Guest Post Up at The League!!

Check out my guest post: Is This a Kissing Book? at The League of Extraordinary Writers today, in which I discuss (you guessed it!) kissing, action, Twilight, and why I like it when authors show dialogue :D

Stranger To Myself

I wake up at 8am each morning. I just got back from a half hour walk. Like, you know, for exercise. I've been making my bed every day. I ate vegetables for lunch today.

It's official. A stranger has invaded my life or I've been body-snatched!!!

Well, that, or I just moved to a new city and am at this very straaaaaaaaange transition period in my life! And I've finally found a medicine that, for the first time in A DECADE, helps my CFS and allows me to exercise without it putting me in bed for a week. Soooooooo. That's weird. I push my body with exercise... and it doesn't push back. I only need 8 hours of sleep at night instead of 10-12. I was always the kinda girl who woke up at noon.

I'm just so awake and have energy and keep active most of the day. Part of my freaking identity has been inevitably composed in large part by my illness and its limitations. I can't really tell if I'm happy or sad. All my rubrics for understanding the world and my happy-o-meters have been thrown out the window. Dragos and Joseph are still in Romania. I don't know a person in this city, other than online friends, who I'm slowly trying to meet IRL ;)

But I AM being productive. I do feel a bubbling creativity that's pouring into my writing. I go to the corner cafe and read some of my "deep thinking" books each morning. Then I write/edit for a few hours. In three days I've gotten through half my edits.

I come home, rest a little. Maybe go to the store to get more to set up the apartment. Read more. Eat vegetables with rice. At sunset, go for a long walk along the river, the sun shining through the giant leafy trees along the Mississippi. The trees make a canopy over the walkway. It's all so freaking green. There was a cool breeze blowing through my hair as I walked!!!! I just left 105 degree Texas last week, so yeah! the weather here just adds to my bizarre feelings, a little alienation, a little adventure, a lot STRANGE. Albert Camus talks about the Absurd as "an actor without his setting." Yes, I feel like that--like the stage crew stole off with my setting when I wasn't looking!! I'm trying to construct a new one, toss a little structure together in this chaos. Hence the bed-making and routine-creating, I think :) 

I have no idea who I'll be on the other end of this when I'm able to articulate an identity in words again. But I'm optimistic about good things--both good things coming, and good things now.

All Alone in the Big City!

I've been here in Minneapolis a total of 5 days, maybe 6? I've lost track, but it's definitely been one of those weeks that feels longer than normal weeks do. I went and got lost in the city trying to find a bookstore today--always the best reason to get lost :-)  I broke out my street map and found myself again, eventually found the bookstore too. I've been here 5 days or whatever, and I've been to three bookstores and one library. Shocker, I know ;)

Then I went for a walk this evening. Did you know the Mississippi river runs right through Minneapolis? I didn't, before I got here last week. And our apartment is seriously two  blocks from the river. I went out walking on a path along a high up bank. So much greenery! Giant old trees, and the sun was setting through the branches as I walked. Then a nut from a tree fell and landed on my head and I just laughed and laughed. Absurd world we live in! *yes I know I probably looked like a lunatic, laughing my ass off and rubbing my head as I walked down the sidewalk*

It's so bizarre not to know a single person around me. Dragos and Joseph are still in Romania for another week and a half, and it's seriously whacky being so on my lonesome. Not sad really, just STRANGE! At my old coffeeshop where I went for years and wrote my book (and the three starter-books before), everyone knew my name and I knew theirs. I had in-jokes with the baristas. We hung out sometimes outside of the coffeeshop.

Here, I've been frequenting the same cafe every day this week, but I'm not feeling up to being gregarious and trying to introduce myself. This is the first time I've moved to a new place without some mechanism in place to get to know people, like school or a church or a job. I don't know how grown-ups get to know each other and make friends without these things. Guess I'll learn and start coming up with some inventive ways!

In other news, I am being wicked productive on line edits. After two days, I'm 65 pgs through the 300 pg draft, and I gotta say, I'm SO EXCITED about what's happening with this edit round. I may not be the most objective observer, but I feel like MAGIC is going down with this draft! I read the notes from my editor or see how she tweaked a line, and I swear it's like SHE INVADED MY BRAIN and plucked out exactly what I meant but hadn't expressed well! So yeah, every edit round I get more excited about how having a great editor can really shape up a book into something excellent and exciting.

How I Want To Live: With Passion & Compassion

Every new day brings so many new experiences since I've moved. I swear I haven't felt this kind of unbridled newness and adventurousness to life in years, maybe since I was a teenager. It's like, after a certain amount of time as you get older, you just stop expecting things to change. You settle into a routine. Even decorating my new apartment feels liberating--not just decorating with the old things you've always had, maybe they didn't match or weren't quite YOU, but they were there, so you just keep moving them around.

