Big-Boned. It's Not Just a Euphemism.

I was wearing women's size 12 pants when I was in fourth and fifth grade and in 16's by 8th grade. None of that Junior's section crap for me either. Nope, it was Ladies 16's. And I felt fat. These were in EXTRA LARGE territory after all.

Because everywhere I am hearing about how we should be a size 6 or 4 or of course, a size freaking zero. Because those are the sample sizes they are making for models! So the theory is that if I could lose enough weight, I could one day be a size six or four. I could get to be a SMALL. If I worked hard enough. If I just lost enough weight!

Like a lot of teenagers, I became obsessed with my weight. I stopped just short of developing a full blown eating disorder, but the obsession of counting calories consumed most waking moments for a couple years there... and I only ever made it to a size 8. Which at the time seemed like failure. Why not 6 or 4?

I haven't thought about all this kind of crap in a long time. Went to college, met a dude, got married, got secure in my body, myself. Have gone up and down in body size. Last year I dropped a bunch of weight due to a migraine med I went on, I know, you all want to punch me. All this to say, randomly, I haven't weighed so little since high school. I haven't tried on jeans to size myself (I abandoned pants with like, buttons, a couple years ago, I just wear jeggings, yay, pajamas you can wear outside!), but I did decide to try a new style, so I bought a bunch of dresses off ModCloth.

I figured, hey, I'm skinny now! I'm probably a Medium.

Picture me: aglow to get my new coat from Modcloth. I have not purchased new clothing (other than aforementioned jeggings) in two or three years. I take the glorious garment from the box and slip it on one arm. And then try to slip it on the other arm.

Except it doesn't go.

I mean, it sort of goes. I can jab the arm in there, but trying to button the damn thing, well let's just say that sucker's not going in. It almost gets there. But even if I suck in really, really hard, it's not making it. Because there are these things called RIBS. And they're in the way. Because even though I'm randomly so skinny that my waist is basically just my f'ing RIBS, I'm STILL not getting into a Medium.

That's right kids, I'm STILL A LARGE. At the smallest size I should healthily be, I'm a LARGE. 

There was never EVER hope of me fitting into a size 4 or 6. Because my BONES wouldn't have fit. I'm only now realizing this at age 32. The bones of my hips would literally split the seams and not get into those motherf'ers. It wasn't the 'thunder thighs.' There are bones involved!

So I start looking around at my friends. Like the one who fit into size 4's. Like, measuring the width of her hip bones to the width of mine. I'm so skinny now my hip bones freaking stick out! And there's no way these suckers are fitting in anything smaller than like a size 10 or 12 pants now that I'm an adult!

Yet when we say we're big-boned, people laugh under their breath. Yeah, okay, they think. Just a nice way of saying overweight. And then I want to punch them in the face. Now I have proof! I'm skinny enough to see these damn big bones poking out, and they're just mother'fing bigger than all the tiny size 4's out there!

I wish we could all rearrange our ideas of SMALL and LARGE or somehow do away with all this shit! GAH! Because these size idealizations screwed me up so much as a teenage girl. I was only ever gonna fit into Large or Extra-Large clothes, and not because I was fat. This is such an f'ing revelation to me, now all these years later. I want to go hug teenage Heather.

Long story short, I reordered the dresses and coat in Large.

THIS IS WHAT LARGE LOOKS LIKE! OR SKINNY! OR WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT! I feel f'ing gorgeous, so that's what I'll call it ;)

An Open Letter To Christian Fiction

Dear Christian Fiction,

I really, really like you. In fact, after neglecting your genre for about a decade, I've been reading you like crazy, discovering all the books and authors I missed in the meantime. Seriously, I've read more than sixty books in your genre this year already. And tons more a decade ago when it was all I read. As someone who's been both inside and outside the Christian camp, let's chat.

First off, some of your books are really, really, like crazy good. Mainly any book by Laura Frantz (oh my gosh I'm obsessed with her books lately, pardon my fangirl) or Deeanne Gist, Tamera Alexander, Lisa Tawn Bergren, Melanie Dickerson, and Julie Klassen. Thoughtful books where the writer's aren't afraid to let bad things happen to their characters. Where there are good and bad people alike, and those lines aren't always determined by whether they are Christians or not. These writers are doing it right.

But here's my problem with you, Christian Fiction. When others writers among you paint the world as made up of THEM, ie, non-Christian heathens who are evil and immoral and driven only by darkness vs. US, the Christians who maybe make mistakes but always choose the right thing in the end, it makes me kind of sick to my stomach. It's not how the world works and oh my goodness I sure hope you know that.

And here's the other big thing that ticks me off: when you have God speaking to the characters all the time. Like literally a voice in their heads, in pretty italic letters on the page. Do you not get how painful it is to pretend that's the way the world, and God, work? Do you know how upset I was as a teenager because God never 'spoke' to me like he did in all the books I read and how I thought that meant I must be doing it wrong? And in such plots, God always steps in at the last moment so nothing bad ever happens to the characters. And I want to pull my hair out because BAD THINGS HAPPEN to people. And painting a world like this, where the Christians are always good and do the right thing and hear God's voice... it's just plain wrong and hurtful and destructive, to all parties. I mean it's not just you, it's Christian subculture too. Either way, I was so shocked and unprepared when real life hit in my early twenties. I was unprepared for life's squalls and storms because it didn't fit this picture I'd been fed of how the Christian life worked. I was shattered.

