2022: What to Expect From Me

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Honestly, I have very little idea at this point.

The second half of 2021 was one long mental health crisis for me, even more so than 2020 with my slow recovery from COVID. I stopped working on my current novel. I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo for the first time in seven years. Yes, I did bounce back from my spring reading slump earlier in the year, books were interesting again and helped somewhat with my stress levels, but beyond keeping up with reviewing those, my creative spirit was completely drained.

It still mostly is. I’m an author with almost no will to write.

But it will come back with time. Or it won’t, and I’ll hang up my hat, though I don’t think that’s likely in the long run. I’ve been at this gig for six full years now, and four novels later, it’s clear that this has not and will not become a real career for me, only a really passionate hobby that doesn’t make me any money. I’ve accepted that, but I’m not giving up on writing entirely.

That does mean, however, that I shouldn’t feel nearly as much pressure to maintain a consistent blog schedule (not that I have since the pandemic, I totally haven’t) or to market myself. It’s time to just be me, and this is me admitting that I have no idea if I’m going to write anything worth sharing this year. The idea of trying to publish another novel in that time frame is laughable.

I can promise I’m still a reader and a book reviewer.

I’ve been tackling my owned book backlog for the last few years, as a consequence of discovering the joys of book bag sales in nearby towns, and the always-overflowing sale room at my local library branch. At one point I remember my unread backlog being something over 300 books. Today, I counted, and across three years (2019-2021) it’s down to just 65 books. I can totally read 65 books this year!

So that’s the only major goal I’m setting myself: completely clear my backlog and continue to post reviews. Intermixed with that I’m sure I’ll be buying new books to keep up with series I’m in the middle of, though I’ve nixed that post series because it got unwieldy, tracking everything and worse, listing everything I’d struck off my TBR for whatever reason. It’s useful to me, certainly, but not all that interesting to anyone else.

When I have ideas for other posts, I’ll write and post them. But no promises there.

I know I have some loyal readers who faithfully hit “like” every time, and I appreciate that. I’ve never gotten a lot of comments, and that’s okay too, I know you’re there anyway. I want to thank you all for hanging around even as my ability to produce new and interesting content has faded.

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Let Me Tell You a Story #33: How I Got Here

For the last two weeks, I’ve been participating more actively in the #writeblr community on Tumblr–I’ve always been there, but now I’m making a renewed effort to be sociable and take part in a few of the weekly events others host.

One of those is Storyteller Saturday, when writers post and answer questions relating to themselves, their style, their process, and how writing affect their lives.

This past Saturday, one of the open community questions was, in a nutshell, “tell us about your journey as a writer.” It took me half an hour to explain everything that got me where I am now, and while it’s a bit more informal than the posts I usually make here, I thought it was worth sharing with you as well.

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Buckle up, kiddos, I’m older than lots of you so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

I wrote my first book in third grade (I think. I remember which school I was at for sure, I moved a lot as a kid. Pretty sure it was third, could have been as late as fifth. I may have erroneously told this story before as second grade.) The school had just managed to buy a spiral-binding machine, was excited about it, and decided to get good use out of it every student was going to write a book for them to bind.

Mine was about a bunch of snack food coming to life in the pantry and making friends (or not) with each other. I liked having a “real” book in my hands so much when it was done that I wrote another book before the end of the year, but it was a bunch of ghost stories I “wrote” by taking ones I’d already read and changing a few details or adding a plot twist or two. My memory of it feels like fan fiction but in reality I’m sure it was much closer to plagiarism.

I don’t remember writing much in middle school; I also don’t really remember if there was a reason why, specifically. It’s just sort of a blank space. By high school I was writing lots of short stories, ranging from proto-romances to weird, experimental pieces that blended reality and fantasy in absurd ways and really leaned in on the weirdness/alienation/isolation I felt at the time, even when I couldn’t explain why I felt so different from everyone else. It’s easy to look back more than twenty years later and say well you were bisexual but you didn’t know it yet and blame that, but most of what I remember feeling didn’t have much to do with sex or attraction or my crushes–I just didn’t understand why I was “weird” and everyone else was “normal.” Didn’t everyone think about weird things sometimes, or was that really just me?

I took two admission-by-submission writing seminars in college, one for poetry and one for short stories. Despite the fact that I haven’t written poetry since college, I think I got more out of that course than the stories one, in terms of thinking about language. I have none of the material anymore that I wrote for either one, which only saddens me in one case: I managed to write a proper sonnet on the subject of an origami crane, likening the construction of the poem itself to the artificiality of the folded paper. I remember feeling like I had never written anything better. (In terms of poetry, honestly, I probably haven’t and possibly never could manage it again.) The story course, on the other hand, was taught by a professor who may have had good intentions about pushing the students towards “better” writing, but mostly just yelled at us. I stopped taking him seriously after he said (paraphrased from memory) “Science-fiction will never be as popular or influential as real literature.”

Yeah, he was anti-genre-fiction. We didn’t get along by the end of the semester.

But all the writing I did that year (I took both classes as a sophomore) did get me writing “for fun” again, and through the rest of college I attempted to write some longer fantasy works that never got finished, and probably wouldn’t have been novels even if I had finished them, but definitely were too big for short stories.

I discovered NaNoWriMo in 2003, the year after I graduated, but too late to actually participate, so I made my own over Christmas break that year, writing 51K on a single (unfinished, long-lost) story, my longest work to date. I did it a few more times and “won” but rarely finished the story after hitting 50K.

I took another long break from writing in my late twenties and earliest thirties, and for that, I mostly blame my nearly-ten years of World of Warcraft. Playing an MMO as seriously as I did, for as long, just takes so much time. I did other things for fun, of course–I had other hobbies. But writing wasn’t one of them, not for a long time.

Then comes Reddit. I discovered r/WritingPrompts and made an account and started writing nearly every day. (Yes, I still have the stuff I wrote and posted safe on my hard drive, but no, I no longer have that account. I took it down several years ago because I had posted too much personal information in other subs to feel safe maintaining it.)

Between that writing, and some other communities I was participating in, I was really starting to polish my chops. Eventually, after reading one of my stories, a person whose opinion I respected said to me “I hope you’re taking your writing seriously.”

And I realized I wasn’t. I was doing it for fun (and there’s nothing wrong with that) but I had plenty of evidence sitting in front of me that I could do more with my skill than I was.

A few months earlier, I had killed some time on a vacation writing about 24K of a weird little post-apocalyptic romance story, partially inspired by TellTale’s The Walking Dead video game, but once I got home I set it aside.

After deciding to take my writing seriously, I told myself I would take that overgrown plot bunny and turn it into a publishable work in 2015, starting on the first and having the book out by the end of the year.

And I did it. That plot bunny became What We Need to Survive. For NaNo ‘15, I wrote the first 2/3 or so of the first draft of its sequel, which I published in 2016, then the final book of the trilogy in 2017.

I WAS A REAL AUTHOR.

But I haven’t published since. Over the next two years, I dealt with serious mental health issues, a new (better) job that required a complete schedule/life overhaul, and two deaths in my extended family. I was still writing–I have three different stories that have at least a complete first draft done, plus several more in partial drafts–but nothing seemed to be worth focusing on the same way I did the What We Need series. And, you know, grief and stress and illness.

I started 2020 by picking back up my NaNo ‘16 novel, which started life as This Novel Has No Title, Just Words and a Tune, thank you Elton John. Big, gay, double-couple rock-band romance. Ambitious. Dear to my heart.

Messy as hell.

I took a stab at rewriting it in 2018 and didn’t finish, posting about it off and on as #rockstarnovel. It seemed too hard, because rereading made it clear I had given far more narrative weight to one couple over the other, but I wasn’t ready to cut the dead weight, because rearranging to focus just on the “better” couple’s story line would gut the book and change some character motivations.

This year, I bit the bullet and did it. It’s just one story now instead of two intertwined, and it’s going to be better for it.

My goal is still to publish by the end of the year, despite (waves hands vaguely in the air) everything 2020 is throwing at us. I have a week left on Camp NaNo, which I’ve spent on the third draft of Fifty-Five Days–it has a real title now! I’m about halfway through the first pass at polishing, word-count-wise. This time is on cleaning up my excesses, cutting the unnecessary, fixing details. Once that’s done, it’s time to comb through it for filler words and proofreading problems!

Then it’s time to finally let someone else read it. No one has. No one.

But that’s where I am. I will get another book out this year, dammit.

Progress Report: I Did a Thing

Guys, I missed a post last week, and I almost missed another today, because I’m too busy working (and also making dinner, but a girl’s gotta eat.)

What am I working on? Formatting What We Need to Decide. The ebook layout is done, and in another day or two (Elena taps her knuckles on her desk) the print layout will be done as well, then it’s cover time! This is happening, people! Book two!

I’ll do my best to put a real post up Wednesday, and of course I’d never miss reviews on Friday.

Another Writer Q&A

This one comes from Tumblr, where I was tagged for it. It had a lot of interesting questions, so I figured it should get posted here as well!

As for tagging anyone else, if you want to, go for it. I’m not naming names today.

What is your new book about?
What We Need to Decide is another romance, the continuation of Paul and Nina’s story begun in What We Need to Survive, so it’s about love. But deeper than that, it’s about learning self-acceptance, learning what lines shouldn’t be crossed, and how far a person will go to preserve the things meaningful to them.

It’s also about the future, children, and sometimes, dogs, too. That last part surprised me.

What or who inspired it?
The What We Need series comes from a single this-almost-could-have-been-a-love-story moment in the Telltale video game The Walking Dead (season 1, if you played you know exactly what I mean.) It made me realize that in basically all the post-apocalypse media I’ve ever seen, romance is rushed, trivialized, or neglected–it’s much more common that sexual relationships spring up from fear or need or loneliness, and that’s reasonable. But I wanted to see if a real romance had a shot, too.

Apparently it did, because I’ve still got two books’ worth of story to tell.

What was the biggest challenge, writing it?
In a romance, it’s easy to come up with internal emotional struggles, roadblocks to intimacy and happiness. In a post-apocalyptic setting, it’s easy to come up with external challenges to life and limb. What’s been hardest for me is to meld the two disparate genres, making my internal and external conflicts echo each other enough to fit in the same story.

What do you want to achieve with this book?
I always want to grow as a writer, putting out a better book than the one before it. (I only have one book to my name so far, so this will get harder in time.)

What do you hope for your book?
That people will read it, enjoy it, be inspired by it. Romance as a genre often gets dismissed as fluffy, but mine’s pretty damn serious, and I hope readers can look at my work and see that romance doesn’t automatically equal an easy summer beach read.

Are there any parts of it that have special personal significance to you?
Writers draw on themselves for details all the time, and little things about me have snuck into both books. Paul ended up with some of my strengths, Nina a few of my flaws, and the whole thing is informed by my deep and abiding love of music. (There’s a few song titles hidden in the narration, because I’m a nerd like that.)

Do you have a favorite character or one you really enjoyed writing?
I don’t know if I can chose a favorite between my main two squeezes, because they’re both a joy to write, and I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure they play well off each other. But Nina’s the serious one, so whenever I get the chance to write her with her guard down, and she busts out her snarky sense of humor–that’s a blast.

What do you see as the major themes in your book?
Love, survival, personal growth, and hope for the future.

What made you set it in__________?
Post-apocalypse Midwestern USA? I’ve lived all over the Midwest, and I’m familiar with a lot of the places I’m writing about, how the people sound, the countryside, what the weather’s like. Research fills in the gaps (bless you, Google Street View,) but I wasn’t about to set this story somewhere I’d never been.

Did the title come instantly, or did you labour over it?
What We Need to Survive went through five titles before I settled on that one, though I knew the very first was only a placeholder while I typed up the initial scene I had tormenting my brain. Once I’d settled on that, and the name of the series (What We Need) the other two book titles came easily–What We Need to Decide (#2) and What We Need to Rebuild (#3.)

To whom have you dedicated the book and why?
WWNTS is dedicated to my husband, because I’ve been writing for fun my whole life, but he was really the first to help me see I could do more than that, and he’s been supportive throughout the entire process. I could not have done this without him.

WWNTD doesn’t have a dedication yet, I’m still pondering.

Who do you think will enjoy your book?
I’ve gotten positive feedback from romance fans, from PA fans who don’t usually read romance, and from a small handful of people who don’t usually read either genre, but read it because they know me. I won’t say there’s been no criticism, because there has been, but what I’ve heard so far makes me think the only people who won’t enjoy it, for sure, are people completely uninterested in love stories of any genre. (Which is totally fine, I’ll evangelize for romance acceptance, but I’m not here to shove my book down anyone’s throat.)

Do you have a special spot for writing at home?
Nothing special, just a desk with my computer, a Groot bobblehead, and space for a candle or two if I’m feeling fancy.

Do you like silence or music playing while you’re writing?
Rain sounds! They help me shut out distractions, while not actively distracting me like music can, especially if it has lyrics. I will occasionally indulge in classical or other instrumental music if the rain’s getting stale.

When did you start writing?
I literally cannot remember a time I did not write. My first “published” book was a second grade class project, where everyone had to write and illustrate a story on pieces of construction paper that got bound with the school’s shiny-new spiral binding machine. I wrote a story about different snack foods coming to life in my kitchen and becoming friends before they got eaten. And I know I was writing before that, making up things in my diary where I inserted myself into my favorite books and TV shows.

Did you always want to become an author?
Somewhere in the back of my mind, yes. I just never thought I would, because I was only ever encouraged to be creative as a hobby–arts and crafts were wonderful things to do, but you can’t make a living from them. Music is great, yes, learn to sing! But don’t think you’ll ever make any money from it. Creative writing? Fantastic! But do you know how hard it is to actually get published?

So I didn’t try, even if I had never actually stopped writing. Then I buckled down and tried, and I did it.

Tell us a bit about your childhood?
Elena the storyteller began life as a compulsive liar, an unreliable narrator of remarkable daring. I wanted to be the center of attention, the best at everything, so I made up stories where I was, and I told my friends, thinking they understood I was only telling stories.

They didn’t. They told their parents, and their parents told mine, and I got lectured about how wrong it was to tell Stacey I was a professional ballerina dancing in Swan Lake at age 5.

I stopped telling the stories, and started writing them down instead, because then people would understand they weren’t real, and that made them okay.

If you’ve had other jobs outside of writing, what were they?
Libraries, greenhouses, tutoring, and a whole slew of service-industry jobs, which have taught me two very important lessons: 1) The customer is not always right, and 2) You’re getting paid to smile at them anyway, so smile.

If that sounds cynical, well, it is–you’d be amazed at the number of people who think service = servant, or worse, idiot. I’m still a person deserving of basic respect, thank you.

Describe yourself in three words.
Determined, caring, and imaginative.

What Sign are you and are you typical of it?
I am a Gemini, and while I don’t put any stock in astrological symbolism, what little I do know seems to fit me–Geminis are often sharp of wit and mercurial, apparently.

What three things do you dislike?
Excessive humidity, cantaloupes, and hypocrisy.

What three things do you like?
Cool breezes, watermelon, and good listeners.

Let Me Tell You a Story #25: The 29 Rules for Proper Comma Usage

When I was in seventh grade, waaay back in the early ’90s, I had an English teacher who is almost single-handedly responsible for everything I know about commas.

Now, I can’t say I hadn’t noticed the rules of proper comma usage before. I read, and I read a lot. But some of the niceties had undoubtedly been escaping me.

I will never forget that class, because it was the first and only time my tests have been blank sheets of paper.

The teacher was already elderly, nearing retirement, when I had him twenty-odd years ago, so his teaching methods seem antiquated now–even by the time I reached my senior year of high school, teachers were moving away from strict memorization to applied learning.

For the most part, I think that’s great. But I am forever thankful I learned punctuation “the hard way.”

We had spent the week going over the rules for commas in our grammar books. (I’ve tried and tried to remember what textbook it was, and I thought it might be The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation–the teacher called them “your blue books,” and I remember the awful baby-blue cover with ’70s-esque font in darker blue. But quick research turned up that TBBoGaP isn’t old enough to have been my textbook. I’ll probably never know what it truly was.)

On Friday, we sat at our desks, bare except for a single pencil, and waited for the blank sheets of paper to be passed out.

Then we wrote down every rule we’d learned for comma usage, word for word.

I don’t remember exactly how many there were–my mind jumps to 29, but that could be because I’ve been telling this story to my friends over the years, and hyperbole has crept in. It was probably closer to 20 than 30.

Any student who didn’t get them perfect had to take the test again the following Monday, while the rest of the class read the next short story we’d been assigned in our other textbook.

Most of the year went like that–a week of intense focus on a single grammatical concept or the rules of a particular type of punctuation, then a week of reading. (Oh, and we had to do a 500-word “persuasive” essay every week. I laugh to think how hard 500 words was, back then. I’m pretty sure one of mine was “People Should Grow Roses.”)

Fast forward to now. Could I write out all 29 (or however many) rules again, word for word, like I did in seventh grade? I’m sure I couldn’t.

But every time I read a book that never sets off forms of direct address in dialogue with commas (“What are you doing Ted?”) I cringe, and remember how I know doing needs a comma after it, and think of those blank sheets of paper.

Reply Like No One’s Watching (Writer Q&A)

One of my favorite writer-blogger friends, Eve Messenger, hit me with this one. I’m a sucker for talking about myself, books, and writing, so of course I’m all over this. Thanks, Eve!

The Rules:
1. Thank the blogger who nominated you and link to their blog and Twitter in your post.
2. Answer the questions that the blogger who nominated you has provided.
3. Nominate up to 10 other bloggers or Twitter followers
4. Create ten questions for your nominees and notify them of their nomination.