But we sold or gave away all our old ugly furniture when we moved. I've been buying little bits here and there everyday. A nightstand, a table, a bookshelf. I bought a rug today that is the kind of rug I always wanted to have--lime green and a little funky. I'm obviously invested in making the outside of my body reflect my inner personality :) but this is new to me--having my living space as a conscious form of expression as well.

And I've been reading, reading, reading. A mixture of awesome YA books and then other books that help me, well, learn about the world and how to live in it. Mainly Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, and Natalie Goldberg. Today I bought Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and started reading through some of it. I find a lot of overlap and interconnection with these writers. Watts talking about the problem of alienation and personal identity, Campbell discussing the "art of living," Goldberg with her delicious view of the world and our fabulously chaotic 'wild minds', and now Camus talking about the question of whether life is meaningless or not, and what the role of artists might be in this world. Certainly part of me seeing all the interconnectedness and relationship of ideas between these authors is my intuitive self making meaningful connections. But still, so many people and writers and authors are all asking the same questions: does our existence have meaning? how do we create meaning? what is life about? how do we live in a dynamic and fully participatory way in this world?

On the road trip with my brother, we spent a lot of time talking about stuff like this. I was able to distill my hopes for my life in a way that I think encapsulates it clearly: I want to live passionately and compassionately. I want to be passionately excited about what I do each day, and I want to love and care for others.

Here's a little of Campbell to whet and delight your appetite:

You really don't have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that's not a wasteland, some of field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia--a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you--a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish [...] Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy.

What you have to do,

you do with play.

The Week of Whack

This week I moved from Texas to Minnesota, from a smallish college town to right smack in the middle of the city, and oh yeah, I had some health problems hit the day before I left that made everything more... interesting. My brother helped me roadtrip up from Texas, he left yesterday, and today was the first day of being alone in a new city. By myself. It's both stressful and so amazing I can't put it into words.

I do believe this place will become my new haunt: Seward Cafe, part of what appears to be a large community co-op. There's this amazing grocery store too that's part of the co-op. Super cool, lots of hipsters inside with great hair and tattoos, chilled out atmosphere, they discourage cell-phone use and there's no wifi. Sometimes it's nice to go analog, old school, and watch the squirrels and birds in the garden out back, read a book and write in your journal instead of on the computer. And the food: to frickin' die for. I had an omelet this morning that seriously made me want to lick the friggin' plate!!!!

It's a place that will be ideal for writing I think. No distractions. Lots of peace and quiet. Greenery. I caught some peace there this morning, sitting quietly for a few hours, drinking bottomless coffee from those fabulous thick diner cups. Catching back up with myself that had been all whack during the moving week.

Muscles I didn't know I had are sore from moving stuff around in the apartment. I'm setting up this great nook in my apartment, lazy-boy chair right by the window with this gorgeous view from my 13th floor. I look around this still pretty empty room and think: "huh, when I say home now, I mean this place. this strange place in the middle of a city. this place that feels like I'm just visiting will become home."

The world is whacky. Here's to embracing my new corner in it.

View from my bedroom window, crapo quality b/c I don't have a camera right now, just my web-cam camera! and my crazy-ball hair framing on the right side :-)

Taking Leave

I left Austin (moving to Minneapolis!) this morning to a beautiful sunrise and the Once soundtrack. Perfect combo of hopeful morning light and super emotive music :-)

Roadtripping w/ my eldest brother = fun times. A really good break from stress and craziness. We're in Kansas. The air is already cooler from sweltering Texas temperatures. We took a walk tonight after we got to the hotel and there was a veritable COOL BREEZE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shocking, I know!! Strange world, transition spaces, but I'm looking forward to what's ahead.

May B. by Caroline Starr Rose REVIEW

May B. by Caroline Starr Rose

This book is so beautiful. It’s the kind of book I would have loved when I was a tween (is that the term now? I’m so old, lol)—it’s got an intensity and seriousness to it, but it’s still so accessible. I’ve never read a novel in verse before and wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. I wondered if it would slow down my reading. Instead though, I think it made it swifter, while at the same time, some of the line breaks would add punch to thoughts, descriptions, or emotions.

This story is intense, un-put-down-able. This book enters loneliness and darkness and hope in ways that are just almost heart-stopping. Though set in the past, it’s one of those books that feel universal, that grabs you with its raw language, stark images, and-- even though it’s set in the middle of nowhere--it still has incredible momentum and tension.

May B. debuts January 2012 (Schwartz and Wade/Random House Children's Books). My thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this ARC.