I get it, Christian Fiction, I do. You have your tropes the same way other genres like Romance or Mystery or even YA do. I don't even mind all the preachy bits because I understand, the point of this genre is you get to talk about God and have your characters talk about God. And I'm generally fine with a little wish-fulfillment fiction. I like happy endings as much as the next girl. I just have a problem when you ascribe it all to God and pretend this is how the real world works.

In the meantime, I'll keep on reading you, and just avoid the authors who trigger my gag reflex. Because I still enjoy you, Christian Fiction. I like that your characters have depth and go through big emotional character arcs, and I like the way you do your love stories in historical settings, and I like that I can read you without worrying about being assaulted by graphic sexy times every other chapter (which I still like on occasion, but not every single book where it seems like that's all the scenes are just wishy-washy character-wise, all driving toward the sexy times scenes!). And yeah. Like YA, I like that your books seem to have more time and attention spent editing them than a lot of mainstream genre books. Sometimes I even like it when you talk about God.

Still, please be on notice Christian Fiction. It's hard enough having faith in God in this world. Please don't muddy the waters with your wish-fulfillment on how you WANT God to act and give us a little more of how he DOES act, which more often than not, is silence, requiring faith.

Identity Crisis & Lust for Life

Because of some debilitating chronic health problems, two months ago, this was my daily routine: I would wake up, check email for five minutes because that’s all I could handle of looking at the computer screen, then turn on an audiobook, put a cloth over my eyes, and just lay there listening for hours. For days on end. For weeks. Just me laying in bed, listening. Unable to work at all or write or even watch TV. I listened to 26 audiobooks in the month of February, almost one a day, no lie.

Even though it was just a month and a half ago (I’ve been gaining more and more strength back ever since), it doesn’t seem real. The time had a dreamlike quality, even when I was living it.

It’s kind of throwing me into a weird identity crisis now that I’m feeling better. Which I guess happens to most people during periods of great change. Like culture shock, or when you went away to college or lived on your own for the first time, or get married. Suddenly you’re in all these new circumstances, surrounded by new people, and the patterns of identity that used to characterize you are suddenly all in flux.

The Buddhists would say this is probably an accurate picture of how life is, constantly changing, ever moving. That periods of stability in our life are really only an illusion, an attempt by us to wrestle control from an unsteady world.

And the past two years have been full of dramatic changes like that, often because of the ups and downs of my health. Two years ago I was the healthiest I’d been since I got sick a decade ago. I was able to drive, stay out all day, and come home and take a twenty minute walk. Then last year I crashed so hard I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks at a time. It’s enough to make a person screwy in the head, because sick-Heather is a different person than well-Heather. Healthy-Heather is a confident bad-ass with tattoos and pink hair. Sick-Heather is reclusive, meditative, and very, very quiet.

So, in spite of the Buddhists, I would really love for things to be stable and placid. I would like a period of rest where I continue feeling healthy and am able to work without interruption, and I would like to know that I can plan something a couple months from now and rely on the fact that I’ll be feeling well enough to do it. I would like to figure out faith and what I think about the world and have it remain stable. I’m tired of feeling like the floor can drop out from under me at any moment.

I want so many things. All these zinging firecracker desires.  I feel like the world of wants has suddenly opened back up to me, now that I’m feeling better and am able to do more things. I feel almost frenetic, I want to do ALL the things, ALL AT ONCE! The name of that movie about Van Gogh keeps pinging around my head: Lust for Life. Yes, I think, that is exactly what I’m feeling right now. Lust for life.

Desire strikes me as this deeply human and beautiful impulse. The Buddha might say desire is the cause of suffering, and that’s true to a point, but there’s also something explosive and beautiful-unto-weeping about wanting to gulp in the whole world and savor it on your tongue.

So that’s me lately: gulping it all in. And writing a ton, as if I’m making up for those months where I couldn’t write a thing by writing like a speed demon now.

Meditations on Illness & Zach Sobiech

It’s hard to read about sad things. I’ve been sick for twelve years, and lately, life has ground to a halt as the illness hits a new all-time low. Yet while I lie here struggling so much with being too sick to even be on the computer or watch TV, spending weeks doing nothing else except lying quietly in bed listening to audiobooks in the dark or simply lying still without anything to distract me for hours, I think often of my friend’s daughter’s best friend, Zach Sobiech, who is dying of cancer with only a few months left to live (his amazing song Clouds has gone viral in recent months).

I’ve never met Zach personally, so maybe it’s not my place to talk about him, but I’ll say a little anyway. When I’m this sick, it’s all a little groggy and the days pass in a kind of fog, which feels like a blessing. Then I think, these months which I want to pass quickly so I can start feeling better again, Zach must want so badly to pass slowly.

Through this protracted downturn in my own illness, I’ve come back to God after half a decade away. It’s a fairly quiet affair, coming back to faith. I’m tender-stepped and unsure. I’m not sure if I can believe that there is purpose in this, in my being bedbound or Zach dying. I’m sure there will be lots of people trying to come up with suggestions of how there is God’s purpose in it all. I have no clue if there is purpose in suffering or if that it is simply the way life works—some prospering and others sick and dying, apparently with no direction or design. I get mad at least when people talk confidently about God’s purpose in situations of suffering not their own.

