Welcome to Fall! Here where we live in Florida it’s just barely dipping down below 70°F degrees, but that’s cool enough for us! In this episode we start to talk about Fall as a “season for writers,” symbolic of the emotions, triumphs and hurdles we experience working on our stories.

This is the first of a two-part series where we cover the balances and imbalances of the Fall season (see our worksheet on our website for a full list!) and discuss the core emotion of this season: grief. It usually manifests in the writing process as we let go of our work, either for editing or publishing, and not just the story itself but the process of creating it. It’s not all grim and terrible, in fact it is necessary as you move into a place of finding and nurturing the “seeds” for your next story project!

Ep.10: Seasons of Writing: Fall – TRANSCRIPT

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.

KimBoo York
0:42
Hey, y’all, it’s KimBoo. And I am welcoming you back to Around the Writer’s Table. We are working on episode 10 today, which was the first half of us discussing the season of Fall. And we’ll get into more details around that because it’s not just the actual Fall outside of your window, which we’re not getting too much of here in Florida right now. A little bit of a dip in the weather, but it’s not too bad. But we’re going to be talking more about the season as it affects your mental mind state. Melody’s gonna go into more of that for you. 

And I know a few of our regular listeners might notice that this episode is a little shorter than previous ones. We’ve had some talking going around, and we’ve gotten some requests that maybe shorter episodes would be more convenient for our listeners to listen to. So instead of giving you one long episode, once a month, we’re gonna break it down and give you a little bit shorter episodes twice a month. So you’re still getting all the content, just maybe breaking it down into a little bit more bite-sized pieces for you. So don’t worry, we’re not going to cheat ya outta anything. 

If you don’t know. My name is KimBoo York. I am a romance novelist and former project manager who helps writers and solopreneurs find time, mojo, and motivation to create whatever they happen to be creating at the time. 

My co-hosts are, one, Melody. She helps her clients find their sense of home by restoring balance and harmony to their lives through  plant spirit medicine and her book Soul of the Seasons, which is what ties into our topic of Fall for this episode. 

And then Gina Hogan Edwards, passionate about supporting women and finding their voices on the page and from the stage. She’s been doing a lot of work on that lately. 

So, as I said, little leeway intro, a segue intro. I know y’all it’s still early when we’re recording this. So I’m not sure I’m fully awake. But I’m gonna hand the reins over to Melody. She’s gonna give us our little overview on the five seasons for writers, as we like to do every episode so that people are all up-to-date. Even if you’re just joining us, you’re not gonna be left out in the cold. That was a Fall joke. I could hear everybody laughing in the background. And okay, thanks. Thanks, Melody, I appreciate that. See, my comedy routine needs work. And then we’re gonna go into more detailed explanation of Fall as a season for a writer. So, Melody, if you want to go ahead and jump on that overview.

Melody, A Scout
3:14
Thank you, KimBoo. And welcome to episode 10. So we started out, when was that? Back in March sometime when we started out with a season of Spring and Spring…

KimBoo
3:28
So that was actually, we recorded it in February of this year. Yeah. Came out right at the end of February, if I remember correctly. So that’s, we’re going on almost a full year here.

Melody
3:37
Wow. Wow. Yeah. So the season of Spring in our creative process is where all those new ideas that, those seeds that burst in Winter, are now sprouting everywhere. And we have all these new ideas for projects or new ideas for the project we’re working on. It’s where we have a vision of our works, we can see what it will become. And we invest time and effort into the planning and decision-making necessary to bring that vision to fruition. 

And from Spring we move, of course, into the season of Summer. Here’s where a lot of the production goes on. It’s where a lot happens in a short period of time. We are maturing our process. We’re getting that rough draft down. We’re getting even maybe the second draft in here, and it’s coming into shape with a lot of hard work. Take’s some oversight, to keep it in balance and keep it moving. 

From there, we talked about–this was our last podcast–about the season of Harvest. This is a brief season between Summer and Fall, and it is the season of abundance. It’s where we can appreciate and feel gratitude and satisfaction in all that we have created. And we have all the abundance, everything that we have created, and that moves us into the season of Fall. 

And Fall, of course, in nature is all about letting go. This is a season, if you notice in nature where you’re at, the trees do an outstanding job of letting go. They actually withdraw some of their lifeforce back into their roots to conserve the energy needed through lean months in Winter coming up. And they let go of anything that’s not essential. And this really plays into the next phase of our writing and creative process. Because at some point, we have to bring our writing project to a close. If you’re like me, it seems like that never happens. But I say I need to end it. And then the revision process, the process of cutting away that which does not serve the vision of our book. So we’re going to talk about the season of Fall today in the writing process.

