Write What You Know

I frequently write what I know. I write about fairy tales, which I’ve been studying since I was a child. I write about high school and college, which I attended. I write about church, about characters with mental illness, about camping and cats and families that love each other. And I write about things I don’t know—princesses and romantic relationships and living in tiny cottages without modern amenities. But there are some things that I don’t write specifically *because* I know them. Some things, I’m just too close to.

I’ve never written a character that’s specifically bipolar. I’ve never written a character that deals with the specific romantic issues and experiences I’ve dealt with. I can’t.

Often, authors will say “I want to read a book like this,” and the responses they get are usually along the lines of “Well, write it, then.”

The books I want most, the characters I could relate to in the most meaningful ways—I can’t write those. It would be too difficult, too painful, and even too dangerous.

At this point, you may be wondering, how can writing something be dangerous?

When you are mentally ill, at least, writing something very personal can be extremely risky.

When I was 21, I wrote a novel featuring a protagonist who dealt with a lot of the same mental health issues I had dealt with, by that point in my life. I wrote this during the year I spent in one of the lowest spots I’ve ever been in. Now, there’s a discussion to be had there about correlation and causation. Writing this story didn’t necessarily trigger a breakdown—it’s entirely possible that already being in a bad spot is what inspired me to write about a character in similar circumstances.

But I am absolutely certain that writing that story worsened my mental health in that year. Because this was what I was writing about, writing ceased to be an escape—I went to hide from my real life, and found myself deep in the headspace of a fictional character who was even worse off than me. I always get very entangled with my protagonists when I’m writing, especially if I’m writing in first person, as I was at the time.

My protagonist started the book with an eating disorder. I ended the book with an eating disorder. And, to be clear, I’m not accusing a figment of my imagination, or the process of writing about her, of making me anorexic. But I’d been dancing around the edges of disordered eating for at least five years at that point. I’d known that I was the kind of person who was at risk for developing one. And I do believe that sharing headspace with an anorexic character is a large part of what finally pushed me over the edge. I do still write about mentally ill characters, but I never let their problems come quite that close to me. They’re on good meds when I start writing them. They have problems similar to mine, but not quite the same. I certainly will never again write a self-harm scene pulled directly, exactly, from my own experience.

That was….that was bad.

A very real danger of being a writer with OCD is that you become obsessed, very easily, with whatever you’re writing. My stories consume me. And when I was already in a bad place, continuing to work on that story made everything worse.

I’m still really proud of that book, but none of you are ever going to read it, because I’m scared that thorough revisions would pull me back into that bad place.

I want to read stories about characters who deal with the same really serious, intense stuff I deal with. Reading those stories gives me a few hours of relief, which is the exact opposite of what writing them does. I need to see myself in fiction—I think we all do. But there are parts of myself that I, myself, can’t put into fiction.

I spend a lot of time writing what I know, but I can’t write what I know best.

Publication Announcement

My first novel, a retelling of "Prince Lindworm," will be released next month! Stay tuned for more information, and if you want to hear it faster, consider supporting me on Patreon!

 

Health and Creativity

It’s been a while, and I’m here today to talk about mental health and creativity.

About a year and a half ago, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder. And I was given new meds. And it was amazing. It still is. I feel real, and present, and human now, in a way I haven’t in a very long time. Maybe in a way I haven’t ever—certainly not since I was a small child, at least.

I love feeling this way. And it’s absolutely worth it.

A lot of people talk about how mental illness makes people great artists. A lot of other people talk about how that’s a load of crap, how pain isn’t the price we pay for a creative mind, how all the brilliant, mentally ill artists throughout history could have made even more, even better art if they weren’t held hostage by their own faulty brains.

Mostly I’m with that second group.

I don’t write well because I’m sick. My writing quality hasn’t gone down because I’m less sick now.

But here’s the thing: my writing quantity has. And whatever they tell you in school, quantity and quality are connected. The more things of any quality you produce, the better—we improve with experience, and the more things we make, total, the higher chance we have that some of them will be good.

I’ve found it harder to write since getting proper treatment. I still like to write. But I don’t need to anymore, and that makes all the difference.

I used to get trapped in my stories. It was terrifying, sometimes. A scene would play out in my head. And then it would play out again, and again, an endless loop for hours or days or weeks. And the only way to escape was to write it down.

I remember, once, in a ninth grade science class, a scene popped into my head where one of my characters died. And he kept dying, in the back of my head, dying and dying and dying, until I was crying over nothing in the middle of biology.

Apparently that’s a symptom of OCD. Obsessive thoughts. I used to have a lot of those.

The great tragedy of my imagination is that its contents can only exist in one place. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with a delicate balancing act. The real world is ugly, and hard, and I prefer my stories. But my stories will beat ceaselessly against my brain until they drive me mad. Or until I write them down.

The second the final word hits the page, there’s peace. The story is no longer trapped in my head, fighting to get out. It’s no longer in my head at all, and that world is no longer one I can escape to. I’m alone in my head again, and for a few hours, a few days, it’s great. And then it’s cripplingly lonely. And then a new story comes, and it all starts over. But that old story is something I can never have back, something that will never again feel any more Mine than any other story, by any other author.

I’m better now. The obsessive thoughts don’t come the way they used to. The stories are still there, but they’re not caught in a loop, and they’re not clamoring to get out. I can focus on other things, and pull them forward when I need them, when I’m ready for them.

I can keep them in my head, if I want to. I don’t have to scramble to write them down just for a moment of peace and quiet in my own mind. And that means a lot of my motivation to write is gone. It’s harder to find the time to write when I don’t need to. It’s hard to resist the temptation to just keep the stories inside, safe and close and Mine.