So being with God in these long months of enforced quietness and solitude is less about finding any purpose in it all, and more about feeling the blanket of peace that comes occasionally in spite of all the hurt and anger and pain. Over and over in the Bible, God promises that, “I am with you.” I also like that Jesus’ path on earth was one of great suffering. It makes him more relatable. It makes me think that even down here in the shadows and depths, there is hope. For me at least, being with God is that joy that comes sometimes in the silence. Seemingly out of nowhere, when by all accounts I should be miserable, comes peace and even more strange, a strong sense of thanksgiving. No clear voice or sense of divine interaction or direction, just peace and joy where, according to circumstances, there should be none.

In Buddhism, there is a practice where, instead of breathing in peace and breathing out all the negative feelings to cleanse yourself, you do the opposite. You breathe in all the pain and suffering, both your own and that of others, holding it in for a moment, and then breathing out peace and loving-kindness to all who are connected by suffering. Sometimes when you hold it all inside, it’s such an overwhelming flood of hurt you think you can’t bear it. But then breathing out grace and peace and loving-kindness to the afflicted, to others and myself, feels like it changes something. Even if it’s only me that’s transformed. It’s where compassion is born.

I think this is the same principle when praying for others. I don’t know if prayers for others do anything other than help us grow in compassion and connect to God. I don’t know if they change anything externally, or actually affect the person we are praying for. Still, I think of Zach and everyone who loves him and I pray for them. I pray they have long moments of peace amid everything else in the upcoming months, and afterwards.

I think of the angels supposedly in heaven who do nothing but pray and praise God all day long without ceasing. I think of the centuries of monks and nuns from many faiths spending their lives in silence and prayer, and then I think, maybe that is the purpose of my own sickness— so that I can live a life of prayer and meditation. I remember I used to think that sounded terribly BORING, but now it begins to make more sense to me. Because as much as I might get angry of other people trying to deduce God’s purpose in suffering, I guess deep inside, I still want there to be one.

Anyway, listen to this amazing song by Zach and my friend’s daughter, Sammy. Every time I watch it, compassion wells up and spills over into tears.

Sometimes the video doesn't show up, so here's the link directly to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvSYZHmhIAM

 

You can find more about Zach here: http://www.childrenscancer.org/zach/

On Writing What You Know

I’ve been thinking about the kinds of stories I want to write lately – both because I wrote my first book outside the Glitch world in December and am looking towards my next few projects, and because I’m editing Shutdown, the last Glitch book (a book that I was really able to sink into and take the characters some intense and cool places, emotionally).

I guess that’s what I’ve really been thinking about: how to write stories that emotionally, readers can relate to or think, ‘hey, I’ve felt like that,’ even if I’m writing impossible and outlandish plots.

I often think the best books are ones where you can almost feel authors struggling with something on the page, whether it be a big question about life (see Gabrielle Zevin’s Elsewhere), or teenagers with cancer (John Green’s TFIOS), or grief (Nelson’s The Sky is Everywhere, McNamara’s Lovely Dark and Deep, Courtney Summers’ Fall For Anything), or an experience of being the mean girl (Summers’ Some Girls Are), or thinking about temptation and good and evil (like the ring in LOTR), or exploring an existential crisis about what it means to be human (Marion’s Warm Bodies), etc.

So because I’m trying to write emotionally resonating characters, and one way to do that is to write what you know, like Flannery O’Conner, my stories are often going to have physically broken people. People with the wooden legs or deadly allergies or other health problems that neither medicine nor magic can fix.

Any resolutions to these problems are going to be hard fought for, and will most likely leave the character very different than when they first started out, sometimes very battered. This is certainly true of Shutdown, when one character veered off in ways I didn’t expect. I had an idea of where the character would end up back when I wrote the synopsis two years ago, but the journey getting there was far more arduous than I first expected. The character dramatically changed as I wrote them, because I realized there was no way these circumstances wouldn’t change the person. I’ve experienced the way that life can dump things on you that you can’t escape, whether you see them coming or not. You can’t run away and you can’t pretend your entire life hasn’t changed. So you find ways to cope with it, both good and bad.

In the book I just wrote and the one I’m thinking of writing next, I’m tackling—in a very sideways manner—the way that circumstances and physical disability can intrude on your plans and dreams. And then letting it fly and watching how my characters react. In one book, the main character reacts by being furious about his situation, in the other, the MC is so accepting of her bad circumstances at first that she doesn’t fight back against them at all. In both cases, the illnesses are somewhat supernatural, but I’m exploring some things that very much resonate with me in real life, with the debilitating chronic illness I’ve fought with for eleven years. Anger and acceptance are kind of constant warring states in my head. I can write these characters so easily, because I know how it feels.

But these obviously aren’t just stories for sick people alone—in fact, I don’t think most people will even see this as a subplot when they read the books. Still, the question I most want to explore through my writing (and my life really) is: how do we find peace and joy through difficult life circumstances? Because this at least is universal—you will have difficult circumstances in your life, no matter if you are fifteen or fifty. You will encounter conflict and sometimes, you will suffer.

