New Website, Debut Novel, and the Loneliness of Creating

For so long, I hoped to one day say, ‘my novel comes out this year.’ And now I get to, because…

My debut novel comes out this year.

My YA fantasy novel The Space Between You and Me releases in print and ebook on November 14th with Amazon and other major retailers. You can preorder the ebook now!

Here’s the cover made by real live cover designer Andrew Davis (no relation) who has designed covers of other books on real live best seller lists

So what’s my book about?

Well, it’s about magic, coming of age, family, and best friends finding love in a world that wants to tear them apart.

Since kissing his best friend and setting fire to their friendship, Apollo has been slumming it with the outliers of his magical community.

Jonah has determinedly not been thinking about his ex-best friend and the kiss they shared. But it’s impossible to forget said ex-best friend when he is also your Kindred.

Though their magic only stirs to life when they touch, Jonah and Apollo would be separated for the safety of the community if anyone found out they were Kindred.

When they uncover a plot targeting the orphaned members of their clan for experimentation, they must decide: Keep their secret and stay together or sacrifice their bond to save their clan?

It is my sincere hope that this magical book evokes best friend and first crush nostalgia against the backdrop of a neon-colored night, all tinged with the unsettling threat of an enemy that reminds you of how you felt watching Stranger Things for the first time.

Publishing this novel had been an idea marinating in my brain after a friend who read it asked if I wanted to write anything for a queer book box project she was working on. While out sick from work last year, I finally decided to take the plunge. Turns out having an additional eight hours free per day gives one time to think about all kinds of other facets of one’s life.

Given that the indie publishing track kind of goes hand-in-hand with building your own platform, I’ve decided to buy a domain after nearly two decades of supporting my writing habit with my day job. You can visit my website, and what will be my main home base, here. I will keep this old girl alive for now, but please bookmark my new internet home. If you’re feeling extra bold, sign up for my newsletter; I give subscribers access to the first 99 pages of my upcoming novel.

After reading Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, I’ve been thinking a lot about art. About supporting my art rather than asking it to support me. So instead of going into this with the expectation that this book will sell enough to one day hit the NY Times Bestseller list and Jimmy Fallon might want to talk to me (Who am I kidding? I could NEVER go on a talk show. Instead of fantasizing about interviews or awards ceremonies, I fantasize about how I’m going to duck out of them Cormac McCarthy style), I will focus on building the biodome for my book to fly in and hopefully land with someone.

But the process of creation is weird. You make yourself completely vulnerable by putting an entire novel carved from your heart into a public space, all with the fervent hope that it resonates with someone else. When people refer to the loneliness of any creative art, I don’t think they’re talking about the actual creating; sure, you are alone, but one is rarely lonely in the company of stories and art. I think people are actually referring to the years spent honing your craft, performing the admin that sucks up all your time to be creative, continuously looking at the creation from every angle until you’re sick of looking at it and then, still, sharpening it further, being the sole proponent of your work, screaming on a hill and hoping someone hears you while you spiral in a fomo-hazed depression, eating bag after bag of Tapatio Doritos while watching other authors find success. That’s the lonely part.

I’m currently in the thick of that part, in case you haven’t gathered that. Here’s the call to action, ya’ll. Indie authors usually don’t have the backing that publishing houses can provide, so people spreading the word is the #1 way our work can find its way into the hands of readers. This has all been done out of my love of what I do (read: my own pocket), so here I am, just a girl, standing in front of you, asking you to love me (and link bombing you).

Interested in my book and ready to take action?

Preorder The Space Between You and Me

Add The Space Between You and Me to Goodreads

Sign up to be considered for an ARC of The Space Between You and Me

Need to know more first?

(I feel like this could double as a personality test…)

Check out my story board on Pinterest

Check out my novel’s playlist on Spotify

Check out my website

Follow me on Amazon

So there’s the haps. Thank you to everyone reading–new followers, old followers, random lurkers–for following me on this journey. I hope you will meet me at my next stop.

How Audiobooks Killed My Muse

Let me tell you a story.

Two days ago, I wouldn’t have uttered those words, let alone written them. I’d been too afraid to commit to telling any kind of tale; every idea that entered my head felt too fleeting, too flimsy.

After coming out of edits on two books over the last couple years, and writing a mere…

34,525 words to a new book during National Novel Writing Month, I felt like a shriveled husk of creativity. I’ve got my bag of excuses of course–kids, work, Netflix, life. However, behind the scenes, I have been filling every spare moment with reading. Paper books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Every moment my hands are busy but my brain is free, I found myself plugged into an audiobook (currently: Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune). This is because I have always felt that books provide knowledge and inspiration, the most important food groups for the writing kind. Thus, I find myself in an addictive relationship in which I feel if I can just read–well, everything, then I’ll be a better writer and a better human. I mean, yeah, it’s partially true, but at one point, you have to set the book down (and unplug the headphones) and live. Or in this case, daydream.

