Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan (Melville, 2012), will unashamedly tell you that she’s lived with her parents four times. Her newly-released novel, a coming-of-age about post-college angst, is spliced with details from her own experience and speaks volumes to the plight of so many twenty-something’s undergoing a quarter-life crisis. Stein’s protagonist, Esther, is a recent Northwestern graduate suffering from the post-grad blues. While Esther’s narrative is bestowed with details from the author’s life, Stein’s story has a few twists and turns uniquely her own. I recently sat down with this up-and coming writer to talk about her writing process, moving in with the rents, and her obsession with Pandas. When did you start writing? Have you always known you wanted to be a writer?:  I started writing when I was in acting school because I was so exhausted; I was in all these emotional scenes and I was crying all the time… So, then I would go back to my dorm room and write short stories. That year it dawned on me that writing was a job.  So then I was like “I’m going to be a writer.” And that was eight years ago! So, you went to Northwestern? No, no. I didn’t go to college. That’s a long story, too: I moved to NY when I was 19 to go to acting school. I had one year of acting school and since then I’ve been to the New School for a year and now I’m at Brooklyn…

When I was a teenager, I was a little hurt when my mother commented that I was a daydreamer, as in “just a daydreamer.” Apparently I spent more time than my siblings sitting and staring off into space. If I were Catholic, I would carry a bit of guilt for daydreaming, but my mother gave me Buddhism, from which I learned that reflecting on things is not much different than daydreaming. In daydreaming, the controlling mind relaxes. There is no striving towards problem solving, but rather a contemplation of the options. However, as Erik Mueller says in Daydreaming in Humans and Machines, “…when one sees a cat, one is not overwhelmed with every idea and experience associated in some way with cats…” Even daydreaming can be selective. You don’t have to worry about your mind becoming so relaxed that random unrelated images bombard you. In random daydreaming, a person’s thought usually turn to fantasies about people, on whatever emotional issues with them are most urgent at the time. But it is also possible to daydream with an indirect focus. One can go into a daydreaming mode with a particular idea in mind. It is akin to solo brainstorming, and also shares some similarity with mindful meditation, which has been described as “paying attention in a particular way” by Jon Kabat Zinn, a longtime Buddhist teacher. It is also a technique used to help interpret one’s dreams. Night-time dreams have been known to offer profound truths, such as when Watson and…

While it is true that finishing the first draft of a novel is just one small step on the staircase towards publication, it also a tremendous accomplishment. It takes dedication, and even more so when the goal is to finish a 50,000-word novel draft in just one month, as many do by participating in National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo happens every November and has participants from all over the world. However, NaNoWriMo is more than just a cool writing event; it’s also a nonprofit organization. Their mission statement says, “National Novel Writing Month believes in the transformational power of creativity. We provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people find their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page.” On the NaNoWriMo website, writers can create a free account and use it to announce their NaNoWriMo novel, update their word count, and earn personal achievement badges. Furthermore, the website provides things like writing inspiration and encouragement from staff and published authors, a place to connect with the writing community through online forums, and a way to find in-person writing events in your own local community. They also have an active Twitter account, on which they post things to inspire, coach, and help writers along in their novel-writing journey. Even here in the Fox Cities and greater Green Bay area, we have plenty of NaNoWriMo resources and active participant groups. In Green Bay, the Brown County Library hosts regular write-ins at their central location every Saturday…