Autofiction: Letting Go at Launch Time with guest H.H. Rune

·55 min·3 clips

H.H. Rune says she wrote from “these are the lessons that I learned,” not character assassination.

Episode 181 begins with the hard part after the writing: letting the work go. Valerie Isan sets up the conversation around sending projects into the world, and the mood lands in that very writerly place where craft talk bumps into nerves, manners, and a little emotional cleanup. H.H. Rune joins in and makes one thing plain: her work is not built from character assassination. It comes from lessons picked up through environments, exchanges, and relationships. That difference gives the episode its spine. The hosts and Rune keep returning to the line between drawing on lived experience and flattening people because the story needs heat. Rune's book Find Me becomes the practical case study. Valerie asks whether the books are novel length, and that opens the door to how the structure works. It does not move down one clean lane. Rune describes three strands: author journal entries, memories, and the plain-font travels of the book itself. The front matter gives readers a cheat code for the italicized entries, bolded memories, and the book's movement from person to person. The format sounds deliberately unsettled. Someone finds the book, leaves it somewhere, passes it along, and the story slips into another life. That lets Rune bring in characters with different financial backgrounds, cultures, upbringings, and circumstances. Some move past where they started. Some do not. History enters the discussion too, especially in the second book, which touches lesser-known historical moments because people often assume they learned more history than they did. The episode stays generous, even when the talk brushes against relationships, social experiments, and the weird vulnerability of launching work. Near the end, Rune mentions putting a note on her website, the hosts wish her luck with the social experiment and the books, and the close feels like a small handoff to listeners.

As heard by us

A reflective craft conversation about release, structure, and what readers carry forward.

Writer Craft stays centered on the hard act of letting creative work go and sending it out into the world. H.H. Rune brings a grounded, thoughtful view of layered book structure, shifting voices, and the pull readers can feel toward characters.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a craft talk about sending work projects out into the world and being okay with it.

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