There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love...”

I decided to break the seal on a box of notebooks I wrote when I was in my early 20s (that I had packed and taped up in 1996). Reading my 22-year-old self fervently swear that she’ll never fall in love again makes me feel sad, mostly because she didn’t. Almost, but not really.

At 22, I was intensely passionate about many things—not eating red meat (the hormones! The red dye!), writing, feminism, literature (I had just discovered Anais Nin and Henry Miller, if that tells you anything), and love (again, the hormones!). I believed everyone had a soul mate just waiting for them out there in the world, and it was up to me to find him. Over a five year period, I recorded the turbulence of my love life in painstaking detail on page after page. I wrote about infatuations, crushes, obsessions, attractions, and love. Every time, it was the “real thing.” And every time, passion became my poison.

If these notebooks are an accurate depiction of what my I knew then, I can say I have learned a few things in years since. I no longer believe that everyone has one soul mate; I think we have many, and that people are drawn together by fate and circumstance. I no longer believe that such thing as an easy relationship exists or that the level of difficulty has anything to do with love.

I’ve also learned how to protect myself. After putting the pieces of a broken heart haphazardly back together time after time, I decided that spending the rest of my life shielding a heart of glass wouldn’t be a wise move. And I stopped letting other people in. 

Suppose love came knocking on your door. Would you turn it away with a “sorry, all stocked up on that here?” Pretend like you weren’t home? Chase it down the street with a baseball bat? Or would you open the door, smile, and thank it for being so punctual?

What I did was design a complicated mess of a barricade, complete with traps, skill tests, checklists, pulleys, ropes and, I think at one point, even a moat. If someone wanted in, he’d have to run the gauntlet, suffer the proving ground, navigate the emotional land mines, and pass every test. Should he make it through unscathed, I’d make certain he was sorry he even tried.

What I got for my efforts was a series of superficial relationships that never developed any depth or longevity. Or intensity. Or passion. And when they ended, I felt no more than a twinge of regret…a far cry from the anguish I experienced over breakups in my twenties. My thirties were not as melodramatic, but I sacrificed passion for peace.

I am not certain what I expected to find by reading the angst-ridden messages from my 22-year-old self. I hoped to discover that I am better off now than I was then, but I don’t think that’s true. I do mean it when I say I am happy being single, but I’m beginning to understand exactly what I’m missing out on by protecting myself so carefully. Without heartbreak, love and passion are watered-down versions of the real thing. Until now, I didn’t even realize that I missed the full-strength version.

There’s a reason it’s called “falling in love.” At its core is an element of letting go, even if you know there is turbulence ahead, that you’re signing up for an emotional roller coaster ride, and that it might end in tears. The only thing gained by crawling into your shell is, well, a really comfortable shell.

I’ll have to find a happy medium between being head over heels and in over my head if I want to experience the kind of intense emotion the 22-year-old me knew all too well. As for the happy ending, just consider me “in production”—I know that this movie won’t have an ending until I find a way to take heart instead of losing it.

The funny thing is...

Even when you stopped allowing the men in your life to break your heart, the thing that surprised you most was that it could still be broken — by Life, by Loss, by Things Outside of Your Control. Sometimes they didn’t just leave you and go somewhere else; sometimes they really left you and everything else in this world. When that happened, there was no ex. There was no second act, no breakup sex, and no opportunity to wait for him to come crawling back just so you could turn him away one last time.

Instead, you were left begging under the weight of the universe, asking Providence for one more chance, calling Fate at three o’clock in the morning to sob your heart out.

You did what a lot of girls do; you tried to move on. You went out nearly every night, hoping to run into Divine Intervention, or even Chance or Fortune—you weren’t picky then.

But no matter how alluring, no matter how charming, no matter how hard you tried to conceal your desperation, you brought evening after evening to a close with Grief.

Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's not real...

All writing is personal. And sometimes the best writing feels awful. I cut my teeth on personal narrative, though I didn't know that's what it was called at the time. I've written lots of fiction too, way more than the occasional short stories published in rather obscure literary journals. I even have a novel in a box, where it will probably live forever. Once I became accustomed to "letting it all hang out" with my writing, I needed fiction less and less often. 

A longtime friend and I have a running joke that came from the movie Postcards from the Edge (based on a book by Carrie Fisher). Whenever we have an experience that causes extreme public or social embarrassment, we shake it off with "it twirled up." In this scene, the daughter accuses the mother of inappropriate behavior. Her response? "IT TWIRLED UP."