This is all the inside track though, the things going on in my head as I wrote. As I mentioned a moment ago, I don’t think any of this is explicit, you might not pick up on these underlying themes in these books unless you’ve read this blog post and remember it. After all, in addition to wrestling with these problems that create internal conflict for my characters, they are also all falling in love. Because well, in addition to wanting to explore some meaty life questions for myself, I’m also just a sucker for romance J

Anyway, all of this is a tool I’ve used to help me dig deeper with my characters. Too often we think that ‘write what you know’ just means we should write about external experiences we’ve had in our lives. Um yeah, if I stuck to that, I'd be writing stories no one wants to read about sitting on a couch for hours on end! But I’m learning that using ‘write what you know’ can really ratchet up your characters by infusing them with the emotional and mental dilemmas you yourself have wrestled with.

Looking Back & Looking Ahead

So New Year’s is a time of looking both back and forward. Back on the year that past, forward to what’s coming next.

 

Looking back: 2012 was a wicked f’ing crap-ton of a hard year, physically, emotionally, and work-wise. I experienced more health problems than ever before in my life, but I also wrote two books and took them through most of the editing stages, then for fun wrote another book entirely in December. I lost my love for writing, then powered through and eventually gained it back again. I faced deadlines and met each one. I’ve learned SO FREAKING MUCH about writing this year. It was a crash course, a dump-you-in-the-deep-end-and-hope-you-don’t-drown course, but I finally figured out how to swim (though there were a couple of times I was sure I was gonna drown). Btw, if you know a debut author, give them a hug, because the debut year all on it's own is a crazy intense and stressful thing.

Let’s see, what else? My eating habits have changed entirely due to the Meniere’s disease, so I consume only trace amounts of salt every day, drink no coffee, and drink no alcohol. I live pretty much like a little nun, sans the headdress and plus pink hair.

And best of all, I’m happy.

Looking forward: Lots of uncertainties that will make me crazy if I let them. The second and third book of the Glitch trilogy will be out this year (Override in Feb, Shutdown in July). But will they all sell well? Will readers like them? Will my agent like the new book I just wrote, and will my editor want to acquire it? Will this one exciting thing happen or won’t it, and will I be okay if it doesn’t?

My response to most of these is to limit my expectations and expect the worst. I know that sounds bad. I’m not actually a pessimist, but I prefer to expect the worst rather than hope for something so hard and then have the hope stomped on (especially after a year of lots of stompage!) Then if the good thing happens, I’m happily surprised. And when good things come, they feel more like grace, like things I didn’t deserve but was given anyway, and I feel a deep and profound gratitude. And when bad things come, I do lots of meditation and try to turn my sights back only on the day in front of me, which is the only thing I can control, and let the future worry about itself.

Up directly ahead on the docket is editing the book I just finished today, all the way up until edits for Shutdown come back from my editor. Then I’ll hand off New Book to agent man to see what he thinks, and lose myself in Shutdown edits for several weeks. Then turn those in, and go back to editing New Book with whatever thoughts and critiques agent man gives.

At least this is how I envision it working, but I’m certainly familiar enough with how life likes to intervene in our nicely laid little plans.

Either way, 2013 ought to be a far less stressful year than 2012, and I’m looking forward to good times ahead.

What are you looking forward to this year?

Grace

Last year I was at my most expansive in every way. I had health, a circle of friends, energy, and a vitality of personality that seems as foreign to me now as a country across the deep wide sea.

 

During my time of vitality, I was also making some horrible choices. Instead of being grateful for all the good things that I had, I kept grasping for more, like useless shiny objects in shop window I thought would make me happy. Doing things that hurt the people closest to me and pretending it was free of charge.

 

And then this year happened. It’s been a very quiet year. From January onward, my health got worse and worse due to my chronic illness and a new condition that cropped up which gives me intense vertigo, until all I could do was lay on a couch with the TV off, the lights off, not moving at all except to drag myself to the bathroom a few times a day. I could manage 2-3 hours of work on my laptop, and the rest was spent just waiting for night to come so I could sleep and get to the next day when I could do my work again. For weeks on end. For months.

 

Though the storyteller in me is tempted to call this year ‘a severe mercy,’ and create an elaborate narrative about why it had to happen in some fake but satisfying cause-and-effect plotline—aka, I was squandering the good in my life, so then I was humbled by debilitating illness so that then I realized all the blessings surrounding me and could be grateful like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol— the rest of me hopes that if there is a God, that’s not how he works.

 

But at the same time, I am grateful now for the many good things I still have, in spite of my ill health. Grateful in a deeply, profound way. I’ve been very alone but not lonely. I am married to the most wonderful, kind, and loving man who I'm not sure I deserve, and we have a beautiful, healthy child together. I have good work to do, a job I can do from home that I love. I’m grateful for what feel like moments of grace, where I expect the worst, and then something better happens instead. These moments have felt more and more frequent lately. I’m rarely mystical but the sense of peace, where in the past I would have felt only anger, seems to come from somewhere outside myself. If there is a God, this is how I hope he works.

 

After more than a decade of being sick, is this what acceptance really feels like? Finally being okay with tomorrow regardless of if it brings more sickness or more energy? Will writing this post shatter the peace I’ve felt, as if saying it out loud breaks the spell? Or does the wiser me bathed in grace realize that life isn’t so whimsical or dramatic as that, even if it sometimes feels like it.

