What Else?: A conversation with Kate Hash

Pilates, parenting, and plotting things in Excel

All of my best writing ideas come in two ways: while in the shower, or while swimming.

I wrote last summer about how influential my daily laps are in my life. This year I’ve relied on them even more than usual. Blame it on the intense heat or the intensity of my job. Blame it on moving apartments and the economy and the government. Whatever the case, if I can’t go for a swim, I also probably can’t get a lot of my creative work accomplished. Or for that matter, professional work. I need the movement and the solo time.

I’m not unique in this experience. Lots of writers I’ve chatted with use exercise as a way of balancing their lives. But Kate Hash is the first who also finds as much joy as I do in solitude. Loners aren’t alone in their desires!

Kate’s debut novel Gracie Harris Is Under Construction explores grief and opportunities for second love. The namesake heroine loses her husband, then in an unexpected turn of events has an essay about his memorial go viral. With a new column and a book deal on her plate—plus her kids away at summer camp—Gracie escapes to the mountains to find her voice, where there also happens to be a cute contractor ready to help her renovate more than her vacation home. It’s a moving read perfect for anyone nervous about starting over.

This week, I chatted with Kate (who you can also follow on Substack) about her writing work as well as her day job. Turns out life is just figuring things out one “oh shit” moment at a time.

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What is something you do unrelated to writing?

My hobbies are almost exclusively movement related. I love to take long walks. I will also do Pilates classes. The house I’m in this summer has a rowing machine, which is super fun. It’s like running without having to run, which I hate. My full-time job in IT and this new career as a writer require me to be sedentary, in front of a laptop, with a screen bouncing at my face all day. So when I’m not writing or doing my day job, I’m moving my body somehow.

That idea seems to be a common denominator among writers. What kind of walker are you?

Half the time I’m going to have a playlist or a podcast. When I have music on, I’m usually thinking about my novels. There are songs that help me work through certain scenes, to think through plot challenges or characterization . Music to me is equivalent to thinking about the book.

The other half of the time is silence, which is a hobby for me. I live for silence because even though I work in IT on a computer, my job is very people-heavy. Plus, I have two kids and a husband. When I’m on a walk without headphones and I’m not thinking about my book, I can just let my brain be quiet. It’s such a treat. It’s probably the happiest I can be in that pure silence.

And that isn’t scary for you? So much silence… *nervous laughter*

I’m very introverted. I don’t think anyone prepared me for when you have kids how little time there is to just be with your own thoughts and concerns. So for me, it’s a treat. I think it’s very much lifestyle based, though. When I’m an empty nester, I might feel differently and that silence might feel scary. But for now it’s pure joy. And I will say sometimes I solve issues with my writing in that silence, or I come up with entirely new ideas. But the silence is where it has to start.

Do you find that you’re also thinking about other things during your physical hobbies?

Cardio is good for the body, but I hate running. I would sooner give birth again than go on a ten-mile run. What I love about the rower is it gets my heart rate up and gets me moving. It’s also an angry activity and requires a level of focus. It’s something I know I can do if I’m really frustrated, and I’ll feel better at the end. But I can’t hold an extended thought while doing it. Rowing is the one activity where I’m never thinking about writing.

You’re the first person I’ve interviewed for this column who’s a parent in addition to a writer. How is managing that balance?

It’s interesting. My first book I wrote when my kids were three years younger. We’ve always been a family that’s strict about bedtime, so my writing time was 8:30 to 10:30 every night. I wrote the first draft of my second book in January, and it was so different. The kids are older, they want to hang out more. My daughter is a teenager. She stays up later. My relationship to both writing and her is going to be different as I go through this process. I’m already working on the proposal for my third book, and I know when I sit down to write it in January, it’s going to be different. It’s forcing me to be more flexible with myself and my family because parenting always comes first.

I’m really lucky, too. I’m not going to congratulate a man for doing Dad-stuff, but my husband is amazing, especially when I’m copyediting and just need to be really intense. He’ll tell me to go to a hotel or to disappear for a few days. I can’t imagine doing it without that support.

On the upside, I feel grateful for every hour of writing that I get, because it feels like magic. And it also makes it so I can’t be precious about anything. There is no candle lighting, mood setting thing. When I write, I just sit down and do it.

Do you think being a parent has made you a stronger writer? A lot of my friends are at the point where they’re debating children, and as creative people, some are afraid to lose that part of themselves.

This is a very juicy question… I think being a parent unlocks a range of the human experience that is not available otherwise. Anyone can have a character who’s a parent, but I think being a parent means I have a different range of emotions that I can work with.

The concerns people have are extremely valid. When your children are young, you lose a piece of yourself. I don’t think people state that as bluntly or often as they should. What I would probably say to your friends is yes, that will happen for a period of time, and then you come out of it, re-find yourself, and there will be a new depth to your creativity that wasn’t there before. But there are no right or wrong answers, there’s just the life decision that you make.