So I haven’t written much in the last year or so. And maybe, mostly, that’s a good thing. It’s because I’m better. It’s because I have the space inside my brain to breathe. But I miss writing things down. Miss sharing them with people. I’ll find my way back. I’ll find a new balance. I just don’t know how much longer it will take.

Be patient with me, please—my brain works in a whole new way, these days, and I’m still learning to navigate.

Wendy Darling

This is Wendy Darling. Named, of course, after Wendy Moira Angela Darling, she of Peter Pan fame. Wendy is a border collie, which means she’s too smart for her own good, and in possession of boundless energy.

She’s fantastic, and I love her. Also, I’m so incredibly tired. My original plan was to use her name to sort of transition into talking about Peter Pan. But you’ll have to settle for cute puppy pictures today.

Year in Review/Coming Up

It’s been a busy year. Not, I suppose, from the perspective of my readers, but in distinctly un-artistic ways, it’s been a lot.

It’s just past eleven, and I’m writing, tonight, in between baking Christmas cookies. I’ve been trying lately to maintain a better sleep schedule, but some rebellious part of my brain insists that baking is a late-night activity.

2018 has been my first full year working a fulltime job. It’s also the year I bought a house, and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and OCD. I tried new meds (which WORK!). I got two guinea pigs, three hermit crabs, a fish, and a snail. I tried dating and decided it wasn’t for me. I wrote almost exclusively indulgent crap under a pen name, for no purpose but fun. I made boring, grown-up purchases, like crock pots and blenders, address labels and Christmas trees. My new house has a piano, and I finally bought a TV. I’ve been working through my complicated relationship with the church, and though I haven’t found the place where I belong yet, I have some good leads to check out when all the holiday chaos dies down. This week I got a puppy. (More on that later.)

It’s been a big year for life. It’s been a slow year for writing, especially as I try to work out a good schedule with all my new responsibilities.

I’m not going to make any promises, because the balancing act is still a major struggle. But here’s a bit about what’s been going on, and what my thoughts are for moving forward:

I have one major goal for 2019, which is to start my own small press, so that I own my own ISBNs, and am ACTUALLY self-publishing, instead of technically being published by Createspace or Lulu.

Over the last twelve months, I’ve continued to work slowly on my next poetry collection, which will be called Small Scars. I’ve also begun work on a short story collection. This is going to be called The Shoemaker Prince, and will be made up of two longer stories and several much shorter ones, all fairy tales and fairy tale retellings. There may also be another chapbook in the works, similar to thin but about asexuality, tentatively titled Dear Somebody.

My goal is to get back to weekly fairy tale blogs; I have content outlined for the first three months of the year. For my church blog, I’ll be aiming for one post each month. I’m also considering monthly book reviews; in theory these will all be of Beauty and the Beast retellings for the next year.

One thing that remains really difficult for me is Patreon. I’m not getting much use out of it, primarily because I just don’t find it a useful format for my purposes.  There will be a post about that soon, explaining my struggles with it and asking for your feedback. For now I’m putting it on the backburner.

Despite the changes and challenges of the past year, and despite the fact that I genuinely enjoy my current job, my long-term goal is still to write and publish fulltime. As always, I appreciated your support as I work toward this goal.

The Conservative Christian's Guide to Not Sucking: Love

My first memory is of a little boy in a red shirt. My second and third and fourth memories are of church.

A lot of people are leaving the church these days, especially people my age. And honestly, I’m more likely to sleep in most Sundays.

It’s not about God. It has nothing to do with my faith.

I think it’s worse if your parents are pastors. I think it’s worse if you’re from a small church.

See, my early memories aren’t of sitting in a pew while adults drone on. I remember being in basements for Bible study, playing with dolls on the floor. When I get bored they set aside their Bibles to hold me. A prayer meeting turns into a birthday party, with a Barbie princess themed cake. The people at church often babysit me. I love them. They’re my friends. They’re my family.

And then they’re not.

That’s the problem with being the pastor’s family. You’re born into it, and you don’t realize what it means. Not until it’s much too late.

There will always come a time when you are set apart. Something in the church goes wrong. Your family has to move on. You have to leave. And they never call, and on the streets when you see them they don’t smile, and everything is over. Everything is gone.

You grow up, and you move far away, and you go to a church where you’ve never been what you always are—the pastor’s daughter.

And you stay there for months, and no one even learns your name, and you realize things will never be the same.

These people don’t love you. These people are not your family.

And even if they were, what then? What’s the use in loving, when the people who love you always leave?

I have plenty of good church memories, but they always end when people ditch me, and everything is tainted by the sting of abandonment and betrayal. And it’s been eight years but I still don’t quite know how to forgive. And I’m so afraid to let a church be my home again, because it hurt so much when I ended up alone.

So. A word of advice for those concerned about young people leaving the church: if you remembered how to love us every day, maybe we wouldn’t have to leave.

You cast us aside so easily.

The second church family I lost, it was because some people were mad at my dad. It was nothing even to do with me. But they vanished from my life like I was nothing.

I wasn’t allowed to go to a movie theater until I was eleven, because someone at church disapproved, which is unimportant in the long run, but it’s always troubled me.

I thought you loved me. You thought the big screen was sinful.

I never expected any of you to be perfect, but eight years later I’m still stumbling beneath the weight of the pressure that was the unspoken center of my childhood. Be good. Be better. Be perfect. Be the kid that all the other kids can look up to like their parents look up to your dad, and the moment either of you fails to be flawless enough all bets are off.

Here is the thing you have to understand: you drive us away.

Your response to mistakes and disagreements is rejection. Every time.

Here is what the church becomes to me, on a Sunday morning as I think of getting up and dressed and going. Church is about being turned away at the door because your skirt is too short. It is walking in with tattoos and shoddy clothes, walking right out again to escape the disapproving, judgmental, even frightened stares. It is your baby left undedicated because you are an unwed teenage mother. It is a pastor refusing to perform a marriage because it will never last. (Forty years later they prove him wrong.)

What we learn from our mistakes in church is mostly that Christians cannot be trusted. It has little to do with God.

How can you honestly say you want to reach new people when you actively drive away the young and confused ones you already have? We were born in the church. You never even had to reach us. You only had to keep us. And you failed.

I used to take unconditional love for granted. Now, it mostly makes me laugh, since it’s either that or cry.

I would love to be in church on Sunday. Give me a reason. Give me love. Give me trust. Make me feel safe, and maybe I’ll come back.

New Year, No Spoons, Schonwerth

I had a lot of big plans for things to launch in the New Year, but alas, I forget to take into account that the changing of the calendar would not make me magically cease to be mentally ill overnight. I haven’t so much as caught a glimpse of a passing spoon in weeks.

Also, I’ve got a largish project going for a client, so that’s going to slow me down even when my brain does get itself back in order.

So what I have for now is this: There are a few fairy tale rants I threw together before Christmas and New Year’s, and a couple poems, which will all be trickling out slowly as I try to work up the energy for writing more. For those of you supporting me on Patreon, Lindworm is almost completely posted. I know it’s been a bit of a hassle to read on this platform, but once the last chapter is up, I’m planning on posting the entire thing as a PDF; please feel free to bug me if I forget, as I have been beyond spacey these last few weeks.

My hopes are still to release another poetry collection by this summer, and it will be a full book, more like Goodbye or Avalanche than like thin. Please remember that while I have novels, and not only Lindworm, that I intend to publish, I am waiting until I have saved enough money to buy my own ISBNs and start a publishing company. I appreciate your support, both on Patreon and in buying my poetry books, as I work toward that goal.

Lastly, we need to talk about Schönwerth.  Franz Xaver von Shönwerth collected fairy tales in Bavaria in the 1850s, and five hundred of these were discovered in an archive in 2009. I’ve got the first English translation, which contains a fairly small selection of the whole, but every single one of them is amazing. They follow a lot of the patterns that most folktales share, but the deviations are delightful and absurd, and I figured you guys should have a heads-up because I’m planning on talking about these stories a lot.

Sorry?

As you may have noticed, it's been about three weeks since I've posted anything. And guess what?

I'm not really posting anything today, either. Just this general acknowledgment of my own suckiness.

This is not a great time of year for regularly producing new content, between work and Christmas and Thanksgiving. I'm hoping to get at least two or three more blog posts in yet this year, but no promises.

In the meantime, if you're really wanting to read something I've written, there's always Lindworm.

Currently I'm prepping for some changes in the New Year, so stay tuned for more info about that, and also about Christmas sales!

Fish and Fairy Tales

Okay, guys, I am so wiped out. I’m having a Halloween party tonight, kind of, so I’ve spent the entire weekend cleaning and baking and shopping, and any spare time has been for writing, and somehow none of the writing managed to be tonight’s blog.

I started a post on noses in the Grimm brothers, and another one about the story “Donkey Cabbages,” and there’s still that final entry in the Lindworm Series that I’ve been putting off, but I just haven’t had the energy to get to the end of them, so enjoy a night of rambling, I guess.

Last Sunday I helped out with children’s church for the first time at my new church, and, well. It was an experience. We learned about Jonah, and then everyone in the room got sent home with a goldfish. Including me.

Look. I love animals. There are those who are concerned that I may have a bit of a problem with spontaneous pet acquisition. (Spoiler alert: we’re working up to the place where they might have a point.) But I didn’t really want a goldfish at that moment.

However, having received said goldfish, I felt obligated to provide it with the best quality of life possible. So I bought a tank, water conditioner, and goldfish food. I named it Eunice. I got home, I set up the tank, and the tank instantly sprung a leak. Back to the pet store. New tank, bigger and sturdier.

Of course, by the time the poor thing got set up in a new tank again, the stress was really taking a toll. Long story short, I kept Eunice alive for slightly less than seven hours.

So now I have a beautiful tank set up, and no one in it. And then yesterday I went shopping for Halloween party stuff. I couldn’t find any caution tape, and I was sad. So I went to the pet store.

Meet my new friend. His name is Mars.

So now it’s me and my three boys in the tower here: Mars, Helios, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

I’ve been thinking lately about getting a hamster. His name would be Icarus, of course. And I already have the cage set up for my future guinea pigs, Perseus and Andromeda, who would of course produce more adorable guinea pigs. And I really miss having hermit crabs. I’ve even worked out where in my little apartment everyone would go.

Seriously, guys, I have a problem. An animal addiction. Send help now.

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On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been thinking again about that stuff I was reading a while ago about oral traditions dying out. And it wasn’t a problem I was really taking seriously at the time, because I figured, well, we just read things now instead of listening to them. I hadn’t really thought so much about how stories are very much falling out of the collective consciousness of our community, and that does freak me out a little.

Last night I watched “The Swan Princess” with my ten-year-old cousin. She’d never seen it before. She’d never even heard of it before. And Odette, for my generation, was like, the ultimate princess. Sure, we were all about the Disney, but when you got right down to it, we’d choose our bird girl every time. I don’t think I know a single girl my age who doesn’t still want desperately to have Odette’s hair.

A couple weeks ago, I found out my best friend had never heard of “The Brave Little Tailor” before. So now I’m sitting here trying to comprehend how one spends a full two decades without a picture of this adorable, ridiculous little fly-swatter in their head, and, like, it does not compute?

Once I mentioned “The Princess and the Pea” in passing, and the person I was talking to was all, like, “What’s that about?”

