The Upside of Impatience... At Least In My Writing!

I admire books that have that easy kind of narration where you go along for the ride for the character’s entire day, even the boring daily stuff. