The Grand End-Year, End-Decade Round-Up of Grandness

Dear you,

This post is not my usual. I debated whether or not I should do this grand round-up of good things post because I know the slew of grand good things announcements all across the ether can be taxing for those who feel like they don’t have a grand round-up of good things. I was that person at the start of this past decade who felt like she didn’t have many good things and hearing about other people’s good things made me crazy. But in the spirit of things getting better and troubles, even the worst ones, being temporary, I want to take a moment to appreciate the path this decade took for me, because it was winding, full of bullshit and the best shit, the very lowest lows and the very highest highs.

2010 was the worst goddamn year of my life, preceded by 2009 which was the other worst goddamn year of my life. (Cue my mother’s flashbacks to a two-hour long car ride in which I cried the entire time for seemingly no reason at all other than the fact that I couldn’t not cry.)

2009 was economic collapse, college graduation, moving into a house out in the country with my boyfriend, commuting hours to Dallas to a grown-up job that was everything I feared it would be, in that it was a soul-sucking mess where nothing I did mattered and the people there were awful. Cue my own flashbacks of waking up at 5:45 am so I could throw on clothes, get in my car at 6 to get into Dallas before traffic, clock in at 7:30, take a 10-minute lunch so I could clock out at 3:40 and get back home before traffic hit at 5. That job lasted three months. I quit without anything lined up because I worried that if I didn’t quit, I would die on the highway. Cue the next three months of tears, every-single-day tears, what I didn’t know then was panic attack after panic attack. Cue a memory of chopping tomatoes in an afternoon with nothing else lined up to do and the tears coming on again and me wondering what it is about tomatoes and the time of day that has anything to do with anything and yet here I am, upset to the hilt about it.

2019 is a new house, one that I own. 2019 is a new library that I got to open. 2019 is The Porch, the year of my first stage reading, more journal acceptances than I ever expected. 2019 is some of the best friends I’ve ever had. 2019 is anxiety medication. 2019 is so much fulfillment it almost seems to be too much and yet I still want to eat it, gobble it up like there’s no tomorrow.

The decade of the ’10s was the decade of my 20s and holy fuck were they 20s. A rotating door of friends that would get close and then move out to yet another city, job promotions in a career I wasn’t sure about, a masters degree I was so unsure of I dropped out three times before I finally finished the goddamn thing, a marriage that I had been sure about since day one, a husband that has taken me to Holland, Wales, Germany, and New Orleans for the greatest experiences of my life, and now finally has brought me to Nashville where I end this decade feeling like I’m finally home again. This decade was the one where we gained a hateful cat, loved her, lost her, and grieved her, and gained another much less hateful cat (but not nearly as smart and cunning… she has much to learn.) I began this decade grieving a grandparent and I will very well end this decade grieving grandparents again.

And this was a decade of trying to figure out what it means to write. I blogged myself into oblivion, kept a written journal when anxiety wouldn’t let me put words to a computer screen. I vowed I wouldn’t write when I decided to get my library degree and wrote poetry instead because I couldn’t not. I wrote my way through my grandmother’s death because I couldn’t not. I turned that grief into a novel because I couldn’t not. I learned that I write simply because I will always write. The publications and successes are just perks. The real prize is every morning spent with my fingers to the keyboard, every page that is honest, every lesson learned through time spent with the words.

Fuck, the 20s are going to be grand.

And because I am goal-oriented and I like to honor the path, here were my writing goals for 2019, here’s how I did, and here’s what I’ve got on my roster for 2020.

2019 Goals

I had a lot of big goals for 2019, mostly having to do with production. I had spent the majority of 2018 on an R&R for my book and a huge project at the library which left me with a busy year of writing but not a lot of finished work to show for it. So 2019 was all about producing more pieces for submission and getting on with book 2. Best laid plans hardly ever make the cut of reality but this year truly went above and beyond my expectations for writing. Here’s how I did with each goal:

1. Finish a first full draft of book 2, AKA “Wheelchair Cowboy.”

I kinda finished this one. I got 60k words out for the beginning and part of the middle, and then a basic outline to the end. It’s absolutely a Draft 0 and I’m counting it… Kinda. My excuse for this one is that I followed a whim to drop everything and re-work book 1, AKA SAY, WOLF. In September, I sent the book to a wonderful editor (K.K. Fox) for a developmental edit after letting it sit for a year not quite in a trunk but just about. With KK’s guidance, I re-structured the book, queried it mid-October, and had three offers of rep by November. I signed with Kerry D’Agostino, sent her a wolf-themed thank you card, and now we’re off to the races on line edits, hoping to go on sub with the manuscript in the new year. So there. Sorry Wheelchair Cowboy—I’m coming back to you in 2020!

