two big announcements

So, it's been quite a while since my last post, I know. I'm going to try to get better about that. In the meantime, however, I've got two big announcements:

1. My story "Genesis" has been published in Issue 014 of Luna Station Quarterly (who previously published my story "The Marriage of Ariadne"). You can buy the issue here and support art and artists! Or you can read the story online, for free, here.

2. After five years, Daniel and I are leaving DC! At the end of June, we'll be heading to Indian Lake for a little while. After that, we'll be flying out to Los Angeles and traveling up the West Coast. To celebrate our big adventure, I'm offering 10% off anything in my Etsy store. Just enter the code WEST10 until June 28.

just a post about writing, I guess

I am tired. Every day this week I have sat at my computer, thinking, really, another 1000 words? Didn't I just do that yesterday? I have to do it again? I don't actually have to, of course, but then again, I do. The best part of committing to writing 1000 words a day is that it forces me to write even when I don't want to.

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I first read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird when I was sixteen. My AP Language teacher let me borrow it when I finished all our other reading, and it kind of changed my life. I bought my own copy and underlined and highlighted different passages. I probably reread it about once a year, usually when I feel stuck and unmotivated. One of the best lessons in that book is about publication, and how it won't fix you. If (like me) you are an anxious mess before publication, you will still be one afterward.

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Really, I'm not sure what the goal of this post is. To hammer home that lesson? This week has been hard for writing, and I have been a little bit of an anxious mess at times. Publication, after all, is just another thing. A great thing, a thing I am glad and grateful for, but still just a thing. As one of Lamott's friends says in the book, the world cannot grant you peace, but it also cannot take it away.

and then I got published

Issue 011 of Luna Station Quarterly is now live! You can read my story, "The Marriage of Ariadne," here. Or you can purchase it in ebook form. (It's only $2.99!)

Thanks again to everyone for all your support! I hope you enjoy my story.

over the moon

So, I've got some big news to share: I am super excited to announce that my story, "The Marriage of Ariadne," will be published in the September 1 issue of Luna Station Quarterly. This will be my first publication and I am, appropriately, kind of over the moon about it.

photo friday

I've mentioned my friend Katie in this space before - when I first made scones, I thought of her and her warning from Africa that I would turn into a scone if I didn't stop eating them all the time.

Hopefully she won't mind me saying this too much, but she is also a fantastic artist. (I am lucky enough that many of my friends are. Now if only they'd all stay in one place...) It would be very easy for me to get started talking about art and its importance and the way we tell stories and how necessary they are, but really what I want to do is point you in the direction of the stories we tell each other, Katie's new blog. There really aren't words for how much I love this idea, and how excited I am to see where it goes.

(Speaking of stories, it's only right to mention that it is C.T.'s birthday today. Happy birthday, old man.)

A great steeling of nerves

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. (Though I did have a brief flirtation with drawing when I was very small, mostly I remember seeing those drawings when I was older.) It's always been a part of my identity, what I'm good at - but the majority of this writing is contained within the sometimes-secret walls of journal covers. I think this is why I'm so shy about my fiction, because I am used to keeping my extracurricular words mostly to myself.

The Diary of Anne Frank was one of my favorite books circa fourth grade (which also happens to be about when I got my first journal, a gift from my mother), and from that I graduated to Anaïs Nin - somewhere between Anne and Anaïs I became convinced that diary-keeping was itself an art form. (I also ate up books like this as a child.) Sometimes, in fact, I become quite convinced it is the only thing of value I have produced, but then I also recall, as Henry Miller told dear old Anaïs, "All diary-writing is a disease." The fact is, though, even when - despite all my best intentions - I shirk on writing fiction, I loyally write in my black-covered Moleskine. It takes writing events down to fully realize them in my life, and without doing so, I go a little crazy. Actually living always takes priority, but without writing it down, it's meaningless to me.

Diaries are an interesting thing, supposedly secret - because I convinced myself at an early age that they too could be art, I also had a reader besides myself at the back of my head to write for. I still balked at the idea of, say, my parents reading what I wrote in those little books, but eventually my readership did expand: a few friends, at first; later, a boy I was smooching implored me to either read him something or let him read it on a train ride; and when Becca got back from Prague, we supplemented our catching-up with excerpts from our journals. Writers have the peculiar idea that what they have to say deserves to be heard, and diary-writers are no different, in most cases.

So, despite my decade-plus of writing, showing my fiction requires a great steeling of nerves, is revolutionary. Writing has been so tied up in my personality, in who I am, and so opening it up for any kind of criticism (constructive or otherwise) makes me seize up with anxiety. I haven't been able to distance myself enough to realize that my writing and I are not synonymous, that criticism of my writing is not a dig at me. It's something I'm working on.