When I coach writing clients who are working on personal narrative or memoir (or blogs), I often tell them that hitting "send" or "publish" for the first time is going to feel terrible. It's going to feel like your skirt blew up in public and everyone saw your panties. You'll feel exposed and vulnerable. And then you'll get used to it, eventually.

In the past few years, I've written more fiction than I did in college intensives. More than the novel in a box. It was a panacea for feeling like I lost my sense of humor, the tongue-in-cheek voice I had taken for granted for so long. Shit wasn't funny anymore and I had no distance. A therapist suggested I write about everything, but do it in the third person. So I did. And it made me remember why I started writing fiction in the first place. 

With personal narrative, especially humor, hyperbole is acceptable and expected. But it's still oops-it-twirled-up honest. Fiction gave me the freedom to tell the story any way I wanted to, to end it any way I wanted to, and the distance I needed so that it wouldn't make me sad. I've heard other fiction writers say that their work has no basis in their own lives, that it's entirely made up, and I believe them. Sort of. I have fiction writer friends who openly admit their stories are thinly disguised events from their lives. Joan Didion's fiction was (though she's better known for memoir). So was Nora Ephron's, Heartburn in particular. 

In the spirit of twirling up, for every writer I've ever encouraged to push "send," I'm going to share a cringe-worthy (at least to me) snippet of a short story that was published several years ago in a now defunct literary journal. The story is called "Running Away." 

Following suddenly interested in running father to country club track. Watching him on the pay phone from a distance. Healthy, running 5Ks and marathons and away. From my mother, with her quiet cancer. From four daughters with their female neediness. Running away from same, same, same houses on a military base where class mattered less than rank. His poor farming family. An Irish mob of a family in a tiny New York town across the Saint Lawrence River from Kingston Ontario. From dirt and poverty. Weekday mornings in his officers uniform, snapping his collar, snapping at females and poodles and leaving behind a sickeningly sweet cologne cloud.

Weekends, already getting fat at age nine, I put shorts and sneakers on. Followed him out of the house in the early dawn. Ran several yards behind him, knowing he saw me and only that he didn't order me to return home. Running to catch up. Running the miles around the houses on base until he stopped. In the lot of the officer's club. There was a pay phone outside. He held up his hand, motioned for me to turn back, left me behind until he was out of earshot, picking up the phone, cradling the receiver with his back to me. I wait. Stretch. I know. I know everything.

I would prefer this story die with it's out of print, never digitized publisher. It's awkward and weird and I think I was 22 or 23 when I wrote it. But fiction? Sure. Why not? From the age of 11, when my biological father left my mother the day after Christmas to move in with his girlfriend and start a new and improved family, I told people my father was dead. That I never knew him (this is true, and he might actually be dead now because I haven't had contact in years). It was easier than the complicated truth, that he left our family while my mother had just begun treatment for cervical cancer, that the only thing that saved us is that he was in the military and thus forced to pay child support. That he wanted nothing more to do with us. This fiction was the part of me that admitted the hurt and the guilt of knowing just how long before the leaving that the moving on began. 

This is a story I will never be able to tell as my own narrative, but it can still be told. It is not something I still grieve over. I've had a lot of good experiences in my life with men, fathers of friends, that showed me that men can love their daughters even though mine didn't. My "daddy issues" are no worse than most. I stopped trying to replace him a long time ago, around the time this story was published, maybe even because it was published. 

Writing is how I choose to heal, whether the words are truth or revisionist history. I could have made the story end in a different way, made my father a different man. I could write it three more times and have three different trajectories. But I don't have to because it's out there and it doesn't matter anymore. All of this is to say: I hope you get to know what it feels like, even just once, to let it twirl up. 

Because we all want to write more better...

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because if everyone did, I wouldn't be a comma fucker.

I've been a writer since I could string together a sentence. I've been an editor, professionally speaking, for more than 10 years now. I love language, words, sentences, breaking rules, playing with subtext. These things make me happy. What makes me sad also makes me an asshole, a "Grammar Nazi," and apparently, a "comma fucker." I present the evidence, shared by a Facebook friend earlier this week:

So yeah, Finnish: "pilkunnussija" literally translates to "comma fucker," or someone who corrects little or meaningless things.