I strongly suspect that there are a great many people in this world who are unfamiliar with stone soup.

So I was thinking the other day about (of course) Beauty and the Beast, and how I got to the early novel-length version that I frequently rant about. It happened on a ballet website. The details are foggy—I think that I was in the midst of one of my “Swan Lake” phases, and trying to track down performance variants after learning about the version where all the swans are boys.

Anyway, I ended up on this site for this fancy ballet company or something, where they had the complete histories of all their performances. And I guess there’s a ballet of Beauty and the Beast, because this site detailed the entire history of the story, from that French novel straight on up to Disney. And that was the only place I’d ever heard that first story—it’s floating around all over the internet now, but back then it might as well have not existed at all.

I know that I’m way more into fairy tales than the average person.  But I also know that a lot of these stories are built into me, as old as any of my earliest memories, that they’ve been shaping who I am since long before I started consciously seeking them out.

A lot of kids aren’t going to be able to have that. Not with the same stories, anyway, and not with the same kinds of stories—if we don’t tell our stories anymore, if we just watch the movies of them like we mostly do, everyone knows the same version. You lose what I think is the most beautiful thing about folklore; the story never belongs to one person, because everyone has touched it, but it belongs to everyone in a slightly different way. I can’t—and don’t want to—imagine a world where fairy tales are like any other form of story-focused media, where there’s just one, officially recognized version. I can’t imagine many things more tragic than losing the unpredictable, ever-changing, multifaceted beauty of a fairy tale.

So please, don’t let our stories die.

General Life Update Crap

Okay. It’s not actually all that late, but I’ve been sick all week, so it feels like the middle of the night, and I am exhausted, and in pain, and I’m trying so hard to keep up this two blogs a week thing, but I just can’t think of anything to say.

That’s not true. I actually have blogs planned through the end of the year. The titles and corresponding dates are all written in my notebook in purple pen, and I check one off when I write it, then again when I post it, and one more time when I actually remember to link it on my other social media. But I can’t make any of those scheduled words come out right now. They’re all up there in my head, but they refuse to come out through my fingers.

I guess it’s just one of those days. Sometimes life gets hard, you know?

My house is currently being invaded by fruit flies. This is odd primarily because the house contains no fruit. Honestly, it’s a miracle I don’t have scurvy. And I’m doing all the usual things you do to get rid of fruit flies, and it’s working, kind of. I’m catching dozens, but there are always, always more.

The good news is that I’m really improving my hand-eye coordination, catching them in the air. Also, my kill count is reaching, like, mythic levels. I haven’t beaten the brave little tailor yet, but I’m getting close. Four in one blow!

My birthday was yesterday. Nothing too spectacular, but I liked it. Twenty four. We have a monthly birthday lunch at work, and it happened to fall actually on my birthday, which was cool. Then I went to therapy, and then my family came over for a couple hours.

Yeah, like I said, I don’t have much to say. Life in the attic continues to be quiet and peaceful and fairy-tale-esque, the ongoing fruit fly battle aside. I’m a little melancholy, but I think that’s normal, and last weekend I got to make two Barbie skirt cakes!

(I happened to have the top half of a Ken lying around, and, well, what else was I gonna do with him?)

Anyway, back to the usual Wednesday stuff next week—I’ve got publishing rants, religion rants, all the usuals lined up. Sundays, of course, are reserved for fairy tales, and this coming Sunday is the launch of Lindworm! The first chapter will be posted here in a few days, and if you like it and want to keep reading, just head over to Patreon and sign up to support me for as little as $1 per month!

I Temporarily Hate Classic Literature and This Is Why

Today during my lunch break I read How to Eat Fried Worms. Yesterday I read Sideways Stories from Wayside School and M.M. Kaye’s The Ordinary Princess. The day before, I read two books by Andrew Clemens.  I’ve been doing a lot of rereading lately. I’ve been reading some comic books.  Occasionally I’ll read a murder mystery. I haven’t read anything that could qualify as classic literature since about a year before I finished college. (Don’t tell the professors.)

It’s not that I dislike the classics. I just need a break. A long, long break.

My friends don’t get it, because my friends, like me, are all English majors. Look. When I was twelve, all I wanted to read was Shakespeare and Gulliver’s Travels and 1984. Then I went to school. What you have to understand, here, is that I went to a classical education, college-preparatory middle and high school. That’s seven years of education all about classic literature. I can recite Julius Caesar in my sleep, guys. And don’t even get me started on Cyrano de Bergerac. Do you want the Aeneid in Latin or English?

And then four years as an English major? I am litted out, man. I mean, come on, that’s eleven straight years of classics. That is Too Many Years of classics, even for the most classically minded of people—a category that used to include me, but now I’m the girl loading up on deliberately crappy YA romance while my friends dedicate summers to the study of Ulysses.

And I’m kind of mad, I think, that the combined efforts of a bunch of teachers ruined something I loved. It bugs me a lot that by my last year of school, I couldn’t put myself through the torture of finishing the assigned reading, when I used to consistently read the entire book on the first night, no matter what it was.

But I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think most of the blame goes to the classics themselves. One of the things that really bothered me senior year was all the bits and pieces of things we read. Like, if you don’t think a book is good enough to fit into your teaching schedule in its entirety, why are you wasting my time on it? No matter how good the book was originally you’re not going to get anywhere close to its true value just reading parts. It’s like turning off the volume, blocking off all but an inch of the TV screen, and trying to tell someone what the movie was about.

The problem is we’re not being asked to read a lot of these books, especially as we move forward in literary history, for the sake of the story, the characters, or a lot of the time, even the thematic elements. It’s all about the cultural significance. And if you’ve heard me go off about folklore at all, you know I’m all about the cultural significance. But if you think I’m going to devote hours upon hours to hundreds of pages of absolute crap, just because no one before James Joyce ever wrote crap in a certain style, you have got another thing coming.

Screw the classics. I’m not going to respect you for being innovative if you can’t also be good. No one can even read Finnigan’s Wake, guys. Why do we applaud something unreadable? If it wasn’t written by James Joyce, no one would think it was worth anything.

And how on earth do people decide what’s going to be a contemporary classic? Like, Jeffrey Eugenides. Did you read The Virgin Suicides? I did. Did you throw up after? I did.

There’s a certain category of books that are valued merely by virtue of being old, or unique, or even sad, as if something is worth historical preservation merely because it sucks. Are you ever, in your private life, reading for the sake of your own enjoyment, going to go out looking for a book where all the characters are immensely unlikeable?  Where everyone struggles and suffers and dies with nothing at the end to show for it? A book so dense it takes you an hour to get through a page? A book so stylistically unique that you finish it completely uncertain what actually happened, what was an extended metaphor, and what came up in your nightmares last night?

I think I’m pretty much done feeling guilty for preferring to surround myself with relatable characters and hopeful stories. Because I’m down with Homer, and Austen, and even Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Sure. Whatever. But I can’t read them anymore either, because I’ve been attacked from so many sides for so many years with the stilted, classroom versions of them, that suck all the life out, that look deeply for meaning and relevance and dismiss the beauty right on the surface. But the more contemporary a classic gets, the less likely it is to have any value outside of a classroom setting. Here are the themes, here all the styles, here are the cultural and historical backgrounds so you can comfortably dissect the work; why would you want to bother with character and plot and the big picture when everything comes together, when this is so convenient.

It’s about writing, not about storytelling, and I am always, always here for the story. Give me characters that mess up and try to fix things. Give me a terrible world where there’s still a chance to survive, to live, maybe even to turn things around.  Give me crappy dialogue and cheap paperbacks and spelling mistakes, give me characters who love and hate and can be loved and hated, settings that I can see in the background without straining my eyes, looking for the other level of meaning, give me something completely unbelievable as long as it can still be fun, I don’t care. Just give me a real story. Give me something I can feel. I’m so sick of my joy being turned into textbooks.

Greetings from the Attic

I don't have much in the way of blog content this week, and I probably won't for a while; I've just moved, and I don't have internet at the new place yet, and it's not really a priority. Also, I start my first full time job tomorrow, so. Social media is getting neglected.

But last Sunday I moved into the attic apartment of a huge old house, and my life this week has been solitude and gardens and excellent views, and I am very happy. I feel like a fairy tale character. A princess in a tower. Like Cinderella or Rapunzel, only without the kidnapping and slave labor and stuff.

I've been slowly revising a novel, and it's been hard to focus on anything else, writing-wise, but if you have a fairy tale you want me to yell about or whatever, comment or something. In theory I'm going to work my way through the most interesting parts of Il Pentamerone, but I might not get to it for awhile.

No, He's Not My Boyfriend

The first time I was assigned a romantic partner based on hair color, I was five. His name was Cody, and we were both blonde. Obviously, it was meant to be. I retaliated by declaring my intention to marry another boy, one with brown hair, and spent the next several years fiercely defending a crush based more on spite than attraction.

The second time I was assigned a romantic partner based on hair color, I was fifteen. His name was Devin, a church friend, and it wasn’t the first time I’d had to convince someone that was all he was. It took me a week to reassure a friend with a crush that she wasn’t getting between anything, and I nearly hated him, I think, by the time she believed I wasn’t in love.

The hair color incident, though, took place several months later, after his romance with my friend had flourished, then immediately crashed and burned, the way long distance relationships between high schoolers, based on a single meeting, tend to do. It was New Year’s Eve, and our church was holding an all-night event with two others. Devin and I were on nursery duty, with a dozen small children, loud and far too energetic at midnight, none of whom we’d met before.

The culprit was a little boy, four or five, very cute.

Not cute enough to pull a stunt like that.

Of course, when he realized that I was fifteen, and Devin still only fourteen, he came to his senses and saw that it would never work—apparently you have to be compatible in age as well as hair color. A narrow escape, but Devin, I nearly kissed you then and there—spite, again. I don’t like being told who I’m allowed to be with, even by preschoolers.

I don’t like to be told what to do in general (a source of great conflict between me and precocious young cousins), but about my love life, happily nonexistent, I get particularly testy.

I recently went with a male friend to Scandinavia, and I cannot count the number of times the following conversation occurred.

“So you’re here with your girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Oh. Your sister, then.”

“No.”

At this point the questioner stares at us with an expression of blank confusion, and I take a casual step behind Jamie. When men begin this interrogation, I always get the impression there’s one more question they’re dancing around: “Hey, dude, are we gonna have a problem if I bang this chick against a train station wall and have my way with her?”

It’s not that I’m scared of these men—I have a one inch blade in my pocket, and can use it to kill someone in three different ways. Not that I’ve ever tried. But they’re a nuisance, with all of their assumptions. I am travelling with Jamie, therefore I must in some way belong to him. It is not a problem I expected to encounter outside a work of historical fiction.

So, a note to all those who have ever suggested I am or ought to be dating my friends, whether you are other friends, small children, or creepy Norwegian men: No, he is not my boyfriend. I don’t care how old he is, and I do not care about the color of his hair. No, he is not my brother, or my boyfriend, and no, you cannot be my boyfriend instead.   

No, I do not have a boyfriend. No, I do not want one.

Maybe if I dyed my hair purple, there would be no one left to set me up with.

Adventures in Accidental Tourism

(I wrote this ages ago and I'm too lazy to adjust it to reflect that. Sorry.)

