Thoughts of a Rising Writer
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Wow!  I haven't written in a while!

9/6/2013

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    I just finished reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  My book club, The Red Heel Society, is reading this for the month of September.  It is an amazing book about a teenage girl's struggle with Cancer and what it means to live a well-lived life when you aren't well and don't have a long life to live.  When we got together for dinner a couple of weeks ago, each girl who had finished reading it raved about the book and declared it a tear inducing masterpiece.  When I purchased the book at Books a Million, the girl at the counter, a book blogger herself, warned me to have a box of tissues at the ready.
    Spoiler alert:  there is a death in the book and I am about to examine that death.  If you intend to read the book and you are not the type of reader who reads the last page of a book first, stop reading this blog post.  Go read The Fault in Our Stars, and then come back to read my blog post.  Or just stop reading.  I don't want to spoil the book for anyone, but I can't explain my state of mind without revealing at least a part of the end of the book.  You've been warned.
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    When Hazel's boyfriend dies, she has to attend his funeral and read a eulogy.  She has to face her life, however short it might be, without him.  They argued; they didn't always see eye to eye, but at the heart of their story, they were in love.  I get the tears, but I didn't cry them.  I wondered if I had become cold and distant and some thing other than wholly human, some monster merely existing through my time on Earth, no longer able to live the kind of meaningful life the characters in the book might have striven for.
    But I am no monster.  I have lived through Hazel's anguish.  I have loved deeply and lost completely without the solace of a painfully long goodbye.  And I was Hazel's age.  Seventeen.  I didn't have Cancer, but I did have a swelling pregnant belly.  My Augustus was Anthony, and he died quickly and tragically instead of slowly and tragically. 


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I stood in front of a full church and grieved through a eulogy of sorts.  I woke each morning and relished that brief millisecond when I could forget and think the former dreams of my life could still exist, that Anthony could still exist here with me.  I woke in the middle of the night screaming and crying an inconsolable mess of salt and water and tangled sheets that must have terrified my mother. 
    And here I am today.  Seventeen and a half years later.  Life does go on.  I don't wake screaming and crying or thinking I have a life that became only a dream the day Anthony died.  Not to say I didn't have other demons to deal with beyond the initial grief.  I did not have Hazel's death sentence to satiate my love.  I do not know how long I will live, so living a life without another love was something I could not commit myself to do.  Yet, moving on into other relationships has its own sense of guilt, pain, and complications. 
    All of this said, I am relatively balanced in my life now (as much as any writer can be), and I had a choice to make as I read The Fault in Our Stars.  I could dive deeply into the pain and emotion I had experienced, reliving it as extremely as possible in the passages in the book, crying not for Augustus and Hazel but for Anthony and for a younger version of myself.  Or I could examine it in a different light.  I chose the later.  I read through the tragedy, and it brought up thoughts and emotions, but I looked at them, at the experiences of the fictional characters, at my own experiences, in a more analytical light.  Not cold, but through the lens of time and experience.  I shed a few small tears at the end, and I am not fully certain for whom.
    So, reader, if you have made it this far, these are my thoughts.  I am ready to finish the memoir I started back when I first saw those two lines on that little stick.  It has taken me nearly two decades to feel ready, to feel whole again, or whole enough to tackle the raw emotion I lived through.  I have felt this way before, so we will sI must apologize that this will take me away from writing my sequel, although I hope the urge I have to write will carry over to both projects.  To The Red Heel Society, I still intend to have at least a rough draft of Dreams in the Midst in hand for you to read when my turn comes up in February/March.  I may have A Whisper In Time ready for perusal then, too. 
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June Confession/ Update