So after a veritable Mojave-like dryness of inspiration and drive, I happened to be washing dishes like a normie (i.e. no book being narrated directly into my earballs), and ideas for my November novel came pouring in. Are they genius ideas? No, just little snippets of scenes, glimpses at the characters’ minds, but this is the bread and butter of keeping a story alive in my imagination.

I realized I couldn’t expect to keep on filling every empty space with someone else’s words and have the work of daydreaming do itself. I was living in someone else’s final vision of the daydreaming into which they’d poured countless hours, days, months, maybe even years. I needed to give myself the breathing room to settle into the completely free-to-wander headspace I remember being able to call upon with ease as a child. Good old-fashioned staring into space fertilizes the ground to be struck with inspiration.

Next time I’m doing the dishes or checking the mail, I won’t take my phone with me, because I know now that my muse needs to run through empty fields.

Of course reading inspires, but do you think is it possible to read too much as a creative? What’s the first thing you change when the ideas stop coming?

A State of Gratitude

“Gratitude is a powerful emotion to use for manifesting because normally we feel gratitude after we receive something. So the emotional signature of gratitude means it has already happened.”

Dr. Joe Dispenza

And maintaining a state of gratitude creates an environment conducive to receiving what you want, because energy takes the path of least resistance. It’s science (😏).

I am grateful.

I am grateful for the warmth of my children in my arms, dense with blood and breath and bone–solid, squeezable, kissable. I am grateful for their cough and my gritty eyes from being kept awake by their cold, because it means their bodies are strong enough to fight to keep them healthy. I am grateful for soft and swelling music and lyrics that bring tears to my eyes. I am grateful for the turn of summer to fall at night and the wind whispering through the trees. I am grateful for the cold sip of a beer, the hot sip of black coffee, and the cool sip of clean water. I am grateful for the look of understanding–almost telepathic in nature–shared with my partner over the heads of our children. I am grateful for light falling through the shades, striated and languid–the sun has yet to die; we get to have another day. I am grateful for snuggly cats seeking me out in quiet moments (it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you have cats and lay down with a book, a cat will manifest on your chest). I am grateful for the soreness of muscles that have worked hard and dry, worn hands–a working creator’s hands.

I am grateful for the books I can get cozy with and lost in (The Heart’s Invisible Furies and The Darkness Outside Us right now). I’m grateful for the movies and shows that fill up my well, for the memories of my father that come to me when I watch Star Trek: Next Generation–he was a sci-fi and fantasy geek like I am now, and I never realized that before. I am grateful to keep finding books and film and art and music to enjoy because it means the hunger inside of me is infinite. And it means the hunger inside others is infinite. And it means that I will never run out of experiences that let me feel connected to other human beings and their voices and stories.

I am grateful for the people giving me the opportunity to work with them and the venues who have published and will publish my own attempts to connect with other humans. The Grey Rooms Podcast accepted my first short story (twenty drafts later, mind you), and I will get to hear that story being given life.

I am grateful for the girl who used to come home from working two and three jobs while going to school full time to burn the midnight oil writing crappy stories. For the person who continues writing with a demanding day job and two 5-year-olds. The stories are still crappy sometimes, but I am grateful for them, grateful for the passion and my patience to continue working with them, to mold each story into its final form.

I am grateful for the story I am molding right now.

It’s Okay to Say No

“Today is the first day of November and, so, today, someone will die. –The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater

Not to be dramatic, but I always feel a side of fear with my excitement on
November 1^st. Yes, you’ve guessed it. This is yet another post about NaNoWriMo, where writers world-wide converge into one collective unconscious creation amoeba and delve into a 50,000 word-writing sprint over the course of November’s 30 fall-flavored days.

Since I started doing NaNoWriMo in 2013, this will be the first time I will not be participating_[1]. Learning to manage expectations is just as much a part of a writer’s growth as learning the mechanics of writing. As I sit beside my writing and critique partner, whom I am also fortunate to have as a best friend, and she clacks away at her brand spanking new novel, I realize, for once, I do not feel envious of her ability to jump into new worlds with such ease. This is how she writes. She enjoys world-building, the excitement and possibility of beginnings, while I fear beginnings and yearn, from the outset, for the delicious center, where all the secrets begin to surface like bodies rising in the Dead Marshes. I’ve also been fortunate enough to view Maggie
Stiefvater’s seminar on writing (which she’s offering for half off today!), and it has reinforced my instinct to hold off on putting this project down into words; the seminar teaches temperance as I hold my novel baby in the realm of perfect forms in the furnace of my brain and continue weaving it like candy floss in this space, safely hidden away from the imperfect translation of thought-to-word.

I completed an exercise from Stiefvater’s seminar to explore the mood and test which point of view this novel might work best in. As I wrote, I was freshly astounded at how stories are woven: an image that creates a story in your head and takes off on its own if you’re lucky or practiced. It seems like a random image that ignites a random movie that plays on your brain screen. However, both that seed of a story and the resulting array of Power Point slides stem from an infinite combination of stimuli and memories that make your unique map of synapses and the sparks traded between them like paper
fortune-teller predictions in grade school. So don’t discount the experience of just writing to write, without feeling like it has to fit in anywhere or be applied to any tangible Work or Project. Even if it never finds permanence in your body of work, it has done important work in your brain and exercised that story-telling instinct with which humans, in all of our pattern-seeking wiring, are born.

I used to think of myself as a procrastinator, when actually I am afraid to commit something to paper before I have an idea of what I’m setting out to do. Not necessarily an entire outline, but as Stiefvater beautifully puts it in her seminar, it is integral to the writing process to know what kind of book I want to hold in my hands at the end of it all, what kind of emotions I want the reader to feel during and days after reading it, and what I want them to remember, years later, about how they felt when they see it on their shelves. We are, after all, conductors eliciting a mood in our readers; we need to know the mood before we can adequately translate it. This has given me the peace to refrain from writing while I fill out its form in my head, letting the rain build before ripping the cloud apart. This takes less time for some people, like my writing partner who asked me to assign her a genre_[2] and had a solid idea, characters, and pages of plot and dialogue in 24 hours. For me, it takes more.

I thought this would be a pep talk so that I didn’t feel some type of way about skipping NaNoWriMo, but it’s more of an affirmation that this is the right decision. And if this speaks to anyone else, then welcome to my kumbaya circle. I’m not a particular fan of Kenny Rogers, but I find myself returning to and adhering to the advice of “The Gambler” again and again. The chorus is as follows:

You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run

All this just to say ‘intuition’ in a quirky, entertaining manner. Intuition isn’t some mystical otherworldly place you can only touch with meditation and burning sage (but our kumbaya circle does meet on Tuesdays to do this). Sometimes it takes practice, like anything else, to listen for its voice and know when to follow it. This little seed of a novel isn’t done germinating, so I do not yet know the shape of this very emotional, personal project. Therefore, I will continue slowly curating my playlist and Pinterest board–which has been overrun with wolves somehow–and cheering you all from the sidelines, whether you’re endeavoring to write 50,000 words this month or saying no to NaNoWriMo.

₁Not including 2015, when my twins were 2 months old, but I wasn’t even human then, let alone a writer, so it doesn’t count.

₂After reading through this for coherency, aforementioned writing partner/best friend wanted me to mention that I also gave her the idea for her main character and his goal, so as not to downplay my part in her NaNoWriMo project. *smirk*

Reaffirmation

With the newest publication of a beloved author on the horizon, she’s been live-tweeting as she reads one of my favorite works of hers. Naturally, I am comparing myself to her and finding myself lacking. Yes, folks, you can make negative, unhealthy comparisons to someone for which you hold pure admiration.

As I sit here making my mental comparisons, I  wonder why I even bother. What do I even have to say that’s worthy of anyone’s time? Does my work have any Meaning? (I promise the tone of this post turns around).  But as I cuddle my sick toddler, I open one of my poems on a whim, Nest.

That poem still makes me so proud. My epiphany, however, was noticing the poetic devices I employed, some intentionally like the image of home, but more importantly, some unintentional, like my partial rhymes. And then the end of it, how everything just came together and…happened. How I had written no less than 10 poems before this poem, trying to capture my emotions about being a new mother and having lost my father, and that final stanza expressed everything I felt more clearly than all of those attempts combined.

I think that, that final marriage of meaning, form, feeling, and rightness is a key to this whole “what do I even have to offer anyone” question. That poem almost created itself, using me as a vessel; I didn’t have the option to not create it. Is that enough to give work meaning? To say, I HAVE to write, therefore it has meaning. I don’t think so. What I have to offer is how much I enjoyed creating it, and THAT gives it meaning, because if you did it right, others can feel that coming through.