Over the years I have learned that most people don't like to have their grammar corrected (exception: writers handing over manuscripts for an extended and intentional bout of comma fucking). I still do it silently. I no longer read comments on news stories or web sites. I hide Facebook posts by people I care about because I just cannot with the poor spelling and grammar. I cringe at an erroneous possessive apostrophe. I've sent kind and gentle (my opinion) emails to local businesses with misspelled signage.

In my defense, I don't do these things to feel intellectually superior. I do them because I have a dream. It's a big one, but I cling with every fiber of my being. I dream that every single person in the English-speaking world will complete early childhood education with an ingrained understanding of the difference between "your" and "you're" (yeah, I'm so fucking hung up on this that I once declined a second date with a repeat offender texter). I hope to never again have to explain that the correct idiom is "dog eat dog world," NOT "doggy dog world" (yes, this is a real thing that happened). And someday, in this perfect world, I will never again have to explain to a college graduate the difference between active and passive voice.

Trust me, my own mistakes make me cringe just as hard. I rarely read magazine pieces I've written once they have been published, lest I discover that an editor missed a wayward comma splice, misspelled word, or (gasp) changed my correct language to something less than correct. This blog is full of mistakes. There is a post somewhere around here in which I used "to" instead of "too." I beg your forgiveness, but use this example to illustrate 1) I am not a perfect comma fucker and 2) The fact that I discovered this error in hundreds of pages of archives and still remember it proves that I am harder on myself than anyone else.

I could go on about how texting and social media and a failing public educational system has ruined language, but I don't even use proper capitalization or punctuation in IM or emails to friends, so apparently I don't care. What I do care about: Journalism. Literature. Why media outlets thought it was a fantastic idea to ditch proofreaders and editors to save their struggling print publications, which people like me don't read anymore because spelling and factual errors are too damn distracting. Why e-book publishers charge for editing services, yet every single damn book I've ever downloaded for less than $2.99 (or free) was so full of grammatical inconsistencies I couldn't even tell if the writing was actually good.

Written communication matters to me and maybe I'm tilting at windmills. If so, I'll be quixotic until I draw my last breath. Call me pilkunnussija. Or comma fucker. Just spell it correctly.

*This post was sponsored by Grammarly, for which I received a trial period (but since I was hooked at "context optimized synonyms," I'd be telling you all about it anyway).

Writing about writing again, but sometimes confessions are necessary...

“I hate writing. I love having written.” - Dorothy Parker

I bought this from The Rumpus.

I can’t tell if this is too “inside baseball” because many of my friends are writers. We do what writers do: 1. Talk about writing. 2. Procrastinate. 3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

I AM working on a second book. It has a shape and a focus, but I tend to be “all or nothing” about my projects; if it can’t be perfect, then I don’t want to make the effort. And there are so many important things that need doing. Earlier this summer, I realized I forgot to watch The Wire. So I watched all five seasons in about a month like it was my second job. Then I had to start watching Luther, because Idris Elba.

I put off buying an e-reader forever. I LOVE BOOKS. How could I betray my beloved READING EXPERIENCE with an electronic device? Then I bought a Kindle Fire and it made me feel like I could live without paper forever, even just for the thrill of thinking of a book I once read a million years ago and being able to download it at 1 a.m. and read it. Instant gratification. Writing is not instant gratification. Unless writing a Tweet, which is extraordinarily satisfying. I have written almost 8,000 of them, which in sum total is a book-length work, albeit a boring one.

I still write ideas down in a paper notebook. I also have Evernote on my phone, laptop and tablet. I can’t say that technology has made be more productive (probably the opposite), plus instead of just a notebook full of brilliant ideas mocking me from the depths of my shoulder bag, the mocking comes from multiple sources. I have Tetris on my tablet for some stupid reason. A feed reader of informative blog posts and articles to attend to. I’ve watched 50 episodes of Shin Chan on Hulu in the past three months.

All of this side business (bullshit) means that my notes stagnate, angry, unruly, unattended to: “Hey, um, so…think you’ll get to work on me this weekend? You know, ‘cause you said you were excited about it and all, but here we sit—how long has it been? A month? I know you’ve got all that television to watch and those naps to take and, well, I’m sure that fascinating thing about your ex-boyfriend from a million years ago really needs to get written for your blog. I’m sure all of that takes precedence over, say, the possibility of a review in the Times before you turn 80. Whatever.” My notes are a sarcastic bitch.

It probably doesn’t help that I want my second book to be mine-all-mine, not advice, not for anyone else, my Didion book. And I decided that 45 would be a good age to publish this unwritten masterpiece, which is not right now, but later. Except this one doesn’t want to wait and it isn’t going away. But I push back. I’ve been on central time for three and a half years now and I still can’t get used to prime time television starting at 7 p.m. I have a day job that requires a lot of reading and editing, and it pays the bills, so if I feel like watching four hours of television or staring at the ceiling instead of writing, hey, at least my bills are paid.

Weary of covering my ears and humming every time a new thought surfaces, I set a schedule. I resolved to sit down and use the 5,000 words of notes I have accumulated, turn them into 60,000 words of brilliance, and I will do this for 10 hours a week. Last week, I wrote for one hour (not counting day job related writing or navel-gazing blog writing or Tweets or vaguely insightful Facebook posts). I know it’s bad when things I hate take precedence over my writing schedule: Laundry. Vacuuming, which I do monthly when my dog is at the groomer so she won’t go mental when she sees the Bissell Pet Vac (as in "good for sucking up pet hair," not "good for sucking up pets," but dogs think what they think). Financial paperwork that I don’t care about (someone else can figure out how to roll over my 401(k) into whatever stupid savings thing that won’t cause me to have to pay taxes). Did I already say laundry?

I have coached writers. I know what I am supposed to do when my brain wants to scrub the bathtub and organize the linen closet before I can sit down to write. Those are the thoughts I should ignore. I should sit in front of a blank page and let the words come. I should deactivate my Facebook account. I should stop reading the amazing ideas of others and start writing my own. Physician, heal thyself? I used to think it was weird to see doctors smoking cigarettes or eating fast food, but maybe it’s not weird at all. Maybe it comes down to a choice: Help others or help myself.

So, first step. I will forget the “what ifs.” What if this person gets mad because I wrote a thinly veiled description of a thing that happened a long time ago? What if people judge me? What if I don’t have a second book in me? What if I fail? Then I will find the rational part of me that hates the fact that I am never satisfied with my last great achievement and convince it to hunker down and get to work on a chapter outline.

I’m telling you these things because I need you to know that I am not fragile. You can expect things from me. I won’t flinch, make excuses, or fall apart. This is what we do, my friends. This is what we do, having written. Let's all write like motherfuckers.

An imaginary conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel...

I "get" difficult women. I know a lot of them. I've worked for some and am related to several. I am one. I appreciate the stick-to-her-guns fuck you mentality of not caring (at least, appearing not to care) about what people think about you/her/us.

I read Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir, Prozac Nation, when it came out. I was in college. It spoke to me. I even saw the movie. It didn't speak to me. In the late 90s, I (still in college) read Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. You probably heard me cheering about it at some point. I read her second memoir, this one on addiction, a few years ago. I don't remember a lot about it, but I know I identified on some level. I've never met Lizzie (but in my mind I call her Lizzie because I follow her on Twitter and that's what she calls herself and I think if we met in person she'd be cool about it), but in the past couple of years - since she's popped up again writing pieces for The Guardian and New York Magazine - I've been paying a little more attention. She seemed to drop off pop culture's radar for a bit, and I had the sense that she had gone through something similar to my own (hate to call it mid-life because I know I'll live past 80) crisis. A loss of voice. And these pieces, varied as they were, attempts to find her voice again. Kind of like I've been doing for a while now. Except a lot more public. And with comments. On the internet. It feels like an odd question to ask about someone who wrote a book in praise of difficult women, but I also wondered why all the hating on Lizzie?

She's a little bit older than I am, but I consider her a sort of contemporary. And when I read her most recent piece in The Atlantic, "I Refuse to be a Grownup," I promised myself I wouldn't read the comments. Then I read the comments, or the first 20 or so. I wished I knew her in real life so I could tell her that she's doing the right thing, this writing she's doing to get her voice back. And this is the most "back" I've seen her since the 90s.

If you know me personally, you probably know that I rehearse conversations in my head (and come on, you do too, right?). On my way home from work, during that cursed/blessed worst Austin traffic drive time, I had one with Lizzie. It went something like this:

Me: Hey, so good on you for the Atlantic piece. I hope you didn't read the comments.
Lizzie: (leaves her sunglasses on, which is fine because I am kind of the sophomore to her senior in this scenario) Nope.
Me: I mean, I don't know who has time...but the one from the "TL:DR what's the point?" guy...he didn't even read...
Lizzie: I don't read the comments. I don't care what people think.
Me: Hey, that's really great...so, you of you. There was that one "psychologist" who comment-diagnosed you with narcissistic personality disorder and that isn't even a thing anymore; it's not even in the latest DSM...
Lizzie: (icy silence)
Me: I wanted to tell you that I get it. I hate that you have to see criticism all over the freaking internet when you're just being honest, I mean who isn't a narcissist? What's wrong with not wanting to grow up? For those of us who choose not to get married, not to have kids, to remain emotionally...um, I want to say... immature? Why do people care so much?
Lizzie: I don't. So I wouldn't know.
Me: I wanted to say that I'm on your side. Write all the crazy. Just write. Let the haters hate and do it anyway, even if it's just for lines like "I wish people were judging each other a great deal more, and more carefully, but they are not. Knowing this, I have no trouble being myself. It works well. I will die screaming." BECAUSE ME TOO, LIZZIE, ME TOO.
Lizzie: Calm down. (exhales vapor from her e-cig)
Me: OK, so I'll let you go, but just one more...
Lizzie: No.
Me: DidyoutotallyfreakoutthatChristinaRicciplayedyouinthemoviebecauseherforeheadOMGherforehead...
Lizzie: No.

And that was it. She probably wouldn't like me in person. Nor should she. I wanted to tell her about that one time I was on Prozac because my best friend died when I was 23 but it didn't work and how my mom is a therapist and told me the worst thing with mental health issues is to "be in the system" so I always made sure I saw private shrinks, off insurance, sometimes under assumed names, and I think talk therapy is overrated and that most people think I'm younger than I really am too because I don't really have responsibilities, but I do have one cat and one dog just like she does but the cat has hated me for 14 years now and also sometimes I am ridiculous too. When people grossly underestimate my age, I assume it's not based on my appearance, but on my behavior. I don't behave like a person who has the weight of other people's problems on top of my own, rather, I behave like a person who thinks her problems are the only important ones. And, BAM!, right back to narcissism.

Hate her or don't. Hate me or don't. I have had worry. I have had grief. I have had despair. None of these things permanently damaged me. Not even a line on my forehead (yet, but totally fine when it does happen, because it will). So to the critics, to the commenters and trolls, to anyone who cannot follow her stream of consciousness while she reaches for the voice she might think she lost by detouring to law school and relationships and doing things other than writing - pay attention. You're not. She is. And she says it better than I:

"Nothing is more bracing than not being concerned about what other people think. I have no idea why anyone cares. Trust me: No one is looking. I know: I am looking. People are self-involved."

p.s. If you don't know who Elizabeth Wurtzel is or if you were in a coma in the 90s, here are all the Tumblr posts in the world tagged with her name. Enjoy.

On diving into the wreck...and climbing out of it

I've loved the poetry of Adrienne Rich since high school. I discovered her work around the same time as Plath and Sexton and read her poems with the same morbid fascination (and wondering how she survived when the other two did not). When I heard the news of Rich's death in March of this year, it struck me again, how she lived on to write the obits of moody colleagues suffering the same dark disease, diving over and over into the depths, making it farther and longer each time, being the only one who knew how to rise again. She published her last work just a year before her death.

In my own writing, I always knew when it was good. It was good when it hurt, when it felt like hell. I wallow in nostalgia, dipping down and then rising again to find bleak humor in failure, in embarrassment, in broken hearts. Diving into the wreck for material, surfacing to turn words into paragraphs into essays. I've carried a copy of Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck" with me for years. It's what I think of every time I have to do the work of dredging up my own past, and often what I share with writers with whom I work when they are struggling over and over to plumb their own depths. The wreck is always there, I tell them. But you don't have to live there. You don't have to drown.

Rich meant something different, we learned in Lit 101. It's about patriarchy, gender politics, feminine bondage. Says the professor, but I choose to believe that it's a metaphor for returning to our own crime scenes, picking over the husk of memory to find the gold, taking care not to run out of oxygen and become part of the wreck. You can decide for yourself.

Diving Into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

It has been a struggle for the past few years, trying to find my voice again, wondering if it was gone forever. I spent more time than I should have diving into that wreck, deeper than I had gone before. I set up house there for a while. I sank to the bottom and let the water fill my lungs and take over. I am tearful as I write this, remembering how hard it was to find it and stay whole, the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck.

I wanted to write about the damage that has been done. The evidence of damage. I want to write about what surrender felt like. It was easy to let go. It was easy to live down there, so much harder to climb out. And besides, you breathe differently down here. 

But I did. Climb out. And I find it harder every day to go back. By cowardice or courage. I still know the way down. The ladder is always there. I try to stick close to the surface, skimming the water, not allowing myself to sink this time. We know what it is for, we who have used it.

Inspiration here, there, everywhere...

While I love my Kindle (the instant gratification got me), I'm still on the fence about buying books. When I moved to Austin, I culled my five bookshelves down to one bookshelf full of favorites and first editions. I love to run my hands along the spines, turning them over in my hands, flipping through paper pages and reading my notes in the margins (yes, I like to underline things and write in my books). Sure, I can keep thousands at my fingertips with my Kindle Fire, but I cannot bring myself to get rid of these last shelves, these paper memories, these literary giants that sit side-by-side in tidy rows. Vonnegut lives here. Hemingway lives here. O'Connor lives and lives and lives again.

I stumbled across this Etsy shop recently and fell in love with the inspired illustrations with quotes from literary greats. I want to buy them all, hang them so they can be seen from where I work most often (living room, couch, laptop).

These two are my favorites, but it was so hard to choose. F. Scott Fitzgerald makes my heart beat faster. T.S. Eliot makes me want to spill all of my secrets. Jane Austen makes me want to write letters that I'll never send.

I went to Barnes & Noble earlier this week with a friend and we ended up sitting on the floor of an aisle in fiction, leafing through paperbacks (even as we looked up e-books on our phones), pulling books from the shelves based on covers alone, putting our faces close to the open pages and inhaling the paper and ink and wondering if we're going to be the last generation who knows what book stores smell like. Will we someday try to describe it to younger people, our reading glasses perched on noses twitching as we struggle to bring the sense memories back, wishing we would have bottled it way back when, closing our eyes as we remember what it felt like to turn the paper pages? I think yes. We writers love our books. We writers are going to have to be curators of paper museums, preservationists of ink smudges, storytellers of the printed word.

Housekeeping? Housekeeping.

After waffling back and forth about whether or not to archive my old blog and start a new one (it felt like throwing away a lot of memories), stop blogging altogether (but I have sooo much material waiting to be loosed upon the world), or do "something" with my existing site to make it fun for me again (it felt so clunky forever and I had gotten in the habit of heading over to Twitter or Tumblr when I have something to say), I picked door number three.

This is my toe in, re-introduction, new beginning, the opening of the floodgates (I like that one the best). It's been three years since I've blogged on a regular basis, and I want to thank my friends Angie Mizzell, Aleigh Acerni, Doretha Walker and all of the blogs in my reader (so many) for inspiring me and inspiring me and inspiring me once more. I've been testing the waters for a long time and I'm ready to get my hair wet (and if you know me well, you understand that this is kind of a big deal because me getting my hair wet in a chlorinated kiddie pool is equal to most other people diving from a high cliff into the ocean).

If you're reading this post in a reader, you are probably confused. Click over to my blog and see the "something" I did with my site. I'd love your feedback, even if you just want to throw out the spirit fingers (Angie). And since the actual work on my part was choosing a designer, let me add that Carrie of CarrieLovesDesign.com is responsible for all of sexiness up in here.

So with renewed vigor and enthusiasm, let the navel-gazing commence! 

Vacation, all I never wanted...

I've never been great about taking vacations, especially as a freelancer when every hour is a potentially billable one. Over the past year - actually since moving to Austin in early 2010 - work-life balance has been one of my priorities.

This holiday weekend, I'm not headed on a jaunt to the islands, to a cabin in the mountains, or on my dream Alaskan cruise (whale-watching!), but I am disconnecting from work and work-related marketing tasks for the weekend. I have a great stack of books to read, my air conditioning works really well, I plan on taking lots of naps (had a good one this afternoon, falling asleep on the couch with a book open on my chest), getting some things in my house in order, re-organizing my home office space, maybe doing some housekeeping on my own personal sites (not really work-related, but I know that one is a stretch), taking the dog to a dog park for some running around and ball-throwing, and sleeping until my furbaby wakes me up instead of the alarm.

Right now, this is the vacation I need: taking my brain to a new creative space, writing for personal gratification instead of professional gain, taking my body outside for some people-watching and dog-bonding, exploring a few parts of the city I haven't seen yet (yes, I've been here a while but there's lots to see in Austin), and reading for pleasure instead of research.

I might even break out the Moleskine and colored pens and do some actual handwriting (can't remember the last time I went there, but my Moleskine dated pages says it's been too long). And I'm charging my camera now in case I feel like wandering around and snapping a few pictures of this crazy city in which I live, maybe find some interesting things off the beaten path, strike up some conversations with strangers, re-set my internal clock. It's not the Caribbean, but it's what I need now - and bonus: it's all here in a 10-mile radius.

I hope you're getting out - of town or in - and doing some exciting things this holiday weekend. And I haven't forgotten why we have a three-day weekend and plan on including some thoughts on gratitude and respect for the brave people who have sacrificed so much to make our country a better place (you can't see it, but I'm waving a tiny American flag right now). For those of you spending the weekend with your families, be grateful. I'm thinking about mine far away right now after having a marathon phone conversation tonight with my older sister, who I know will have the family over for a barbecue on Monday and I'm going to miss out on the chaos and laughter.

Love you, mean it.

I'm still here, I promise...

Borrowing from one of my favorite bloggers/writers/artists, Summer Pierre, a short note to let you know I'm still around.

My life lately has been consumed with freelance work, hunting for the perfect day job, trying to figure out how December arrived so quickly, and writing things that don't belong here. But I'm around, I'm still writing, and have a list of blog posts to come that are so navel-gazingly fascinating you're going to hate yourself if you miss them.

Have been coveting this for months...

Inspired by the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster produced by the British government in 1939 during World War II with the intention of raising the morale of the British public under threat of invasion, I love this poster from the KeepCalmShop on Etsy:

I love the vintage typewriter, love the "stiff upper lip" British-inspired phrasing, love that it reminds me to dial it down and keep the words coming. I want to hang it above my desk.

I also love the the KeepCalmShop's Etsy store's bio: "During an economic drop we saw a decline in people remaining active in things they loved to do. Money should never be a boundary to the creative desires of the heart. So we wanted to send a message of encouragement to all, to 'Keep doing what you love'.... and then the love of doing it will follow."

Yes.

This year's soundtrack....

Inspired my my friend Angie Mizzell's post, My Story: The Soundtrack, and because I have been working on and off on a memoir-style (sort of) essay collection myself, I came up with my own soundtrack should they make a movie from my memoir (a la Eat Pray Love). A more apt title for mine would be Love, Drink, Cry....but it isn't. I posted this on Angie's blog as well, but wanted to share here. Soundtrack for my memoir, possibly. Soundtrack for 2010, definitely.

The Weary Kind, Ryan Bingham (from the Crazy Heart soundtrack)
Beautiful World, Colin Hay
Hold on Hope, Guided by Voices
All in My Head, Shawn Mullins
Carolina in My Mind, James Taylor
Too Much Space, Lisa Germano
Who'd Have Known, Lily Allen
Bittersweet Symphony, The Verve
Thunder Road, Cowboy Junkies (Springsteen cover)
I am Alright, Madeleine Peyroux
All I Want, Susie Suh
Harvest Moon, Neil Young
You Are Not Alone, Patty Griffin
Don't Mind Me, Lucy Kaplansky

I have an actual iTunes playlist for this one called "Moving to Austin." I also have a playlist for 2009 called "The Shitshow," but I'd rather keep that one to myself for now. Even if you're not working on a memoir like the 10 billion of us who are, what is your soundtrack (or song) for this year? Did you have one for 2009? Is it mostly made up of The Cure? Should I have included "Deep in the Heart of Texas" on mine?

Share yours here...I'd love to add some new music to my own list.

Giving writerly advice inspires me to write...

Last week, I had two friends contact me separately asking for advice about writing. One is jumping back into working on her novel. The other is working on giving her freelance writing career a jump start. I also have two friends who recently dug old short stories out of storage and are working on revising them. What motivation! I realized, having slacked off in the creative writing department myself, that every time someone asks my advice on writing, it gives me a little kick in the pants to get back into writing myself. It's a little too easy - especially with weeks of 100+ degree days - to lose energy and spend evenings and weekends doing something other than watching the television in a reclined position on the couch under the ceiling fan with the air conditioner blasting.

I thought I'd share a few links here for the writers out there that might also need some inspiration (or a kick in the pants) that have helped me. These are for you, but also for me. I hope you enjoy them!

Writer, blogger and author Christina Katz has a great web site and weekly e-mail newsletter for writers. I've been subscribing for a few years now and always find something helpful. One of my recent favorites is her list of 228 movies about writers and the writing life (link to PDF here).