KimBoo
6:19
And we as often do in these episodes, we go a little bit over how that is balanced and imbalanced. And this time, we’re going to start with what a balanced Fall looks like. And the actual topic for this episode in relation to Fall is letting go and I’m not going to scare anybody with that one. I think it definitely has a lot to do with the season of moving on from projects as well as critiquing. We’ll get into more of that later. 

But a few examples, a few things that signify a balanced Fall include: authentic spiritual connection, respect for self and others, accepts loss, finds value and meaning in life, appreciates and values others and self, holding yourself and others to high standards, appreciates discipline and structure…that’s a fun one for me as everybody knows…balanced respect for authority, and appreciating beauty and refinement, mental emotional and physical agility…which I know the physical part doesn’t seem to affect writing, but our physical bodies are part of our minds, so that’s an important one too…able and willing to forgive, recognizing talents and gifts in self and others, respects virtue and discretion. 

And that’s just a partial list. In our worksheet that we give out with each episode, we will be having a complete list of what a balanced and eventually imbalanced Fall looks like on that for your reference. But that’s just to get us started. 

So I’m gonna go to the expert editor, who, in our midst, and to talk about letting go in the season of Fall and what that looks like for writers. Gina, that would be you.

Gina Hogan Edwards
8:18
Hello, ladies. Hello, listeners. It’s great to be here today. I love this subject for so many reasons. Obviously, as an editor, the relationship to letting go and also to taking advantage of that abundance from Harvest are two aspects that an editor must embrace. I always tell my clients that I am simultaneously their cheerleader and their reality checker. And so a lot of times the cheerleader is about embracing the abundance and being able to celebrate all that they have created. And then the reality checker is the one who must institute some of the discipline around letting go. 

But I’d like to kind of look at the phases of our process, which in simplistic terms, you know, there’s the writing, there’s the editing and revision, and there’s the publication process. And in terms of letting go, if you look at the writing and editing, I kind of, there’s overlap obviously in what it is necessary to let go of. But I see the writing process as more a letting go of some internal things that are obstacles, such as our ego, our self judgment, letting go of that internal critic so that in the writing phase we allow our creativity to come forth and we don’t embrace the analytical brain of editing and revision too quickly. And then when you get to the editing process, you still have aspects of the inner letting go. That’s just, you know, inherent in the entire process. But letting go is very specifically, too–I mean, editing–is very specifically, too, about the letting go of the unnecessary things that don’t serve the work. So, you know, paring down your words and refining and doing the self analysis. 

And I don’t want to get too much into critiquing, because we are going to really focus on that in our next episode. But I did want to kind of delineate that, at least in my mind, and you all may see it differently and I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, that writing aspects of letting go in the writing process are deeply rooted in some of our inner work that we need to do, whereas the editing process is about the manuscript itself. 

What are your thoughts about that? And, you know, what the letting go process looks like at different stages. KimBoo, want to do that first?

KimBoo
11:14
Sure. Well, one thing I just would like, because Melody’s always hammering this home, you can be in a particular season at any stage in the process. So you can be in the Harvest season as you’re writing, as you’re letting go of these internal things like egos and your ID and your expectations. I’ve been fighting that one a lot recently, actually, my expectation of what my writing is supposed to look like. How it’s supposed to go out in the world. As somebody who’s been both traditionally and is self published, there’s a lot of change in the industry. And so I know that’s external, but my internal adaptation to that is very much along the lines of, you know, am I doing it right? Am I writing it the right way? And boy, that is suffocating to me, a lot.

And I think the external, when you get into the editing and the critiquing, as you said, we’re going to talk about the critiquing later, that’s very much a craft stage. And sometimes for me, that’s about letting go of what I think I know. I can be very proud, sometimes. I think I know best. And, you know, working with an editor, I often find that what I thought was the best way to approach something is actually, craft-wise, not the best way to do it, to tell the story that I do want to tell. And so there’s a little bit of ego involved in that as well, even though it’s more of an external type of letting go, of letting go of some words, of letting go of how I thought it was going to be structured, and changes like that. 

So that’s kind of my experience with it, in dealing with the issue of letting go through the writing process, you know, personally as an individual. Yeah.

