The Longest Week

Later today I'll be travelling approximately two hours to an airport to pick her up:

My sister, my sister!

 From there, we will drive home where we will maybe make some food. Maybe shower (separately, that's weird). And then very early in the morning we will rise and do this:

Snowboard!

After we beat ourselves up on the mountain, and she re-learns how to snowboard, it's time for home, and tacos, and sleep because the following morning, we're off to do this:

AWP 2013
Boston

Perhaps this year, I may actually have a planned place to stay...

...Then again, maybe not

The Next Big Thing

I'd like to thank Krista McLaughlin for tagging me in this. First of all, because these meme things are always fun, and secondly, because well...I was running out of things to blog about (while still trying to find a damn picture of me, or my sister, with Harry Potter.)

Just to warn you guys, I think next week may be a rather intense week where I'm going to tackle a lot of subjects that working on my memoir (newly updated!) has brought up. Brace yourselves. I'm already expecting to lose followers. Maybe for those of you who stick around, I'll try to figure out another contest, or something. (This is a HUGE maybe, I'm super broke right now.)

Anyways, as stated, Krista tagged me in the Next Big Thing...so here I go!

What is the working title of your book? 
Which one? There's My Sister's Memories, After Elizabeth, and The Right to Live: A Christian Girl's Struggle through Abortion, Losing Her Mind, and Recovery.

Where did the idea come from? 
My Sister's Memories came when I was moving to Maine after North Carolina. I have a lot of issues with my memory, and was crossing a bridge and thought, "What if you saw everyone you love die?"

After Elizabeth was because I was still recovering from everything that caused me to move, and I really wanted to kill someone...so...I do it fictitiously. 

The Right to Live...well...came from my life, as it's my memoir :/
What genre does your book fall under? 
Two Contemporary Young Adults, and one Memoir (with a side of french fries, please :) )

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie? 
I actually hate this question. I hate when the books have the actors on the front cover before I read the book because then I just see the actor, even if the writer tells me the hair was brown, and the actor is blond. Hollywood does their job (casting, auditions, etc), I do my job and let you pick.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? 
MSM: On her 18th birthday, Sarah's parents are killed in a car accident, leaving Sarah to become guardian of her younger, and now amnesiac sister.

AE: In the aftermath of her best friend's suicide, Claire turns to cigarettes, neon hair, and anger, rather than dealing with her feelings...until Andrew moves in across the street.

TRTL: Um, the little "A Christian Girl's Struggle.." pretty much sums this one up :)
Will your books be self-published or represented by an agency?

Agency. I don't care how long it takes. I wanna see my effin book in a Barnes and Noble, and get banned from libraries and schools.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript? 
It usually takes me three to four weeks to do the first draft. There's a lot of coffee, energy drinks, and alcohol usually involved. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 
The need to kill off characters and use writing as therapy really pushed me to write the stories. Is that healthy?

What else about your book would pique the reader's interests?
There are always cute boys in my stories. Even in my memoirs :)

Oh, and um...I'm supposed to pass this on. So...Here we go:

1) One of my lovely Beta Readers for After Elizabeth, Ms. Suzi over at Literary Engineer.

 

2) A woman I met during one of the blog hops and on Twitter, who seems like she has her stuff together, Ms. Rachel Frost over at The Story of Her Life

3) A wonderful blog follower who always has excellent comments, Ms. Elizabeth Seckman at Use Your Words

4) Another great follower with great comments, Ms. Emily R King over at Get Busy Writing.

5) And because this guy also rocks with comments, and the precessors were females and I feel like we gotta try to balance this out, Mr. Andrew Leon over at StrangePegs

 

Occupational Hazard

Writing comes with an occupational hazard. We're not well. I don't know a single writer who says, "I am mentally stable," unless of course, they're seeing a head shrink. I'm not saying we don't have good days, because those do exist. But I am saying that many of us are plagued by self destruction, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a healthy dose of self loathing....which usually leads to suicide, and if not suicide, then missing ears, eyes, body parts, etc. Janet Reid recently posted THIS video. If you're a writer and you haven't seen it, watch it. (It's slightly less than 20 minutes, but it's incredible.)

Yes, this was a pitcher of beer

For a long time, I figured I would be like Sylvia Plath. She was a poet, and a writer. She was brilliant, and haunting, and I can't find any of her writing that is terribly happy. Her voice sounded like cigarettes (in my poetry class in college we listened to her read). My entire life I've had friends ask me to write something with a happy ending. Well, I didn't want a happy ending because I wasn't a happy person. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to kill myself. It's not because I've lost count, but because the lines of self destruction and actual attempts blur together for me now. I wanted to follow Sylvia. I wanted to hold her hand as the ocean waves carried me out, and have people say, "She was brilliant, and she (finally) killed herself." I wanted my writing to affect people the way hers affected me. 