My favorite thing to do in London is get lost in it. I have been here for three days, and have managed to get lost on every one of them.

London is a big place, full of many big things, most of which I have not seen. Big Ben and the London Eye were noticed in passing. Buckingham Palace remains a mystery. Rumors about the historical nature of that large building down the street persist, but as I have passed it only alone in the dark, I cannot quite bring myself to care. It is a landmark that points toward home; that is enough for me.

I recently walked past a man dressed as a woman, complete with wigs in multiple locations. I entered four bookshops on my first day, and came across some excellent gelato. Having spent long hours squinting at street signs and praying to survive the crossing, I have come to the conclusion that both maps and traffic laws here are based more on hope than fact. I have passed six Southampton Rows now. One of them, I’m told, leads to my hotel.

Completely by accident, I have found the home of Charles Dickens. Also by accident, I have found myself at Parliament, the Tate Modern Art Museum, and five more bookstores. It is true that I have been provided with a map, but even if I was good with maps, I doubt I would use it. The lives of those who are not chronically lost must be very boring indeed.

There is a street called the Strand. It is also called about six other things, but the Strand was the most interesting and memorable of them. I’ve walked up and down it several times—straight lines are important for the easily lost, although I’ve still managed, somehow, to get turned around a few times.

The three months I’ve spent in Europe have been strange, stressful, and utterly overwhelming. There are a lot of things, I’m sure, that I could have learned in London. I could have paid some attention to Parliament. I could have actually entered the Tate. At the very least, I could have taken a photo of the plaque informing me that I was at Dickens’ house. But I didn’t. And in the four days I have left in London, I probably won’t.

I’ve learned a lot about the places I’ve seen—who lived there, who died there, what they wrote, who they worshipped, how they worshipped, who they loved. I have cried for dead men I never knew, I have walked on the graves of my ancestors, and I am tired. For three months I have known where I’m going. Today I don’t.

The sky is overcast, the light breaking through it soft and dull. The streets are dirty. People ignore me, which is a blessing. They don’t explain the history of the architecture I pass, they don’t rake their eyes slowly up and down my body, and they don’t whistle. I make up my own histories for each interesting building as I walk by, and I don’t ask for directions.

In a bookstore on a dirty, quiet corner, a woman from Topeka tells me about the weekend she just spent in the Lake District, and the week she spent in Minneapolis ten years ago. In another, three or six or twelve blocks down, depending on how many wrong turns it takes to get there, the cashier and I fangirl gleefully over the new book I’m buying, recently written by an amazing and underappreciated author.

There are a lot of ways to be lost, and I’ve experienced most of them. This endless tour of Europe has been constant structured chaos, and in the midst of it I’ve lost a lot of things, like peace, faith in humanity, and my sense of self. Sometimes when you get lost enough physically, you end up finding yourself emotionally, or spiritually, or however you lost yourself. That’s what I’m trying to do.

So I didn’t learn a lot in London. But I’ve had an even more valuable experience. Here is a city full of normal people living normal lives, surrounded by history but not yet a part of it. I don’t like to go looking for things; I only feel like a failure when they constantly elude me. Beauty is better when you stumble upon it by accident.

I’m sure there are a lot of great things for a tourist to do in London, but I can’t give you much information about any of them. For three months I’ve watched the lives of people who died a long, long time ago. This week I chose to close all the books, turn in all the audio guides, and sit on the outskirts of lives still being lived. I took a few wrong turns, I missed a few great sites, and I found some peace.

Not all who wander are lost. But I am, and that’s the way I like it.

How to Kiss with Tongue

It happens at the mall. I am bored, exhausted by a long, hard day of boredom, which so far has involved trips to every store I know how to drive to without GPS. At the mall I am accosted, as usual, by many men in booths who want to sell something. As usual, my inability to say no inevitably leads me to a poorly cushioned stool in a dimly lit hallway. The man—Kelly, for now—wishes to sell me a hair straightener. I own two hair straighteners already, one exactly like the one in his hand, except that it was accompanied, the night before my junior prom, by a much better sales spiel. Besides, I like my hair curly. 

Two days after the last time we speak, I will dye it all pink.

Kelly tells me many times how pretty I am. He tells me many more times how much prettier I am with straight hair. Having failed, at the end of a long and awkward hour, to take any of my money, he settles for taking my phone number instead.

It is, halfway through my twenty-second year of life, the third time I have been asked out. The first two times were by the same boy, agreed to due to the aforementioned inability to say no. Both were immediately followed by a full year with no communication at all, despite the fact that we saw each other on a weekly basis. I am not sure they count.

The third time I give him my number, take a selfie with the straightened hair, and proceed to the next stop on my road trip of boredom. I get lost.

Kelly calls me the next morning, with vague directions to an overpriced organic restaurant on the opposite side of the Cities. I get lost three times, but still manage to sit on the hood of my car in the parking lot, staring down at the faded pavement, for half an hour, before I am summoned to collect him from his house, presumably due to car problems.

Following three more rounds of lostness, we return to the overpriced organic restaurant together, ordering two different breakfast dishes, both of which we share.

I do not know how much food Kelly wants to eat, as well as being put off by the extreme organic-ness, and pick at it slowly. He talks of his desires to kayak, his sister who is a writer, and the prettiness of my still-straightened hair. He tells me that his real name is Alon, and makes insightful comments on the contrast between my confidence in my ideas and lack of confidence in my voice. I am confused when he tries to take my hand beneath the table, and fidget until he explains, smiling, charmed and patronizing. When he suggests a movie, I agree, composing a list in my head of everything in theaters, and contemplating which would be bearable with a guy I barely know. The one with the superheroes, maybe, though I’ve already seen it.