6/5/2013

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    I have a confession to make.  I haven't really done much over the month of May.   I set very high goals for myself and for Flames in the Midst.  When I did not reach them, I got discouraged.  I know I have potential as a writer.  I know both my first novel and the sequel have potential.  I know I have to get more books out, and the only way to do that is to work hard, but I still let the minor disappointments of the present get to me and create a wall in my mind and in my heart.  A little nagging devil on my shoulder has been whispering,             "Maybe you should quit while you're ahead.  Maybe writing is not your thing.  Maybe it is time to stick with your day job." 
    To confess further,  I let those thoughts get to me.  I let that self-doubt pool up around me until I practically drowned in it.  Then I went to the beach for my best friend's birthday on Memorial Day.  When I walked onto the orange sand (we have orange sand on our beaches due to the broken pieces of coquina), my friend's mother called out to me.
    "Why?  What makes you think you have any business coming to the beach?"
    It took me a moment to recover.  I had to make a mental check.  I was invited to the beach, right?  I wasn't infringing on a private family party.  As I unfolded my chair and let the water-laden mini-cooler slip off my shoulder and land with a soft thud by my feet, I let her explain.
    "Don't you have a book you should be working on? Shouldn't you be home writing?"  She had read Flames in the Midst only out of obligation at first since I practically grew up in her home half of my teenage years.  When she finished, she was hooked.
    Part of me wishes I could tell you I dropped everything (or rather picked it all back up), turned around, and headed back to my house to sit for the next eight hours at my laptop while my children whined about missing the beach in another room and I put 3 or 4 chapters into the document for Dreams in the Midst.  That's not what I did.  I spent an amazing day at the beach with my friends and family.  The kids played on their boogie-boards, we ate lunch, we built sandcastles, and I turned my daughter into a mermaid. 
    She told me, "Mommy, you're really good at this.  How did you get so good at this?" 
    Practice?  Imagination?  Patience? Creativity?  A little of everything?  This was a moment of joy for me. She helped me to focus.  I like creating things, and I like bringing joy to those around me, as well as those I may never see.  I brought joy to my daughter by making her a mermaid, if only for a moment.  I brought joy to my friend's mother when she read my book.  I can't give up on any of these things.  They are too precious and too valuable. 

So, next steps?
  1. The May pricing of .99 worked out okay.  I had more sales than normal, but not as many as I would have hoped.  I am going to stick to the pricing experiment simply because it is worth finding out.  I don't think I will see a significant increase until book 2 comes out.  I have just changed the price to $1.99 for the remainder of June, but you should still be able to get it for the next 12 hours or so at the .99 price.
  2. For whatever reason, The Caffeinated Diva appears to be behind schedule.  I am sure she is much like me in that there are other obligations in her life that contend with her time.  I will keep checking to see if she reviews Flames in the Midst, but for now, I am not worried about it.  I still appear to be on her reading list, and she is still making posts, so who knows.
  3. Write.



    That's it.  That's the plan.  Wish me luck!  I want to continue building sandcastles and mermaids.  When they get picked up in the wind or carried away by the waves, I hope they are not destroyed but merely living a life of their own to bring joy to others the way they bring joy to me.



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Violence in Our World:  Boston and beyond

4/16/2013

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We survive the violence around us, for the most part.  Sitting in relative safety in Florida, I watch the news, and the devastation from Boston floods my home and my mind.  Each day we tune in, there seems to be a new tragedy.  Has the world always been this way, technology bringing it to the forefront?  Or is the violence around us building and changing our world?

I cannot begin to imagine the way lives have been ended or permanently altered by the events of yesterday in Boston.  The scenes on the television are eerily reminiscent of other terrorist attacks broadcast to the population.  Time passes, and we eventually feel safe again.  We feel indignant when our civil liberties are infringed upon at airports in the name of safety.  But, for a little while, we are engrossed in the terror of the moment enough to allow such infringements without grumbling. 

When we are faced with these dangers, we realize the safety we perceive around us may only be a facade.  At any moment, we could be amid the images on the television screen.  We could be thrust into a nightmarish reality and our lives could be changed in an instant.  So we hug our children a little tighter.  We dismiss our frustrations with our spouse or our parents or our children.  We take time out to spend with our family.  Then the pace of our lives catches up with us, and we fall back into our same routines until the next blast hits.

Today, I pray for the victims and their families in Boston.  But I also pray for the victims and their families in Connecticut, in New York, in Columbine, in Oklahoma.  The pain each person experiences will be a permanent scar, a permanent change in them to be carried throughout their lives.  It will dull with time, but it will always be there.  Beyond that, I hope the change we experience in reflecting on these events can last in our own lives.  The increased gratitude and appreciation for what we do have and the knowledge that our time is not a guarantee can help us each day to show love to those around us--family, friends, neighbors, strangers.  Let's refuse to become complacent in the love we show each other.  Let's treasure each day as a way to remember and honor those who have been touched by these tragedies.

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    Author

    A teacher, a writer, a mother, a wife and a friend.  All people wear what feels like a million different hats at any given time.  In this place, I choose to have freedom.  That doesn't mean I'm not still juggling my hats; it just means I choose which of them I balance on my head as I write.

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