Fall isn’t always about Pumpkin Spice everything.

It seems the last few years the Fall has become a season of transitions for me.  I’m not really sure if it has anything to do with the moon, the stars, mercury retrograde or things like that, but I’m sure my friends who know more about that will be happy to tell me, but when I opened my facebook memories this morning there was this post from exactly two years ago today that confirmed my opinion of Fall and transitions. This is what it said:

“Today I sit at the 2017 version of a typewriter and start to bleed. The characters are 98% done and now onto an outline. 

Every day I have self-doubt about writing this book. It is so easy to for me to stay safely tucked inside the comfort of my little box and pushing myself out of that box is hard, really hard. I feel vulnerable like I have an open wound, and someone is standing in front of me with a container of salt, ready to pour. 

I keep repeating stories in my head about people who started new careers over 50 and tell myself I am no different. Through the years I have become a master of reinventing myself and each “new” me has been better than the last, so who is to say I can’t add Author to that list? No one, no one, but me and I’m not going to that to myself. 

So here we go, week two of writing something more than my blog.  I feel a little like a blind person moving around my house after someone has rearranged all the furniture.”

Two years later I’m fulfilling orders of that very book (in case you’ve been living under a rock, you can order that book here.), listening to Facebook Live sessions with other authors telling myself, yes, indeed, Gina you did it, you ARE a writer.

After I read that Facebook memory, I started to think of my past few Falls, this is how they all shake out:

August 2012: I began Culinary School

September 16, 2013: I opened my bakery

August 31, 2014: I closed my bakery, because of medical reasons and the very next day I started this blog. Although the name has changed from Now What The Fuck To Do, which described my mood that foggy day after I closed, this little blog has evolved into what it is today, my words written directly from my heart.

September 2016: I started my touring “career.”

September 1, 2019: The official release date for my very first book, Frank.

If we are going to go WAY back, September 15, 1991, is when I became a mom for the first time and then October 15, 1992, I became a mom one last time.  My point is, the Fall is a season of transitions for me and as I sit here on my couch, in my apartment in Nashville, thinking about packing my bags in less than 20 days to head back out on tour, I am embracing the Fall and all her transitions. I’m trying to change from that person who dreads change with all my heart and morph into a person who realizes change is going to happen whether you are on board with it or not so you might as well roll with all the new things that it can bring.

I am also going to embrace the writer in me. If you know me or have read my blog for a while, you know how I struggle with calling myself a writer. But yesterday, when I was listening to a Facebook Live episode with another author, an author of 8 books, she talked about her when she was writing her first book. She was afraid to call herself a writer, and I was astonished, here was someone who wrote eight books and still, sometimes struggles with calling herself a writer. It was a statement that made me feel at home. Like I wasn’t the only one out there who had doubts.

So I’m going get out my comfy sweaters, lift my Pumpkin Spice Latte, and toast the Fall and all her new transitions.