He directs me back to his house, and inability to say no prevailing, I sit quietly on the floor while he fetches sheets from the dryer and remakes the bed. We use my Netflix account to begin a rather stupid movie, and I react with a clinical indifference when he begins to kiss me. The sheets are black, still slightly damp, and the movie still runs in the background. He tastes like Middle Eastern food, even though he just finished a plate of organic whole wheat five grain gluten free sugar free pancakes. With syrup.

I allow the dampness of his mouth, slightly unpleasant, on my mouth and various other areas, noting that its placement on my neck produces a tingling sensation. When I do not react properly, he coaches me, slowly and gently, through the monumental task of opening my mouth when his tongue approaches, then pushing my own against it. This leads to more dampness, and the tingling is gone.

Having confirmed for the third time that I am not cold, he finally coaxes me into removing my jean jacket. I am concerned for a moment about the pocket knife I can no longer reach, stolen from my little brother, dropped in my deepest pocket at the insistence of my roommate. But I will not need it. When I become visibly uncomfortable he stops. We spend a confused few minutes actually watching the movie, until my parents call wondering where I am. I take the opportunity to escape. He does not call again.

Six weeks later I will see him at the mall again, his ponytail gone, smiling seductively at a girl who looks troublingly young, clutching a new hair straightener to her chest, blushing and giggling. He asks if I want to buy a hair straightener. Shaking my head, I walk around the corner. I wait until I’m out of sight to sit down on a bench, laughing hysterically.

Why My Roommate's Cat is Still a Cat: The Awkward Thing about Enchanted Bridegrooms

My roommate's cat is beautiful. Really, incredibly beautiful: just look at him.

Fairfax is so beautiful, in fact, that we're all convinced he's really an enchanted prince. And yet, we've made no attempt to break the spell.

Why, you may ask?

Because he's seen us naked.

It's uncomfortable. It's awkward. How do you look a hot guy in the eyes after you've peed in front of him? After he's sat on the counter watching you pop your zits? I've cleaned his poop, guys. We had his genitals cut off. How are you supposed to come back from that?

You don't. You just don't. So with happily ever after out of the picture, there's no way we're giving up our adorable cat.

There's really no way things won't be weird with your enchanted bridegroom. I mean, there's pulling your crush's hair on the playground, and then there's throwing a dude at a wall in hopes that he'll die and leave you alone.

In the fairy tale my url comes from, Kong Lindorm, the transformation process involves whipping the poor dude, then soaking him in milk and lye. He didn't have a safe word, guys. (To be fair, his plan before the transformation spell was to eat her. Yet another issue for the marriage counselor to deal with.)

Not that anything comes of the relationship, but the prince makes the little mermaid sleep on a cushion like a dog. And how do you explain to your dad that the monster that wanted to kill him is your boyfriend now?

Some girls get turned into flowers. Picking flowers kills them, guys. And what if he's picking you to make a bouquet for his girlfriend? Awkward. And how many people would ever think that maybe they shouldn't get undressed in front of the botany? That flower has seen things, man.

There's a Schonwerth fairy tale where the princess is under a spell that makes her look like an ugly old hag. The prince is not nice to that hag. Not at all.

And there's more. What if you kind of had a thing for that older lady? What if you fell in love with the Beast the way he was, and then everything changed?

Guys, I'm really glad magic isn't real. This relationship stuff is already hard enough.

In Which I Emerge from My Haze of Depression to Ask You to Give Me Money

Sorry I've been AWOL - depression hit hard this time, and I haven't been able to keep words in my head for long enough to write them down. I'm doing a little better now, but no promises for consistent updates any time super soon.

I'm planning to do a whole bunch of fairy tales posts coming up, but I have to track down my Grimms first, and the house is a mess. In the meantime, I've been doing mostly nothing, but I've got a couple poems and a couple scenes from a novel floating around. If you support me on Patreon, you can see some of that.

And speaking of Patreon, I'm about a third of the way to my first goal, which is enough money to buy some ISBNs and start publishing my work for real, without relying on Amazon. So any help would be really appreciated!

thin is still a thing, available for Kindle and Nook as well as in hard copies. I'm going to print about 20 to take with me to Illinois over Christmas, so if you're interested and in the area, let me know - avoid those shipping costs. People in the Twin Cities, same deal. Everyone else, sorry, but there's no shipping charge for an ebook, and it's a little cheaper anyway.

Also, my essay "And He Became a Handsome Prince: Humanity and Human Relations in the Folk Tradition" is now available for Nook and Kindle. It's all available for free on the blog, but the ebook is better formatted, and includes an intro, conclusion, and bibliography. Not that anyone's probably dying of curiosity about my bibliography, but if you enjoyed the essay, a three dollar ebook is a great way to show your appreciation.

And as always, there's Avalanche and Goodbye. Plus the Redbubble stuff.

Stay tuned for a post about the Frog Prince, eventually.

Impossible Tasks

You all know the drill, right? Standard element in a lot of stories. Chop down the forest with an ax made of glass. Sort out the different kinds of seeds. Empty a lake with a spoon.

This isn't actually a post about folklore. Sorry. I'm here to talk about impossible tasks in real life. That's right: it's another Shameless Self Promotion post. Sorry again. But only kind of.

Today I'm here to talk about the impossible task - the many impossible tasks - of being a writer. See, first you have to sift through all the different words, all the ideas, all the stories, and pick the right ones. Then you have to actually put them on paper, which is harder. They change, see, on the way from your brain to your hand, even when you've got them all thought out just right. It's like sorting out flour and powdered sugar. Like herding cats.

(Someday I will successfully herd my cat. But that's a challenge for another day.)