And then this year, I attended AWP in Chicago. Margaret Atwood was a keynote speaker. She made a joke something along the lines of:

I've been around so long people are starting to question whether or not I'm still alive.

Brilliant woman. Still alive.

She was clever, and old, and humble, and funny. She had a spark in her eyes. She had wrinkles on her face. For the first time in my life, rather than wanting to die young, and beautiful, and fast...I wondered what it would be like to live to be 80 or 90, or like my granddad, 100 (he celebrated his 100th birthday this year!). Imagine the connections you could make with people, the lives you could help save. Imagine how many more novels you could write!

A few months after this I was invited to a middle school in Maine to talk about depression, cutting, eating disorders, etc. During my three week invasion, the option to kill myself became revoked. I fell in love with the students there. I told them they could have a future, and each day by querying, by putting myself out there, I am trying to prove to them that you can grow up in a shitty environment and come out swinging.

I'm not saying that every day it's easy to drive my car to work without the urge to veer it into oncoming traffic or off the cliff I drive by. (I actually had this conversation with one of my managers the other day.) Some days it's harder than others. But I don't do it, because I can no longer do it. I have something to prove to those students.

I may not live to make it to thirty. I may not make it to see 25. Who knows? But every day, I am alive, I fight the burden that many of the creative minds have. I am not mentally well, I've known this since I was in sixth grade. But as I said earlier, there are happy days. If live long enough for people to question my existence, I hope it will be a life well lived. I pray that I'll be able to stand in front of a room full of strangers and make fun of my age and the things I've been through.

The moral of all this is that as writers, we have an occupational hazard. We feel more than most people, and sadly those feelings aren't usually happy ones.

Don't give in to it. Don't die from your own hand. Seek help; support groups, therapy, psychiatric wards, friends, family. Live to joke about paramedics coming to your house and asking if you're still alive. Live to tell youngsters about paper back books when they existed.

Just. Live.

That's all.

Happy Monday :) (I know it's not Monday, but I didn't say Happy Monday yesterday, and this is how I roll)

Encouragement

So, my living situation kind of um...sucks. There's a 62 year old man who has decided to pick fights with me on a daily basis. He's also been having his mother spending several nights here, and so she, too, is picking fights with me. One night, after I decided to take it upon myself to remind her that -I- pay rent here, she does not, she decided to call me crazy. It's kind of been bringing me down a lot recently, and making me more angry than I'd like to be.

This then, led to me venting on twitter. One such day, I stated:

Roommates have decided to play crappy country music too loud. I want to write a sign that says: Quiet Please, Memoir Writing in Progress

A few days later, one of my Twitter followers, also a girl I work with, Amanda, did this:

The sign says, "Quiet Please, Memoir writing in progress!"
It made my day, and even made going home that night much more bearable.

Then, yesterday, a good friend from college, Claire, came to the house, made me dinner, and we stayed in the dining room and chatted for a few hours. She kept laughing at my living situation, my evil roommates, the evil mother. There was nothing we could really do, but laugh.

And then she put down a box, a writing care package that looks like this:

She wrote amazing messages to me, things from her life that I wouldn't have known otherwise. And the best part? Most of it consisted of food! (The rest was drinks, so that's rad, too!)

So, why are these things popping up on my blog? Aside from the fact that they're just awesome?

Because I feel that other writers need to surround themselves with positive encouragement. Try to have people in your life who bring you up, even if all they do is tell you that your writing rocks. Sometimes, we just need a bit of a lift, maybe in the form of notes and food, or a sign that simply says, "Quiet, Please. Writing In Progress".

Blog Comments

Before I start the blog, I'd just like to state that my blog has officially been up for a year. So, thank you guys for coming by, leaving comments, and helping me learn and grow as a writer. Okay, enough mushy.

Short one today.

Back in March, Rebecca Rasmussen had a guest blog about Literary Citizenship. Now, almost a year later, I think about this post a lot. It shared a lot of, "If you want to have the writing community excel, push it along" types of advice. Step one, was to write charming notes to writers.

So let's think about this. I'm assuming most of you who drop into the blog, have your own blogs, no? What does this mean? This means, I take that citizenship to another step, it's called being blog friendly. If someone comments on my blog, I try to return the favor.

Why?

Because:
*I love comments. I feel other writers feel the same.
*It helps establish a connection to the people commenting.
*It may help develop friendships. There are a few people who comment pretty regularly, and I look forward to what they have to say (thanks again!)
*It's kind of like being a pen-pal. You gotta write back, you know?

Basically, I'm not saying you have to comment back. I'm just saying it's a nice thing to do, and probably makes other people happy, too. Plus--if you actually go through and read the blog post, most of the time, there is something worthwhile to read.

:)