Gina
12:56
And I’m glad you brought up the point about, we can be at any given stage seasonally in the process, in each phase of our work. There’s overlap. We cycle back through. So I appreciate you bringing that up. And Melody, I would love to hear your take on this since you are seasons expert, on the inner and the outer world.

Melody
13:21
Thank you, Gina. And thank you, KimBoo, for bringing that up, because that’s where my mind went to as well. In five element medicine, which is the system of balance and harmony that my book was based on, we are continually cycling through the seasons at all times. We’re never just at solely one phase. They’re all meant to balance each other out. 

And that, what I call my inner Nazi, my harsh inner critic, I find not so much towards my work, but more towards myself personally. “I should be getting this many pages done, I shouldn’t be going back and, you know, reworking something else. I should be more disciplined in my approach to my book.” And all the shoulds that I cram in on myself and my behavior and my methodology. And I don’t allow for time to just fully be myself. Nobody fits into one specific formula. We’re all uniquely different and so we have to work with what works for us, what creates balance and harmony for our own writing process. I think that’s important to remember at any stage of the game, but especially in the season of letting go. 

Actually, one of my chapters, I talked about letting go of some sort of disciplined writing schedule that I felt compelled to put myself under during the writing of the book. And if I had adhered to that so strictly, the actual next chapter that I wrote would not have presented itself or at least not in the way that it did. So, the willingness to let go of not only our precious words, but our own internal… I don’t know if I’d call them discipline as much as ideas…and they may be ideas of other writers or other people who are so-called authorities. “You should be having your bed in the chair every day, write every day.” Okay, that works for some people. That’s not my particular MO. And so when I try to do that, I can spend time just, you know, staring at the walls or cleaning my nails or something equally as important, because that’s just not how my structure works.

Gina
16:12
So you touched on something, the expectations, taking on the processes and or expectations that others either put upon us or we do this comparison thing. And we’re like, “Well, if that person is successful, and this is what they do, then perhaps I should be doing that, too.” So I wanted to note that particular one, because when we get to discussing the Fall imbalances specifically, I think that that’s something that we should circle back to in a way. I wanted to talk–no go ahead, KimBoo.

KimBoo
16:53
Yeah, well, I was just thinking, definitely, as Melody was talking, I was thinking, actually from my perspective as a productivity coach, the value of understanding how you work and letting go of those types of expectations. While, you know, Stephen King gets up every day at 4am and that’s how he wrote Carrie, just the legendary story of all genre writers. And, yeah, that’s just, it’s not individualized. It’s not being respectful to yourself. It’s not understanding your own process. And I think that feeds really well into the idea of a natural ecosystem, a natural turn of the seasons that’s true for yourself, as well for nature around you. So I was just gonna throw that out there.

Gina
17:41
So also, in terms of letting go, we’ve talked a little bit about the writing process itself, a little bit about editing and revision. And of course, there’s also the publishing process. And that is certainly a stage of letting go. And a couple years back, more than a couple, I wrote a blog post about several women who had recently published, and what their takeaway, what their reactions were to that process, how they lived through that process. And I found it really interesting that in both cases, each woman had sort of checked her expectations. 

Like one woman, in particular, said that she deliberately had set low expectations for success, not because her book was bad, but because she realized that she didn’t yet have a following. She hadn’t done any pre-marketing. And so in her mind, she was, you know, adjusting her expectations appropriately. What she recognized that she had not done, and we’ve spoken about this aspect several times in previous episodes, is that she gave herself absolutely no time for celebration. She did not appreciate the abundance that had occurred through the process and being able to really note what she had accomplished through that. 

KimBoo
That’s so important.

Gina
Yeah. So important. The other woman had thought that she had set no expectations. But she said she realized that she must have set them because she had gone into what she described as something similar to postpartum depression. She thought somehow after publishing her book that her life was going to change. 

And so I just want to talk a little bit about the grief that goes along sometimes with the publishing process, whether that letting go of the book is a letdown or a relief. Whether it can look something like depression or elation or something else. You all may have some different ways to describe that. So what has been your experience of that. Melody, I’m gonna go to you first.

Melody
20:15
Postpartum depression, it’s a real thing. And I was one of those people who, in my mind anyway, felt like I had set not real high expectation. I think it’s a secret wish of most writers that their work would be rewarded with some recognition, and translate into book sales and money. I think that’s a pretty realistic expectation. And the reality of that may or may not come to fruition. Or it may be, as some writers describe it, the 20-year overnight success story where it takes a while for people to catch on. Or maybe the timing is people were not ready to receive what you wrote, but they are coming into it. 