2. Finish and submit 5 new pieces.

Great success! My five pieces of 2019 were “The Coma” (story forthcoming from Natural Bridge winter 2020), “Probationary Girlfriend” (story currently on sub and racking up close calls and personalized rejections), “Taming Wild Animals” (essay to be re-worked in 2020), “Kitten” (published and available now on Pidgeonholes!), and “Save St. Mark’s” (essay dear to my heart that I will be subbing hard in 2020.)

3. Receive more than 100 rejections.

Yeah, I blew past this goal a little harder than I wanted to. I won’t tell you how many rejections I received this year… just know that it was well above 100. That’s why I’m going to work on lowering my rejection ratio in 2020 by learning some goddamn patience and waiting longer between “finishing” and submitting.

4. Submit to 3 contests or grants.

Lol at grants. Not sure what I meant with that. But I did submit to five contests this year and my story “Woman Hollering” made it to the top ten round of Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. Ten out of 1,400 stories! That was huge and really gave me a boost when I needed it mid-year. That story has since been accepted for publication and will be forthcoming from Puerto del Sol in August 2020.

5. Submit 3 guest blogs or craft essays on writing.

This was a new one for me that I just wanted to try out. And it was great! I had two pieces accepted (1—“Three Secrets to Create the Writing Life You Want,” published with Cleaver Magazine, and 2—“Knowing When to Fly: Leaving a Critique Group,” published on Jane Friedman’s blog which was a dream come true for me) and I pitched three other ideas that have not yet been picked up. Maybe I’ll try them again for giggles in 2020.

6. Complete a year of Lit Mag League and Draft Chat leadership with The Porch.

I have LOVED working with the Porch. Katie and Susannah are two wonderful people that have done SO MUCH for Nashville’s writing community. I am honored that I get to be a part of it with them. I will be stepping back from LML and Draft Chats this next year to make more room in my life for new opportunities but I’ll still be hot n’ heavy with The Porch in 2020 and loving every minute.

So what’s in store for 2020?

Short, simple, and easy. Production, mindfulness, and going easy on myself as I move into this decade much older, much wiser, and ever ready to rock.

What will your 2020 look like?

Photos: The Writing Attic

Dear you,

This is morning. Every morning, if the sun is not yet up. The room is painted in sunrise pink and when I’m up there working, the windows glow for the neighborhood.

 Mornings in the attic are a ritual. Coffee first, of course, but then straight upstairs to get to work. The kitten comes too, every morning. Her level of helpfulness waxes and wanes; some mornings she’s right there with me, watching me type. Most other mornings she’s playing with everything but the immense lot of toys I bought her.

I love this attic. It is my pride and joy, my own little slice of heaven. To have this space to stretch, toss papers around, be as maniacal as I want, is something that I still marvel at, even a year later.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And of course, the kitten has her own desk, where she does all her important work.

I love this attic because it is filled with gifts and creations from my friends and family. The stained glass books are a gift from my mother-in-law. The antlers were a joint effort from my niece and my brother; she shot the deer and he created the mount. The picture of the lady is a gift I gave myself; my grandmother has a figurine of a lady in a similar dress. But this lady’s hair is tied back and proper, her hands are gloved and holding a bouquet. She is prim and small. The lady in the picture above (titled Vivacious) has her hair down. She is smiling and dancing. The picture is part of a calendar created by the local electric company, year 1950. 

The walls upon entering are decorated with an intentional purpose. Artwork from Texas, gifts from new friends, a photograph taken by my best friend from home during her first college photography class (her grown self now an accomplished photographer.)

Ahead are more reminders of how loved I am. There are photographs taken by my father-in-law when he was young paired with photographs taken by my husband when he too was a teenager. Macrame art from a friend named Lisa. A mobile of seashells, sand dollars, and petrified wood created by a friend on a whim and given to me because I happened to be there when he finished it. There is a canvas art print thrifted and created by my mother-in-law for my husband to outfit his first college apartment, something I vividly remember hanging on his wall when I went to this same apartment for the first time. We were sitting on the couch watching Commando. He laid his head near my lap. This was the night of our first kiss.

When I was four years-old, my mother used to dress me in my sleep at four am and take me to my grandparent’s house so she could work her shift at the hospital and still go to nursing school at the same time. My dad drove truck and was long gone by time the four am wake-up call rolled around. My grandfather waited for me in this chair every single morning. We would sit in it together and watch the weather news until my grandmother woke up and made breakfast. When we moved my grandmother into assisted living, she sat in this chair every day with an oxygen tank hooked to the back. After she died, my mom used it as her sewing chair but once I had room for it, she drove it to Nashville so I could use it in the attic, which tells you everything you need to know about our relationship and what kind of mother she is. Now, it’s the chair where I read my drafts.