Eve Messenger’s Questions:

What are three things you do really well as a writer?

I’m character-focused when I write. My scene and story ideas almost always start with me hearing dialogue in my head (insert “she hears voices” jokes here), and I build my characters outward from what they say. So I’m strong with dialogue, personalities, and body language.

When you daydream about “making it” as a writer, what do you visualize?

Quitting (or cutting back on) my day job. I like what I do well enough most of the time, but it was never my dream job.

Do you have a regular writing routine? If so, when?

First thing in the morning, if I can, or as soon as possible during the day. I’m not a night owl, and I won’t sacrifice sleep to write. I will sacrifice just about anything else, so it works okay. As for what I do, I light a scented candle if I know I’ll be at the computer long enough to enjoy it, make some tea or get a glass of water, throw on my headphones and listen to Rainy Cafe, and get down to it.

Dogs or cats?

I like both, I have neither.

What’s directly to the left of where you’re sitting right now?

My husband’s chair. Our desks are right next to each other.

When do most of your plot ideas come to you? In bed, on walks, in the shower, while driving, when reading other books?

Walking and in the shower. Both prime plot-bunny time. Sometimes at work, if my mind’s drifting, but I try to keep that to a minimum–I jot down the idea and get back to business.

What’s your most recent writing breakthrough?

Trying out a new rewriting method that seems to be perfect for me.

Are you able to write in noisy environments?

I write almost exclusively at home, so aside from the occasional police siren or loud trucks on the street, there isn’t much noise. I listen to rain sounds to drown out incidental noise and help me focus, or occasionally, instrumental music. Never anything with vocals, or I’ll start singing along in my head, and then I can’t words. Words no worky.

Have you ever attended a book signing event for an author you admire? If so, what was it like?

Never have, would love to.

Are you better at coming up with titles or elevator pitches?

I’ve never tried to come up with an elevator pitch–the benefit of self-publishing, I don’t have to pitch–so I guess titles win by default. Writing the various promotional materials I’ve used, like my back-cover blurb, was difficult, so I’m sure a pitch would be terrifying.

That wraps up my answers, so it’s time to tag people I want to hear from:

Graham @ loquaciouslyliterate

Tina @ All of These Prompts

And any of my followers who’d like to, just tell me in the comments when you do so I see it!  A lot of the writing blogs I follow are on some sort of hiatus right now, and I don’t want to tag people who aren’t active–hence the short list.

And my questions:

1. What’s the last book you read, and would you recommend it?
2. What inspired your current (or most recent) writing project?
3. Scented candles, yea or nay?
4. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever Googled as research for your writing?
5. One project at a time, or do you juggle multiples?
6. Give me your favorite line you’ve written recently.
7. Tell me five things that are in your fridge right now.
8. What was the most memorable place you’ve ever traveled to?
9. What’s your favorite board game? And if it’s not Scrabble, what’s wrong with you?  (Kidding, kidding. I just love trouncing people at Scrabble. Don’t worry, I’m not challenging anyone.)
10. If there were one more hour in the day, would you use it to sleep, or to write?

Five Things I Love About Winter

1. Snuggling under a blanket with a mug of tea and a book.  (Seriously, is anyone surprised that’s #1?)
2. How quiet a snow shower is.  I like the sound of rain, and I adore thunderstorms, but looking out the window and watching snowflakes drift down in silence is so peaceful.
3. Christmas and winter-seasonal tea flavors.  I’ve got the full spread this year of Celestial Seasonings’ line: Sugar Plum Spice, Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride, Candy Cane Lane, Gingerbread Spice (my favorite new one!) and Cranberry Vanilla Wonderland. I’m actually trying to use up some of my partial boxes of other flavors to make room, because I don’t usually buy five new boxes of tea at once.  And then a few days after that, my grocery started carrying True Blueberry, an old favorite of mine that I haven’t seen for years, so of course I had to get that too.  I haven’t even opened it yet, I told myself I have to use something else up first!
4. The way the afternoon sun sparkles on freshly-fallen snow, before anyone mucks it up with their footprints…
5. …but also the feeling of stepping through that crust of new snow, when it thaws briefly and refreezes overnight, so you get a layer of crunchy snow over the fluffy stuff beneath it.  I really like that feeling.  When I was little, it made me feel like Godzilla crushing a town underfoot, which was fun.  Strange, I’ll grant you, but fun.

What do you love about winter?

The End of the Year Wrap-Up: 2015!