So I had spent, I think, close to nine years in the writing of my book. Gosh, it’s hard to believe it took that long. But it was very intense and demanded a lot of me mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. And all of the energy that went into producing it and editing and revising and revising and revising. And then you put your baby out there in print, and it goes out into the world. And your job, J-O-B, as writer has come to an end. And it hit pretty hard for me. More than I expected. I knew about postpartum depression with book projects. But that combined, it was timed right around the time that COVID hit as well. So there was a lot of stress regarding that. And I talked about this in our podcast on burnout, just how stressed and depleted I was after that. It’s taken me quite a while to recover from that. 

So it is a real thing. And then I think it happens also at every stage of the writing process. At every point, you have to let go of some cherished ideas, some new writing projects, new rabbit holes that sprang up during the writing process, and you have to, you know, file those into writing projects for later. We have to continually let go during our process of writing.

Gina
23:18
KimBoo, what about you?

KimBoo  23:22
I have to admit that, well, I guess the theme of being surprised by the post-writing, post-publishing grief is true for me as well. I think, for me, it’s less about letting go of the story and letting it out into the wild as it is–and this is gonna sound weird–but as it is letting go of the writing itself. Kind of like what you were saying before, Melody. It’s like the job, your job, is writing, and once the story is done, then your job switches to something else. Usually, you know, for professional writers, it becomes marketing and that type of thing. 

But I just really love writing. I just love being in the act of writing. And when the story ends, I always have other stories on deck. I’m one of those authors who’s always got multiple stories at some phase of development. And it’s not as if I can’t just stop and go start writing another one but that story has come to an end, and my writing of that story has come to an end. And I’m always shocked. Always. It’s like being surprised that Winter has returned at the end of the year. Wow. Who could have known? It’s only happened every year of your entire life. But for me, it is always a little bit of surprise, and I know we’re going to be going into the imbalances here as we get ready to segue into the next episode, but for me the endless, there’s an imbalance that’s called endless grieving and I kind of take that as how I tend to react. You know, once I fall into the grieving and realize I’m sad that the writing is over, I just kind of wallow in it. And it’s not any good. It’s totally not good.

Gina
25:08
Yeah, the endless grieving at the top of that list, obviously related to the challenges that we face in letting go. And I find it interesting, both of you spoke specifically about ending that process of writing and how letting go of the process of writing, which, some of the most sage advice that I have ever heard is that as soon as you finish a project already have something else that’s waiting for you. And, I know we could get into a whole discussion about how that might serve you or not. But one of the imbalances in Fall, in addition to the endless grieving is the inability to take on new attachments. And to me, that speaks to this idea of taking on the next project. So if you’ve got that Fall imbalance, then you’re not able to take on a new project because it’s something else that you’re going to fall in love with, and you’re going to have to let go of that too. Because our, each one of our books is a baby, and they go through their lifecycle, and then we have to let them go. And so we go into that endless grieving process. So we have this sort of cycle of emotion through the entire writing-editing-publishing process that’s just fascinating to me. Melody, is there anything you want to add to that before I touch on a few more of these Fall imbalances?

Melody
26:37
I do want to say it’s, I believe important both in life and the writing process is to make time for that grief.

KimBoo
26:46
No, no, I don’t want to. Nope, nope. Don’t we have something else to talk about? What’s next on the list?

Melody
26:55
Just saying. So. And if we can’t make time for that, it does carry over and makes it more difficult to enter back into the creative process again. This is true both in our personal lives and in our artistic endeavors. And when we don’t make allowances for it or we minimize it–”Well, I shouldn’t be feeling this way. Or I shouldn’t be feeling this way so intensely”–we’re minimizing the value of our work, because we only grieve things that we truly value. That’s one of the attributes of Fall is valuing our creations and our own talents and what we have produced.

KimBoo
27:48
That hits hard.

Gina
27:50
The resistance to the grieving process. And yet, when we allow that, that is what helps us create a balance. 

So speaking of balance and imbalances, I wanted to touch on a few of the Fall imbalances that really struck me and there is a long list that will be on our worksheet, but a few of the ones that sort of jumped out at me were the endless grieving that we mentioned, the inability to take on new attachments—and keep in mind, this is when you’re in an imbalance. Also, hypersensitive to criticism, which can come into play when you’re working either with your beta readers and/or with an editor. Perfectionism, being persnickety about things. Again, those are things that are related to an inability to let go. We get so attached to our words, and we want them to be so perfect that we work them and we work them and we work them and we work them. We try to make them perfect.