There are mementos and memories strewn about this room that breathe life into every word I write. Here, my brother’s glass horse forever memorialized in the broken-hearted essay I wrote when we left Texas. Here, a stolen cup from Olive Garden pilfered for me by a boy with a crush on our high school band trip now used to store idea notes. Real good ones like “widowmakers” and “Do the lord’s work” and “artifacts” and “JUST DEAD INSIDE.”

And here it was before, the week after we were lucky enough to buy it, just a little dead inside but filled to the brim with potential.

Now We Start Again

Dear you,

After three years of writing a book I had already tried to write three years earlier, I finally finished that book (as finished as I alone can get it), offered it up, and settled in to wait.

Waiting in the form of books read by sunrise, morning meditations, walks. Full, long, self-satisfied breaths. A clean(ish) kitchen. The garden pulled, tomatoes dried.

But waiting is hard, even if the tomatoes taste so good you consume them before you can save them, and waiting is especially hard when you realize how much of your day was consumed by that book, how much it crowded out any brain space for anything else. The mind abhors a vacuum and the space between creative projects is just that—empty. So I put my mind on search, and lo and behold, the next thing was right there waiting for me to finish waiting and notice it.

But of course it’s never that easy, and although the thing grew impatient as I hemmed and hawed over how to start it, my mind couldn’t get over the fact that it has been three years since we’ve been in this position. A large-scale project, mornings as blank as the pages, an image or two to go on but no sense of who or what or why. Like a jigsaw puzzle once all the border pieces are put together—where do I begin?

I have been here before. The start of every project, large or small, comes with this same feeling of walking through a dark corridor, groping for doorknobs, wondering what waits behind the door you’ve managed to find. I vacillate between whether or not this process is harder now than it was the first time around. The first time around, there was no light at the end of the tunnel, no way of knowing what the end would look like it when I got there, if the path I was on was the right one (or not even just the right one but not the completely wrong one.) None of it mattered because no one knew I was trying to do any of it. I had no critique group, no published stories, no friends that knew I was actively writing. I even kept it a secret from my husband. Easier that way, should I choose to throw in the towel.

But I eventually told my husband that I was writing a book, all shy and quiet like he would be alarmed by this news. I went back to the critique group I abandoned years earlier the first time I abandoned the book, slinking into the room, embarrassed for having been gone so long, long enough that only two of them even remembered who I was. I started submitting stories and poems, sharing the acceptances when they came. I made this website, started this blog, little by little identified myself until the title of writer became synonymous with the title of librarian.

And now, here I am—back in the brain space of the genesis of a long project but no longer in the genesis of my identity as a writer. Needless to say, it is difficult to rectify the two.

So how strange that just as it is time for me to start a new book, it is also time to start a new garden. And not just any new garden, a fall garden, something I have never had the opportunity to grow before.

One by one, I had pulled up my plants from the summer, too distracted to think about what should go in their place for the fall. Distracted by the queries I was submitting, the manuscripts I sent in response, stories I was proofing, the interminable waiting for anyone to answer me regarding anything. Much easier to refresh the inbox than to plant vegetables I had only eaten a handful of times before, much less seen in the ground, much less grown myself. But staring at the inbox never made an email appear, just as staring at a blank page never made words appear, just as staring at a seedless ground never made food.

So I went to the farmer’s market. Having procrastinated long enough, I found that everything was already gone, of course, with the exception of swiss chard, collards, brussel sprouts, and some kale all of which I took to plant (exception: kale, because just no.) Not to be deterred, I pulled out my seed collection, my starter pods, and the grow light, and planted everything I wanted—broccoli, carrots, spinach, beets—even if it is too late, even if it comes to nothing. It is a rebellion of sorts to plant when you know it is too late, just as it is a rebellion to start a project before you feel ready. You do it anyway, giving the finger to expected results and celebrating when you are pleasantly surprised.

I nestled these babies next to my desk, the glow of the grow light warm on my arm, same place they were when I re-wrote my book for the third time last winter. The metaphor here obvious and cliche but I swear—there is magic in growing seeds next to your desk when you are growing the seeds of a book on the page.

Every morning comes. Better now because it comes still dark, before the sun rises. I turn on the lamp, say hello to the seeds and give ourselves one halo of light in which to do our work. We are in it together, me and these seeds. I breathe like a tentative footstep and start again.