Have the tighter time blocks made you more prolific?

My goal every night when I sit down with the laptop is forward motion. And the expectations I have on myself are reasonable as a result. If I can only write three hundred words in a night, that’s three hundred more than I had yesterday. If I sit down and I’m in the zone and I write 2,000, that’s also wonderful.

I plot, too. I’m willing to veer from it, but I have a spreadsheet with my chapters and what the main drivers in each will be. When I do a first draft, I don’t write in order. I just sit down and write the chapter that speaks to me. And then it hits a point at 60-70% into the book where I need to go back and start from the top. But when I’m slammed the way I am with my time, I need a plan. I think if I sat down with my own brain, I might start writing a different book.

You’re the first person I’ve spoken with who is also a spreadsheet plotter like myself.

For everything but my novels, things in my professional life, I think in PowerPoint. That’s how my brain has been trained. Excel for me is just how you map things and get work done.

Explain to me what your job in IT is and how you arrived there after being a child who wanted to write?

I was a journalism major in college. It was the early 2000s and journalism was starting to not be wonderful. I grew up very blue collar and knew I didn’t get a college degree in order to live paycheck to paycheck. So I went into digital marketing, which was exploding at the time. I also taught myself how to build websites as a teenager. I was a nerdy introvert and lived on my little computer. The jobs just kept getting more technical from there.

Now, I run a big part of the IT environment for UNC-Chapel Hill. It scratches a different part of my brain than writing. It’s also a very weird time to be in higher ed with everything happening in the country. I have a lot of excitement from my burgeoning publishing career and then the day job gets harder because of the outside influences.

Do you think having a job that’s divorced from books has helped you as a writer?

I don’t get bored. The work is so different. It allows me when I sit down to write not to feel like I’m doing more of the same.

I think my day job has made me a little braver, too, because there's financial security. I was really fortunate with my publishing deal and because I have a husband who works, I probably could’ve quit my day job, but I haven’t done that yet because I feel selfishly that it’s benefitting me. In a year from now, it could be totally different. My entire life and routine, even my hobbies, are structured around my day job. I’ve had days where I wake up and think I’ll do it today. And then other days, I decide to give it three more months. I have amazing colleagues. Almost all of us could do any job, but it’s the people you work with everyday who make you want to stay or not.

Let’s talk about your book. How’d you decide this was going to be the debut?

This is where we come full circle. The idea for Gracie Harris is Under Construction came to me when I was walking. There was a stage when I was going on a two or three mile walk, every single day. The idea just came to me. I would go on these walks, listening to my little playlist, and it was like a cinematic experience. I saw the story in my mind and then finally tried to write it.

I’ve been a writer my whole life. When I was younger it was short stories, and then in college it was journalistic articles. I lived abroad in Italy for four years and kept a blog. But writing a novel is entirely different. I didn’t know anything about the publishing industry, I just knew I was going to write the book for me.

I wrote the first draft over a summer. My kids were busy and my husband was working crazy hours, which was helpful because there was no expectation to hang out at night. And it was great. I wrote a ton.

It was after I finished the first draft where I thought it wasn’t terrible, and that I should probably do some research and editing. Now that I’m further into the process—I literally have a finished copy of the book on the table next to me—I’m so happy that Gracie is my debut novel. I think this is the perfect first story for me.

No one talks about the benefits of your partner giving you that space, either.

My husband will joke that my love language is leaving me alone.

Gracie Harris falls into the category of women’s fiction/romance. What attracted you to the genre and how’s your experience been in the community?

I didn’t even know women’s fiction was a term until I was doing my meetings with my agent and editor. What I love about the genre and all of the adjacent genres—thrillers, romance, romcoms—is that it gives you an opportunity to talk about really serious issues. You can get really deep in a romance because you know there’s going to be a happy ending. You’re also exploring the best of the human experience. In some ways it feels like a balm to the world to write books that are both serious and soft. I get a lot of joy from that.

I really love that with Gracie Harris I also got to really take a fine tooth comb to what grief looks like for a woman when you’re worried about everyone else. Part of her struggle is that she’s never going to be the center of her own world, until the summer where she can. What I also got to do with Gracie is to have a female main character who’s just a little older with a different worldview and different experiences than a lot of other characters.

I love this genre. Unstuffy is probably the way I would describe people who write romance, and the world needs more welcoming communities.

Kate Hash is a Chapel Hill, NC-based debut novelist who enjoys creating and consuming stories about dynamic women, unexpected relationships, and the complexity that comes with entering midlife. She has lived in Italy, run a business, and even appeared on an episode of House Hunters International (one of her favorite “two truths and a lie” facts). During her four years abroad in the early 2010s, Kate operated a popular travel blog and contributed guides to the much-beloved Design*Sponge. Kate is currently the Assistant Vice Chancellor for IT at the University of North Carolina and is mildly obsessed with college towns and the creative energy they produce.

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