KimBoo
28:48
No idea, no idea what it’s like. Yeah.

Gina
28:53
There’s also deflecting or refusing compliments, which, you know, that could be a whole other episode. Overly dependent on authority, and that one jumped out at me again, because that is something that will come into play when you’re working with an editor. And I always warn writers, don’t take everything I say at face value. If it doesn’t feel right to you and your work, this is your baby. You know what’s right for it, what serves it better than I do. And I will make suggestions—and some things will not be suggestions—but a lot of things are, and you have the ability to override me. But being overly dependent on me to tell you that this is right when your gut is telling you that it’s not. You know, being in a balance in Fall, you’ll be able to follow that gut and not just take my word for it. 

So those are some things that just jumped out at me on the list of imbalances in Fall. So let us move on to getting ready for Winter. Don’t want to jump too far ahead into that since we are going to do our next episode on critiquing, which is also a characteristic in Fall. But Melody, I’m going to throw this to you a little bit. Just to give us maybe one or two things about getting ready for that Winter season moving from Fall.

Melody
30:23
So the season of Winter is a season of rest, quiet contemplation. It’s the season of death, coming into acceptance that we have had this loss. It’s also a season where creativity happens. Things are dark. It’s like they don’t call it the womb of consciousness for nothing. It’s a place where those little seeds that got sprouted earlier, perhaps in the middle of our last project, come to fruition. However, like nature, this is a season where all our activities come down to a bare minimum. In nature, it’s all about survival during the lean months. If the trees kept all their leaves and all their life force up in the tree—I’ve seen this happen as well. If you have a sharp frost, a hard entering of Winter, it can split that tree from crown to roots and kill the tree. Because it’s kept too much going, tried to keep too much of its life force going. So the importance of Fall is trimming away all the excess, is paring it down to the true essence of our vision that we had in Spring, and keeping only those things that accurately reflect that vision that we had. So that’s the importance of good editing and critiquing, and the ability to let go that which doesn’t really serve our overall project vision. 

Gina
32:17
Great. Thank you for that, Melody. So we are going to have a worksheet, as we have done in previous episodes when we have focused on each one of the seasons. And that will be a download that’s on our website. So if you’re listening to this on one of the podcasting platforms, go to AroundTheWritersTable.com. And that’s where you will find the worksheet.

Melody
32:37
Yeah, I’m going to include that. I’m going to include an exercise in there about finding a good container for your grief. So and, a ritual, some sort of ritual, because in our daily lives when we lose something, we lose a person, we have a ritual, where we honor that person, and we release them into their next life or the end of their life on this world. So I think that’s good practice to have to letting go things that were very meaningful to us. So I’ll include a exercise on that.

Gina
33:17
Excellent. So KimBoo, you want to give us a little bit of a peek into what we’re going to be doing in our next episode as we carry this Fall season over.

KimBoo
33:29
So in our next episode, we are going to be talking about critiquing, which fits into the realm we’ve talked about it a lot in this episode about letting go and how that fits into this season. We’re gonna continue with discussion of this particular season of Fall, as we’ve been analyzing specifically—let’s see if I can talk after talking this long—narrowing it down a little bit and talking a bit more about the critiquing process. Now, just a little bit of a heads up. This is actually going to be an intro to the next couple of episodes because we’re going to be going over it in the next episode. And then we’re going to be doing more in-depth dives on critique because this is such an important episode issue for writers, which I think we can all agree on. 

So gonna wrap it up this episode. We really, really appreciate y’all listening to us. Remember, if you’re on one of the podcast distribution channels, such as Spotify or iTunes, leave us a recommendation, a thumbs up, whatever that particular platform uses. It would really help with the fighting the mean old algorithms, but also go drop by our website, as Gina was talking about earlier AroundTheWritersTable.com to pick up our worksheet, which goes a little bit more in-depth on the balances and imbalances of this particular season, along with that exercise that Melody was talking about. So for episode 10, this is KimBoo signing off.

Gina
34:52
Gina, saying goodbye.

Melody
34:54
Thank you everyone for joining us and leave your comments and questions on our website. We’d love to hear from you on our podcast.

KimBoo
35:02
Absolutely. Thank you all. 

Melody
Bye.

Dave
35:10
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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