After you get things on paper, you still have to change the paper, again and again until it comes close, at least, to being the kind of thing you thought in was when it only existed in your head. It's weird, and it's hard. When I'm still in the process of writing, I tend to get scenes and fragments sort of stuck in my head, just running in an endless loop until I finally get down the whole story they belong to, just right. Sometimes it's nice, comforting, having a good scene as a background to your life. Sometimes I put off writing so I can keep a good scene.

But sometimes you get a bad scene, and it follows you everywhere for hours, and it's terrifying. Once, in high school, I nearly started crying in science class because in the back of my head, I'd been watching a character die over and over again for hours.

I got a few weird looks.

And here's the important thing: all of that is just the beginning. The easy stuff. You've gotten the words from your head to your paper. Now you've got to get them to other people. That's the hard part. Because it takes time, and it takes energy, and money, and a certain belief in yourself that can be hard to maintain. Forget emptying the lake with a spoon. This is where you walk into hell to get Persephone's beauty in a box. This is the final test.

And this, this is me asking all of you to be the ants that help sort seeds. This is me asking you to help me level a forest, to help me drain the sea.

I like writing poems, and I love that people like reading them, too. And the blog posts about fairy tales? Well, there are few things I enjoy more in life than screaming into the void about fictional people being idiots.

But I want to do more. I am doing more, actually, and I would love to get to a point where it can be a bigger part of my life.

I write novels. Writing novels has been the main thing I've done with myself, I guess, since I was about sixteen. And I'm not going to send these novels out to agents and publishers and the whole shebang. I love the publishing industry. I mean, I really love it. My big goal in life, since I was eighteen, has been to be a publisher, to have my own small press and to share stories with the world. My own stories, of course, but also everyone else's.

So here's the deal: I currently have three poetry collections out. One without an ISBN, two using ISBNs from Createspace. That means that when I sell a book, Amazon gets money too. And that's kind of where things need to be in my writing career right now. But I don't like it. I think that Amazon is pretty bad for the publishing industry, and I don't want to support that long term.

So as much as I want to write more, to publish more, I'm waiting. ISBNs cost a lot. But once you have them, you're in control. You aren't being published by Createspace or Lulu or whoever. You're really, entirely, being published by you. And that's important to me.

So I'm here, asking you to help me drain the sea. Because it's not the kind of thing you do alone. Help me to become an author and a publisher. Help me to publish my own books, help me to publish other people's books, and help me to achieve the financial security to devote as much time and energy to these things as I can.

I have three books out. Goodbye and Avalanche are available on barnesandnoble.com. And on Amazon, but if you can, I would appreciate you using Barnes and Noble instead. thin is available on Etsy. All three are available for Kindle, but I'm currently in the process of getting Nook versions too, and I'll let you know when that happens. I know a lot of people don't have Nooks, but if you do have any compatible device, the Nook versions will cost you less, and pay me more, than the Kindle versions.

Next, I have a Redbubble account. I haven't entirely gotten the hang of it yet, so it might be kind of lame, but if you want to see something, I'm definitely up for suggestions.

And then there's the big one. Patreon. And this is the simplest one for you guys, by far. It doesn't take a lot. Just a dollar a month, and you'll be helping and supporting me so much.

So here are the links:

Patreon

Redbubble

Etsy

Barnes and Noble

Amazon

And finally, thank you for anything you can do to help. The thing about all the most impossible tasks in folklore is that they are possible, as long as you don't do them alone. And I believe that's true for the real world, too.  Together we can do great things.

Screw That

Sometimes love hurts. Maybe most times. Maybe all times. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, the way it has to be. Because love means change, and change is never easy. It’s even harder when you have to change from a monster into a man, and I guess that’s what I was planning to write tonight, but screw that. We’re tangenting. We’re tangenting hard.

Because it isn’t fair. Why should he have to learn to be a man? He never asked to be a man, or a monster. He’s just some poor little boy who got used, and it isn’t fair. And the little mermaid? Screw that prince, girl. You should have stuck that knife in his chest when you had the chance. Girl, you should have lived. He didn’t care about you. He didn’t care about anything. Girl, he killed you long before he said yes to another woman. You fought hard for your humanity, girl. You sacrificed everything you had for it, and he still consigned you to the stupid doggy bed in the stupid hallway. You deserved better, girl. You deserved to live.

So forget about love and all its pain. Screw that. You fight, and you live, and you don’t put everything you have into someone who will never give anything back. That beauty will never see that you were never a beast, boy. She’ll never understand how that fairy hurt you, and no matter what you, she’ll always believe that everything you are is only your fault. So rip her throat out while you have the chance. Those fangs are all you have left, boy. You better fight to keep them.

And stick that knife in him now, girl, now before it’s too late. You loved him, and you gave him your life. And your sisters loved you, and they gave you the chance to take it back. Screw him, girl. All he ever gave you was a pillow outside his door.

You deserve more. You deserve so much more. Don’t let them hurt you. You have to live. You have to fight for what’s yours.

Real Life Stuff

Well, first of all, I think I have one now.

So over the last week I've started a job at Barnes and Noble and moved into an apartment. And since I've been at my new job almost constantly since I moved, there are fragments of furniture everywhere, the cats probably think they've been abandoned, and I'm living out of a suitcase and off of ramen noodles and Goldfish.

Tomorrow I shop. And update my LinkedIn profile.

Also, I'm starting my final semester of college next week. And I'm writing my final big research paper, which is, of course, about folklore. Specifically transformation stories.

So the blogging will probably be even more haphazard than ever, given my recent acquisition of a life, but expect lots of rambling about beasts and mermaids and snake people. And Oz. I think I'm going to have a lot to say about Oz in the near future, for reasons I'll get into another time. And brace yourselves for that, because once I get started on Oz, it's hard to get me stopped.

In the meantime, this is your weekly reminder that I write books.