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is almost here! It begins November 1 and is perfect for writers who NEED deadlines to get anything done. You can sign up at the web site to participate - the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in just one month - and there are forums and tools that help set deadlines, hold you accountable for word count, and get advice from others who are participating. Read "How NaNoWriMo Works" here.

I love this advice to writers piece by Kurt Vonnegut called "How to Write With Style."

One of my favorite blogs with tons of advice for freelance writers, The Renegade Writer. If you're at the querying editors stage, they also have a great book called Query Letters that Rock.

Find inspirational quotes, book recommendations, and tons of links to other web sites at Advice to Writers (Writerly Wisdom of the Ages, collected by Jon Winokor).

If you're a podcast-listener like I am (I get most of my NPR fix via podcasts), there are several good ones for writers and readers, like Selected Shorts (short fiction read during their live shows by stars of stage and screen), KQED's "The Writer's Block" (short stories, excerpts, and nonfiction read by authors), Book Lust with Seattle librarian Nancy Pearl (interviews with writers on writing), The New Yorker's Fiction podcast (writers reading their favorite stories from The New Yorker), "I Should Be Writing" (the podcast for wanna-be fiction writers), and of course, This American Life (storytelling at its best).

And my final bit of advice, though it's specific to me, is return to what worked for you in the beginning. I have a battered copy of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. I discovered this book while I was still in high school and it was the first book on writing I read that really spoke to me. It freed me to write, it gave me permission to call myself a writer, and all of these years later, it still gives me so much inspiration, even when I have to force myself to pick it up and start reading. It's always close by; I always know where it is; and I think it might be the 5th or 6th copy I purchased because I've loaned or given others away to writer friends with writing emergencies.

For those of you who have asked my advice, I love you for it. I love you for thinking so much of me, but also because you inspire me by asking. And for those of you out there who would like to ask but haven't, ask away! Comment here or email me at kellylovejohnson[AT]gmail.com.

My writing space in Austin...

It's not an entire sunroom like I had in Charleston, but I decided to set it up where my dining room should go and there's great light from the windows in the living room.

The inspiration board is a work in progress (always)!

Musing on my muse and writing mojo...

I had a period of adjustment after moving to Austin in January during which I couldn't (or wouldn't) write unless it was work-related. I wouldn't even unpack the boxes marked "home office," just set up my home computer on my desk so Time Warner could hook everything up the first week I got here. My notebook from last year lived in my shoulder bag, but I hadn't been able to write anything but "[fill in the blank] suuuucks" for months.

Every time I logged into my blog, I found good reasons not to write anything. I read old blog posts and they either (a) made me sad or (b) reminded me of when I used to be funny. I also read old blog posts that are still up on the site of the magazine I used to work for and they either (a) made me sad or (b) pissed me off. I also read some of my old essays and wondered if I'd ever get my writing mojo back. Did I accidentally kill my muse? Did I drive her away during one of those weeks last year when I repeatedly told her to "fuck off" and wouldn't get off of the couch? Did I forget to bring her with me to Austin? Did she just get sick of me altogether?

It's taken me a few months to realize all of the above is both bullshit and necessary. I needed some "off" time. I just moved halfway across the country, away from my friends and family and the home that I loved. It's been less than four months. What I really needed to do is cut myself some slack. So I did.

I also decided to put away the 2008/2009-barely-written-in Journal-O-Negativity. I went to a great store here in Austin called Wanderland and bought myself a new notebook and some nice pens. Earlier this month, I started from scratch, writing again. Not just writing again, but writing in a notebook. Not just writing in a notebook, but writing every day. I went back to my 15-year-old "inspiration" notebook. I re-read Writing Down the Bones. And I gave my permission to be my 20-something year old writerself, just stepping out into the world of sharing very personal information, understanding that not every sentence I write has to be brilliant, and even if I'm just writing about how I don't feel like writing, just write anyway to get the pen moving.

It worked. A couple of weeks ago, I unpacked my home office boxes. I threw or gave away anything that reminded me of negativity in my past (why did I pack that crap anyway? Bad juju...). I hung up my inspiration board over my desk. I created my writing space. A new writing space, one that makes me happy every morning when I come downstairs and see my little office in the space where most people have a dining room table. I've nearly filled a third of that new notebook I've had for less than three weeks. Is every word brilliant? Absolutely not. Most of it is crap. But I'm writing again, which also means I'm seeing the world in a different way, which also means I know that one's muse never leaves for good. Mine is lurking around here somewhere; I know she's close by.