell you?” 

When I had my big expectations going back to that writing period in the wintertime, I was willing to look at what was calling to me on a deeper level. Nothing wrong with having goals. There’s nothing wrong with having schedules. I don’t have to function optimally that way. And I certainly wasn’t functioning on a schedule that day. 

And how many little gifts, I think these insights that we receive and these gifts of creativity, how often do they happen when we let go of having to do it any specific way? And maybe even let go of writing for the moment? And just go out and give your brain a chance to be open in your mind to be open and be curious. I’ve gotten inspiration from my writing from a lot of different, seemingly unrelated sources. Not only talking to my artists, friends, my writer friends, but viewing art, viewing beauty, even exercise. There’s a lot of ways to open yourself and be open to what that gift is. And I think we miss a lot of opportunities. In the past, I was more likely, when I was feeling frustrated not adhering to my schedule, I’d double down. 

34:05
KimBoo 
Oh, yeah, I don’t know what that feels like at all.

34:08
Melody 
Yeah, let’s do more. Let’s just pound, work harder.

34:14
KimBoo
Go harder!

34:15
Gina 
I’m really glad that you brought up this particular aspect of the conversation because I feel like one of the most important qualities for any writer to have is curiosity.

34:28
KimBoo 
Absolutely. Yeah.

34:29
Melody 
Absolutely. Curiosity about everything. Be curious about your illness. Be curious about your pain. Be curious about your mother-in-law that drives you nuts.

34:37
KimBoo 
Oh, that’s a lot to ask now. Come on.

34:41
Melody 
If you’re looking at it with, from non-judgmental eyes and when you go out to look at nature, you don’t go, “Oh, how come you’re not blooming yet? How dare you have a leaf that color.” We’re not that way. We’re not that way with our pets and we’re not that way with nature. But we sure are with ourselves.

35:07
KimBoo 
Oh, yeah, I feel called out about that. For sure. 

35:11
Melody 
Oops. 

35:13
KimBoo 
I like how we’ve moved into the process because I do have one more question. It’s a little bit lighthearted, given some of the deep things that we’ve talked about. But I think it’s important because there’s so many variations and like you said, we don’t judge plants or our pets. My pet, of course, is perfect. I don’t know about anybody else’s. But how we process our writing itself. And, I think we’ve made you sound a little bit like Thoreau out at Walden, walking through nature, writing your book with your fountain pen in your hand. But I know that’s really not, I know that handwriting has been a part of it, but also writing on the computer. The act of writing for you, how does that work?

36:04
Melody 
Oh, that depends on the day. I will say it’s a little different in each season.

When I’m writing my first or second draft, I’m all excited, I’ve got all these ideas bubbling up. And so I sit at the computer. I don’t hand write a lot of this, I’ll hand write outlines and other details, make notes. But when I’m writing my first draft, second draft, I am thinking way faster than I can write by my hand. So I just go on my keyboard and things fly, and I’m excited and it’s put down easily. Then when I move into the next season, that would be spring, is the new growth bubbling up. The next season is summer, and that’s where you start into the revisions. And you take a look, step back, and you take a look. And what does this need? It needs a little propping up here. It needs a little pruning there. Needs some watering and fertilizing. So that’s like, maybe third, fourth, fifth drafts in there, taking a look at that. And then when I move into harvest, I’m getting closer to that time, and there’s almost no tweaking to be done. It’s full but it’s not completely finished. I give it to beta readers and then allow them to give back to me something of value that they have received or make suggestions. 

From there, I take that valuable information into the season of fall. I go into the revision process. And I was very wise to hire Gina as my editor to help me. This is not my favorite part of the writing process. Gina helped me a lot with this. And, you know, a couple of times, she’s like, “Take a break, go away, come back.” Very wise advice, and then, “Go in, get it done, get out.” She would say, “Don’t read it over again,” because I have a habit of being a perfectionist. So I would change it this way, change that. Nope, that’s not the time to do that. It’s time to get it out the door into the material life of the book. The final revisions which have been challenging to me, but Gina helped me focus, trim away what wasn’t essential to the message and then keeping the core of what is really valuable and keeping my goal in mind of what I wanted to offer when I wrote the book.

Then moving into the season of summer, you have let this baby go out into the universe. There is some grieving to that process. Postpartum, book launches is a thing. And I hit it pretty hard after the book came into print, and I did a small tour. I needed to give pause. 

Then coming back into the season of winter again, then these, it’s the season of death. The death was the letting go of that old book. But when I was writing the book, all these little seed germination of new ideas, I could write a book about, I could write a book about this. So we tuck those away. They get planted back in the ground. And so during the season of winter, those little seeds started gestating and germinating. And as with the garden, not every seed that lands sprouts. Not every sprout lives to be a seedling. And if you’re a gardener you cull sometimes. You see which one has more promise for life to it. Then you start again in the season of spring, and bring that to life, and give it body and structure, and give it legs again.

40:08
KimBoo 
What a great overview. Fantastic, and I think what a great lead-in to what our future episodes are going to be about. Gina, I know you’ve been thinking a little bit on how we’re going to approach this. So if you can let our listeners know what they can expect out of the next few episodes where we go a little bit more in-depth with Melody about this.

40:27
Gina 
Yeah, I think it’s going to be a pretty simple, sequential process through each one of the seasons. We’ll talk about spring and how that’s a time for us to remember our visions, to set boundaries, to make quality decisions, and we’ll talk about this in terms of how that affects writing and the writing process, and our own inner development and landscape.

40:58
KimBoo 
That’s just going to be the start of the whole cycle where we’re going to go through every season in this podcast. So that’s going to keep us motivated through the rest of the year ourselves. I think now we’ve hit a good number of topics for today. Melody, do you have anything you want to shout out there into the void before we wrap up the podcast officially?

41:21
Melody
I just want to thank both of you for not only engaging with me on this interview, but also being my support. Gina, for a while through the grueling process of writing the book and Kimboo, more recently, and connecting on a deep level about the love of our craft and other fun and exciting things. And I’m so looking forward to talking more in future podcasts. There’s just so much exciting material that we have to offer you on each phase that will help support all our writers and any creative person. This applies in any aspect of creation. I’m so looking forward to it.

42:12
KimBoo 
I am too, honestly, which is not something I would have thought about this topic if you’d asked me a year and a half, two years ago, but I’ve seen the value of it, and the lessons that you’ve taught me. So I’m really excited that we’re gonna go in-depth on this, moving forward. We appreciate you listeners for joining us today, whichever day this happens to be that you’re listening to this podcast. And we encourage you to come back to future episodes. I think there’ll be very engaging for you, learn a lot as we learn. It’s going to be a joint process. And that’s it. I think we’re done. Have a great day.

42:48
Gina 
Thank you, everybody.

42:49
Melody 
Thank you.

42:55
Dave Hogan
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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Around the Writer's Table and its co-hosts, Gina Hogan Edwards, Melody, A Scout, and Kimboo York own the copyright to all content and transcripts of the Around the Writer's Table podcast, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity. ​​You ​are welcome to share an excerpt from the episode transcript (up to 500 words) in media articles​, such as ​​The New York Times, ​Miami Herald, etc.; in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., ​​Medium); and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided you include proper attribution and link back to the podcast URL. No one is authorized to use the Around the Writer's Table logo, or any portion of the transcripts or other content in and of the podcast to promote themselves.