Shelby Bach's Blog

Today is my great-grandmother’s birthday. She passed away in 2012, but she would have been 104.

As a child, I would stay at her house when I visited Texas to see her and my other extended family. She taught me to embroider, to bake, and to make her very creamy, very strong eggnog, telling me to taste test it so many times that I got tipsy (then she giggled madly). She lit up when she had a child around to spoil and when she was pulling your leg. As I got older, she always wanted to...

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Two weeks ago, at Camp GLP (a weekend full of fun, wisdom, and play), the above sentence—delivered by Agapi Staussinopolis—stands out, especially as I get back in the swing of everyday life.

At a young age, we learn to compare ourselves to other people, often finding ourselves wanting. We are now talking more about how corrosive this is to our enjoyment and appreciation of our own experiences—and many of us are learning to stop that losing battle with comparison to others’ highlight reel.

Bu...

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Pictured above are ALL the drafts I needed to craft The Ever Afters series. I almost titled this post, “How to fit five and half years of work onto one coffee table.”

Click to view slideshow.

Each of the stacks are for one book, not in order. Feel free to guess which is which…and the slideshow will reveal which is which.

Not pictured:

copy edits and first passes manuscripts containing notes from my agent and/or editors the idea books
any of the marketing, promo, or presentations that accomp...

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Tend and Befriend is a concept put forward by Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., a psychology professor who challenged the accepted notion that our only natural responses to stress were limited to Fight or Flight. Dr. Taylor and her colleagues argued that under duress, women reached out to their young and/or their peers for care (i.e. “tend and befriend”). That connection actually LOWERED STRESS.

This is a science-y way of saying, “humans need each other,” which is my favorite kind of science.

As a...

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I’ve always liked Mary Oliver, even on the day my writing professor printed out one of her poems and invited the entire class to mock it. According to my memory (which admittedly has been known to change facts to make a story better), this professor even singled out one Mary Oliver poem for special insult. It was a poem I recognized—I’d hand-lettered, decorated, and framed it as a gift for my mother the previous Christmas. She keeps it in her painting studio to this day.

Ultimately, I decide...

As you may have noticed, dear reader, I took a step back these past two years.

I can’t tell you exactly what happened. (At least, I can’t tell you yet, and it may be several years before I’m free to talk about it.)

But I can describe what it felt like.

Thanksgiving 2015, it was as if I stood on a shore as a storm blew in across the sea—the sky dark, the waves high, the wind blowing as sharp as a knife. Safe on land, I watched a boat floundering, just beyond the breakers.

My family was on it.

...

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Sometimes, when I am very lucky, my life feels magic.

This week has been dreary in Charlotte—rain and gloom and just cold enough to shiver inside your raincoat. Naturally, I thought of that time in college when I got a chance to backpack around the U.K. solo. (The weather was often like this.) Specifically, I remembered that time I wandered out of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace and was like, Hey, Holyrood’s Park is right there. Doesn’t it have a place called Arthur’s Seat?

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The fog was thick. Y...

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This has been the picture on the background on my iPhone for the last two years. It’s my reminder to myself: stop, slow down, and appreciate beauty when I discover it.

What a luxury it is—in this modern age of convenient flights—to drive across the country. I got to do it twice, the second time solo.

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I took this on the second day of my drive from Portland, OR to Charlotte, NC last January. Daylight was a precious commodity. I had driven south to avoid the worst of the snow in my tiny car, a...

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Thursday, my mom said all the women in our family tend to be beach babies–we come alive near the water–and the men tend to be mountain men–they feel complete up in the beauty of high country.

It’s absolutely true for me.

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One of the things I miss the most about Portland is the proximity to the coast. It was easy to drop everything for a day trip to Cannon Beach. I did drop everything for ocean time, and pretty frequently too. The evidence is in the pictures saved from the four years in Orego...

I decided to create a blog.

You may be wondering why, because I already had a perfectly good blog attached to my website. Technically, I didn’t need an auxiliary one.

I come to decisions slowly. (For example, I’ve been thinking about this blog for roughly a year.) By the time I finally make up my mind, I usually have more than one reason for doing something.

So, here are mine:

The Pragmatic

I started the other blog in 2009 and kept it up through 2016, which means I’ve been posting in the same...