 

I hope I’ve learned that fear of tomorrow has nothing to do with today, and that living today is all that matters.

Not Defined By Negative Space: My Thoughts on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

I’m a writer, but I still can’t figure out a way to write about CFS that doesn’t sound like your grandmother’s boring list of complaints about her latest ailments. You either have to be funny (which I can occasionally manage in social settings when I’m feeling well enough to get out, but am rubbish at when I write), or you have to weave a story that draws the reader in.

The trouble with that last bit is the kinds of stories you can tell about CFS. You see, the thing is, sick people don’t get to actually do much of anything. There’s no natural building tension that arcs up to a climax. Sick people are all dénouement. We live in the evening after all the exciting things have happened. We can recall back—remember when I was 19 and running around the city? Remember our first date where we walked to the beach by Navy Pier and ate Subway sandwiches, and I was embarrassed about having ordered a meatball sub because they are so messy to eat and I wanted to impress you? Remember when we walked back to the college and you held my hand because it was cold, but then you never let go the whole twenty minute walk home?

But now I watch movies about people who decide to change their lives—they go back to college, break out of old patterns, take up dancing or biking or reinvigorate their love life. And I feel like those people are aliens. The longer I’m ill (and it’s been over a decade now), the more separated from normal life I feel. It’s a foreign land populated by foreign people. I read about these people doing their exotic things like walking their dogs or driving to pick up their children from soccer. I watch movies where people fall in love and kiss in the rain. I get out of the house once a week and my husband drives me around and I see people jogging on the beautiful path by the river. And I stare at them thinking: I cannot even fathom what life is like for you.

 

I don’t want to be one of those people who is defined by the things I’ve lost. I don’t want to be the piece of art where all the negative space tells the story. But then there are days like today, where I barely manage three hours of work from my couch, and the rest of the day I’m all but catatonic, laying down and closing my eyes to still the spinning vertigo and resting my exhausted limbs. Days where I just want to scream at the top of my lungs at how crappy it is that I can’t drive a car, or get out of the house, or cook a meal, or contribute to the housework at all, or even read a book.

 

But the kinds of stories I want to tell have to end on a hopeful note. Even the story of my own life. So instead I’ll try to focus on the fact that some meds have allowed me that three hours of work a day, that I’m getting through my copyedits and will be done by the due date, that I get to be a writer and have a wonderful career that I love with work I can do from my couch, that I have a beautiful son and an amazing husband. And I try to remind myself that no matter the bad crap, this life I have is very good.

Waking Up & Great Love Stories

These last few weeks I feel like I'm finally coming awake after a long, long sleep. This is both literal and metaphorical. I've finally weaned myself off of sleeping pills that I'd been taking for two years, and I hadn't realized how much they'd been affecting my waking life until I stopped taking them. I knew I hadn't really felt passionate about anything artistic for a long while, but I thought it was just creative and physical exhaustion. My CFS had been kicking my butt since May and I've spent most of the summer stuck on my couch or in bed. And then there was the vertigo that completely immobilized me for a few weeks there.

BUT! So as to not go on like your grandmother listing off all her weird health problems, suffice it to say, physical therapy has helped the vertigo, the CFS has finally chilled out a bit, and life without sleeping pills has become suddenly more vibrant and alive in a way I hadn't realized I was missing until it has returned.

I find that my imagination is finally spinning again in a way that it hadn't for a long while. I've had three fully realized novel ideas this past month, wrote about twenty pages of each of them, and have settled on a project I feel so passionate about I wake up grinning I'm so excited to get started working on it.

I've also been watching a slew of movies that are full of the passionate ideals I'm trying to touch on in my writing. Most recently, Moulin Rouge, which is the perfect mix of ridiculous camp and stop-your-heart melodrama. I love me my melodrama. Those are the kinds of stories I love to devour as a reader and the kind of stories I want to create as a writer. As I was settling on the WIP idea I wanted most to work on, I was thinking about the kind of story I wanted to write.

First and foremost, I want to write a love story. And I want to write a love story about how the intersection of two people meeting and falling in love can change the entire course of their lives. This idea is near and dear to me: it's been my personal experience of love. I met the most amazing man on my first day of college, and our being together (through both good times and bad) has been the single most important factor in directing the paths my life has taken. I think about it sometimes--how very different our lives would have been if we hadn't met. I think about certain decisions and events that could have so easily happened a different way so that we'd never crossed each other's acquaintance. I've been married ten and a half years. A person is bound to change in that amount of time, and if you are very lucky, you learn how to change together in ways that continue to be compatible with one another. I've been incandescently happy in my marriage lately, but I think any great love, whether it ends happily or in tragedy, changes you, and those are the stories I want to read and write about.

Some of the movies I've been watching recently that highlight the kind of love that changes everything:

Deep Thoughts on Love... and Zombies

I find that the older I get, I become both more and less romantic. Less romantic in that I care less for romantic gestures. John Cusack with his boombox might strike out with me these days. But more romantic in the way that I feel more and more convinced, especially after a very rough last year, that finding someone you love and who loves you wholeheartedly in return can change the course of your life, and give the spice and emotional support to live it. Really, I don't think this is just about romantic love, but familial love and deep friendships too--people who are invested in each other and care for one another.