I began the year with a partial draft of a novel that had taken over my waking thoughts and started invading my dreams.  I sat down on January 1st to start a new draft, one that I meant to finish.

I didn’t.  The POV choice I made wasn’t working, and I started over. Again.

Eventually, though (in March) I had a complete draft.

By May, I’d fed it through some lovely beta readers and had started revisions.

On June 15th, I started this blog, beginning my colonization of the Internet as a writer. Since then I’ve written 136 posts, though that five-day-a-week schedule I had in the beginning got difficult to maintain.  The Christmas blogging challenge aside, I think I’ve found my groove with the M/W/F plan and I intend to keep that up in the new year, with the occasional extra post as necessity dictates.

In August, I started keeping a journal, occasionally using prompts and posting the results on Tumblr. They’ve actually been some of my most popular posts, which is awesome, but still sort of strange to me.  But cool.  Strange and cool.

In September, I finished the final edit of the novel and started doing the nuts and bolts of the publishing work.

In October, I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo in order to keep writing while I was still doing publishing stuff. In November, I did, and I won, and I plowed through to the end of the draft in the first week of December.

So in a single year, I’ve published one novel and finished the first draft of the next in the series.

Oh, and I’m on vacation right now, working on the first draft of #3. Three chapters in!

Guys, it’s been a hell of a year.

I’m so proud of myself that sometimes I can’t stop smiling.  (Some of that might also be because I got my first reviews, too.  I hadn’t been looking, because everyone says you shouldn’t look or you’ll get obsessed, but then, of all things, my mother told me while I was over for Christmas.  So I had to look.  And I’m thrilled.)

I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it many more times, but thank you.  Everyone reading this, yes, you.  The support I have received from my blog readers and Tumblr buddies and the occasional Twitter peep has been so encouraging, and I’m grateful for it.

Keep reading, feel free to start conversations with me here or elsewhere (I’m all over the place!), and above all, keep being awesome and supportive people, because the world needs more people like you.

I wish everyone a most excellent New Year.

The Twelve Days of Christmas Blogging, Day 12

What am I grateful for this Christmas?

My husband, my health, my family and friends.  Those practically go without saying!

But the other big thing I’m grateful for this Christmas is the Internet.  Yes, you read that right, and yes, I mean it.

I could not have become an author without the Internet.  This glorious series of tubes brings 99% of what I need to my fingertips: writing tips, writing friends, research, articles on every aspect of the process from rough draft to published work.  I could not have become an author without the Internet.

It allows me to work at something I love, and it brings my words to you.  Without the Internet, I would have no audience.  (Well, almost none, anyway.)

If you have purchased and read my book, then, you’re awesome, and I’m grateful to you.

If you haven’t, you’re still awesome because you’re reading my blog anyway, and I’m grateful to you as well.

If you’re a friend I’ve made online in the past year through any social media, you’re super awesome, and I hope I can continue to lean on your friendship when I need an ear to bend next year!

I can’t say thank you enough to everyone who’s been with me through any part of this process, and I’ll leave everyone with one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever been given: Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

I would not be where I am today if I had been.  So I’m grateful for me, too, this version of me that’s braver than the old one, that’s happier than this time last year because of all she’s accomplished, that’s looking forward to learning more and doing more next year.

The Twelve Days of Christmas Blogging, Day 11

What was my favorite childhood Christmas present?

I loved getting toys and dolls and books and all sorts of things, because beneath my childish exterior beat the heart of a truly materialistic soul.  I still love things, though most of that love has transmuted from the need to acquire into the need to create.

But my favorite childhood Christmas present is one I don’t remember getting, though it’s one I still have.  For my first Christmas I received a teddy bear from our neighbors, a perfectly reasonable gift for a baby.

Most children have a favorite toy, and this bear was that toy for me.  His name is Fred, though obviously at not-yet-a-year-old I didn’t name him.  I don’t know who did, actually–I never asked my parents.  Maybe I did name him later when I could talk.  I just know that his name is Fred.

I slept with him every night until I was ten or so and finally decided that I was getting too old for that.  But he still went with me everywhere.  He came along on every vacation–still does.  (I am not sentimental about much, but I never travel without him with me.  Mom joked once that I should make him his own passport.)

He’s old now, too fragile to be handled much–I keep him on one of my bookshelves.  His fur is faded, matted, worn right through in spots.  His nose used to stick out, but now it’s flattened back into his face, and I’ve had to sew him shut a few times over the years to keep his insides inside.

But he still gives the best bear hugs.