In literature and tv and movies, the story catalyst often hinges on love. A lone cowboy or gladiator is willing to change his ways and risk it all for a woman. A girl is willing to do anything, even if it means giving up her life, for the chance to be with her vampire boyfriend. In the Zombie apocalypse, like in The Walking Dead, love for the same woman is both a curse for one man, and a source of hope and will to survive for another. That show really makes me think sometimes. Apocalypse stories generally repel me, but that show manages to captivate me, both for the exciting zombie chase scenes, and for all the talking/feelings scenes. This season seems to be equal part of those.

Of all the supernatural stories, I can stomach zombies the least. Zombie apocalypse stories seems so hopeless, the hope for the survivors so thin. Inevitably someone you love turns into a zombie, and then you have to kill the one you love. And the hopelessness is so relentless. There’s this scene in one of Carrie Ryan’s zombie trilogy that sticks with me—the survivors are in a gated city, but the zombies just keep falling and piling up on one another until you know the pile of bodies will make a bridge up and over the gates. Or Libba Bray’s short story in the Zombies vs. Unicorns collections where the normally heartwarming parental sentiment—‘I will always come back for you’—takes on chilling secondary meanings. The scene at the end of that short-story, I can’t seem to shake, even though I read it a year ago.

I digress a bit, but my main point, which apocalypse stories and others highlight, is that the course and trajectory of your whole life can hinge on another person coming into it and love sprouting up. It’s not just apocalypse stories where love between two people gives the kind of hope to keep on keeping on. Real life feels like that sometimes too—this fight to keep your head afloat. Sometimes it’s hard to find meaning in the daily grind, but having someone who you love, having a family, provides this ground foundation that you build and nourish hope on. It’s the place where hope springs up fresh every day, enough to sustain you for this year and then the next.  I’ve been the fool in times past when I didn’t see that, but I see it now clearly, and hold tightly to the ones I love.

Some days are...

... a kick in the pants. Today was just one of those wicked tough days, both for me and my husband in our respective pursuits. He's in his first year as a PhD student, and I'm just a little in limbo trying to figure out where this book is going to go, and some days are well, the kind that kick you in the pants!!

But what this post is really about is how super lovey dovey I feel for my husband. So tonight we were both kind in downs-ville, bumming about our fears of failure and all the things that could go wrong, and awhile later he stops and says: "but the most important thing in my life is you, and we're good and that makes everything else okay."

At which point I turned into a happy sobby mess and hugged him hard. He's right though. Sometimes life just feels really f'ing tenuous you know? This this last year made me realize how life's crazy and hard and if you are lucky enough to find someone solid, then you're one of the luckiest f'ing sobs on earth. This is a man who has put up with years of my debilitating sickness, tons of other bs, and has loved me through everything. I love him so f'ing much. The Titanic might feel like it's sinking around us sometimes, but being together makes you believe you can survive it, it makes all the difference in the world.

Being a Writer with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

This post was going to be about copyedits, but other things have intruded, namely my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I try not to talk about it much, but on days like today, where the exhaustion got so bad I could barely hold the pencil to mark up my copyedits, there's little else I can think about. I've been sick since I was a freshman in college, over ten years now. I try to spread awareness of what CFS is when I can. I know the name makes it sounds like I just get a little extra tired or take naps in the afternoon or something. I go to a support group sometimes and the best way I heard to explain it to people is this: it's like the last day of having the flu. You still have a fever, your body feels weighed down with lead, you're not very functional. Of all the things in my life--being a wife, mother, writer--it's the CFS that defines me the most. At one point I had to use a wheelchair because I was unable to walk.
Last year I was well enough to start going on short ten to twenty minute walks, but unfortunately I had to stop taking a medication that was helping and I've relapsed. This means lots of time on the couch, maybe venturing out of the house once a week for a couple hours. I go on lock-down and try to wait it out until the energy comes back little by little.

So. I try hard to keep a positive attitude. It's been this bad before. I know how to adjust my expectations and muddle through. There's so much in my life to be happy and grateful about. A wonderful family, healthy son, loving husband. Glitch is coming out this year, and people around the internet seem excited about it. I'm so lucky to be able to be a writer in the first place, a job I can do from my couch, which I know full well is a rare and precious thing.

And the copyedits are going well! I'm about a third of the way through and I have 8 days left to get done. Even if I take today off just to rest, I should be able to finish on time.

If you want to know more about CFS, here are some links:
- fellow author (Seabiscuit, Unbroken) Laura Hillenbrand talking about her debilitating CFS
- A quick overview here

How to Be A Rockstar, Even When You Don't Feel Like it

I'll be honest, for as many amazing things that happened in 2011, it had its fair share of punch-me-in-the-face moments. So over the past month, I've been working to put things back together, personally and professionally. And I'm finally gettin' my mojo back :) So here are my personal steps to getting back the I-Can-Do-Anything-I-Put-My-Mind-To-Rockstar-Mojo.

Step 1) Dye your hair bright pink. This says: BAM, I am in your face! I am kick-ass! (if you don't feel it at first, that's all right. It's part of the point. Every time you look in the mirror you can be reminded of your kick-ass-osity).

Step 2) Get your sh*% together. Rockstars are productive. They make stuff happen. They are creative. So getting my sh#$ together comes with a few different sub-points:

• Take care of emails more regularly so they don't get into the triple digits
• Make sure to take time for daily inspiration. Rockstars aren't robots. They are creative and passionate. Take time for that everyday.
• Do laundry. Because no one likes a rockstar without clean underwear.
• Make check-lists and cross stuff off every day. Every little bit of productivity starts rebuilding confidence that screams hell yes! I can do this!
• Do what you love, and foster that love in every way possible. This is what really makes rockstars. We do what we love, passionately, and catch other people up in the passion. As a writer, this means catching up my readers. But that's not going to happen if I've lost connection to that passionate place that made me want to tell stories in the first place.

Step 3) Love on your family. My family is my support, my stable center. Without them, none of the rest is possible.

Snow

It's snowing outside and I can't help but grinning because it's so beautiful and magical. I just moved from Texas to Minnesota, and in an odd bit of weather, it's only snowed a few times so far this winter. Everyone here assures that me by March and April, I will find little about the snow magical ;) But for right now, the magical feeling stays, and I found myself humming all morning: It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

This December has been completely insane and without going into TMI, let's just say it's been very emotional and rollercoaster-y, but good things have come out of it. On the 29th, I'll celebrate my ten year wedding anniversary, and it's especially meaningful this year. I look out the window and see the snow falling, and it feels like hope and new beginnings.

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

I was never one who liked poetry much. Except for Robert Frost. I read him as a teenager when I was trying desperately to be cool and like poetry, and he was the only one who resonated. I liked that he talked about deep sh**, but that he still rhymed. It seemed then, and still does, like the mark of genius that his rhyming lines rarely sounded contrived, and still managed to convey such deep, clearly imaged ideas. After a few readings, the lines would get stuck in my head.

At the time (as an emo teenager) it was "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" that most captivated me. The repeated line at the end, so powerful, haunted me for years, maybe haunts me still: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep." The short jumble of words in this poem, it was the first time I'd really understood the power of literature. He managed to say what I felt so deep in my soul. He captured it on paper. In words I could repeat over and over.

Just last week I was thinking of "Fire and Ice," (when I was thinking about apocalyptic and dystopian literature) playing at trying to remember the lines, and finally lighting by memory upon the whole poem before looking it up on the internet. Residual memories, lines memorized a long time ago popping up again when I felt a particular emotion. So strange and awesome.

And today, the lines I couldn't get out of my head: "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...." Over and over, like a mantra beating beneath my forehead. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, two roads diverged in a yellow wood, two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." I want to grab Robert Frost by the lapels and demand: but how the hell do you know which is the best f'ing road to take??? But alas, he is not here, and his lines, like ice, will suffice. At least so perfectly to portray the dilemma, if not offering any clear answer.

Zen & Meditation & Eat Pray Love

I have a bit of a pattern to my days now, though I hesitate to write it down, because I feel like every time I assert something lately, it's doomed to change the next day. But I will chance telling you all anyway ;) 

I wake up, take my son downstairs and wait for the bus, come back up to my apartment, make some coffee and read and meditate. Well, sort of meditate. Usually I sit quietly and listen to music and try to focus on sensory input and still my wandering mind. I watch trees out the window. At my old apartment I watched the birds in delighted fascination. But I tried it 'for real' this morning, with the whole sitting quietly for a set period, just focusing on breathing. I don't know what to think of it yet. But I liked what the teacher last Sunday at the Zen center said: that this is an experiment, something we are trying out as a way to be present in our lives. He repeated part of a poem by Dogen several times: "to study zen is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be connected to all things." I like that.

So I go write in the afternoons, take care of my son on alternate days after school, and spend most evenings reading. And lately my evenings have been spent reading Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love. I thought this book sounded silly when it came out and became so popular. Sure, I thought, rolling my eyes, some chick going around the world to find herself and talk about some spacy God-hybrid (you know, all the religions mixed into one), complete with having heart-warming stories that sum up nicely at the end of each chapter and make everyone who reads it feel good.

But then, I watched Gilbert on a You-Tube video, and you know what, she seemed pretty great--down to earth and compassionate. And then I looked up a bit about her book and realized: a woman who hits a crisis, goes through a divorce, and talks about meditation? I need to read this book ASAP.

So I picked it up last week and am reading slowly through it. I like it. Some moments are just perfectly captured, even transcendent. I've cried several times while reading. Gilbert is very likeable, even if some of her stories do have that too-familiar 'testimony' feel--you know, that art of crafting stories out of one's daily life more according to the lines of narrative punch than actual reality, where there's always a lesson to be learned, some clear out-come to be gleaned (a good testimony even follows the narrative arc: conflict, rising action, climax!, resolution). And when Gilbert asks questions of god, she gets (or as she says, some part of herself provides), answers. Like answers answers. In words. Which always disturbs me a bit, because it was stories like this that were so confusing when I was very religious for a full decade, and so desperately hoping to hear an answer from God.

Here's the thing--I may take up meditation, I may try out participating in the community at this or another Zen center, but I am not looking for enlightenment, I'm not looking for an intense spiritual experience, and I'm certainly not looking for God.

But I would like to be a little bit less bewildered feeling all the time. I would like some peace. And I have seen the way that this lifestyle engenders compassion. That's what I would like to see organically grow in myself: peace and compassion. If there's a long history that says this kind of meditation can bring that, then I will try it out, and try it genuinely. I can do self-discipline. I face resistance and overcome it with writing fairly regularly, I think it will not be entirely foreign to sit everyday and try to focus my breathing and let go of the monkey thoughts.

We'll see. Like the teacher said, it's an experiment.

The Hardest Question in Life: What Do You WANT?

The instructor in my writing class said that what drives plot is this question: what does your character want?

This is a devilish question. It startled when she said it, because I've been quite tied up with plotting out this book (book 2 in my trilogy) very externally: this happens, and then this, which leads to this. The cause and effect thing I had down. But I realized there was a problem as I was reading through the first draft I'd written this summer: it had no heart, it had no soul. There was no reason to care about my main character, because she's a muddle.

What does she want?

Oh, you horrible, very important question. And it only hit me today, because I must be slow, and because things in my life have been quite hard lately--she's a muddle because I'm a muddle. What do I want?

Believe it or not, it was this exact question that set me off on some of these Big Change Life Choices earlier this year. I read this question (or a version very similar to it) in a book and literally threw the book down as if it had burned me: "Where do I feel good? What is giving me joy?" --Joseph Campbell, in A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

My answer to what my character wants as I looked through my muddled draft today was: she wants things to start being okay, for them not to be bad for awhile. But really that is what I want. On my quest to find joy and to answer the question of what I want, all I have so far  discovered is What I Do Not Want: loneliness, sadness, bewilderment. Divorce is hard.

My novels are in first person. My main character, Zoe, is both like, and unlike, me. I think she will need different motivations from me--that the motivation that drives a novel cannot just be for things to be okay. Though maybe she's a little understandably shell-shocked from some things that have happened. And I have always used writing as a way to work through and understand my own world. If I can let my main character be more honest, let myself be more honest, I think it will give soul to the book. But I don't want this to be a sad book. I'm tired of the cliched middle novel of trilogies being The Sad Book ;)

How To Save Your Own Life

My insecurities can run away with me if I don’t watch it. I’ve felt like I’ve been walking around for a few weeks now frantic and absolutely bewildered. Time moves too fast, then too slow. I feel no control over my life or the hours as they slip by. I thought of the perfect image to encapsulate how I feel today—being caught in an riptide, being swept further away from the shore by forces stronger than oneself and not able to get control or break the surface.

There’s this lyric from Adele’s “Turning Tables”:

Next time I’ll be braver, I’ll be my own savior.

Makes me think of the title of Erica Jong’s book: How To Save Your Own Life. I hated the book, but the title is still one that’s stuck rattling around my head years later.

There are some admittedly crappy things going on in my life. Things I wanted to go one way, and the opposite happens. My health junking out on me again. There are also some very wonderful things.

It's NOT that I need to adjust my expectations, or ‘let go’ of expectations, or even pull myself up by my own emotional bootstraps—I think really it’s one of those things where I need a different paradigm. I’m asking the wrong questions about how life should be lived, and about what constitutes a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ life.

I felt the frantic and the awkward self-consciousness bubbling up before my writing class tonight, so I sat out in the car in the parking lot beforehand for awhile. I turned on some quiet music. I sat still. I concentrated to my connection and relationship to all the things around me—my fingers on the steering wheel, the air blowing on my face, the trees gently moving outside my windshield. If I am connected to the things, much less the people, surrounding me, all my self-involved concerns of awkwardness fade from the foreground.

And I suspect that control (or at least, peace) comes when I abandon my clenching fist, trying so desperately to control outcomes (which tend not to obey anyway).

How to save my own life might in this instance mean: number one, that change is possible--it is possible to stop drowning, but beating at the water more frantically isn't the way to do it. Instead, stop thinking about the self in such isolated individualistic terms and learn to exist, present, in each moment, connected to the things and people around you.

Rejection's A Bitch

The process of becoming a writer is often like becoming a Professional Rejectee. It’s a good life skill to have, and even though I’m actually experiencing awesome successful things in my writing career (after YEARS of the rejections!!!), rejection in other forms still abounds, socially and manifold other ways. There's the quiet kind of rejection – where people just don’t notice you at all and you want to shout: “I’m interesting and awesome, I swear!” Moving to a new city where no one knows you is rife with this kind of (perceived) rejection. Then there’s also the loud kind – the blunt NO. My method in general for life the past few years has been to barrel forward, face-plant into a wall of rejection, be knocked to the ground in a kind of bewildered shock (cause you gotta think there’s a chance of being successful if you’re gonna keep that kind of full-speed forward motion going), slowly and dazedly pick myself back up onto my feet, and start going forward again. I can’t decide if this is because I’m a glutton for punishment or if this is just the necessary formula to actually accomplish anything in life.

Sometimes I have such confidence in myself—that I can tackle and be successful at almost anything reasonable I set my mind too. Then there are other times when every little slight or even barest criticism seems to cut to the bone, and you cuddle up in your blankets feeling like a giant uninteresting blob of failure. You wonder how you ever felt extraordinary. Then, if you’re me, you re-dye your hair blue, drink some wine straight from the bottle, and go to sleep. And when you wake up the next morning, things always seem to be better and brighter. One foot in front of the other til you start gathering momentum again ;)

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.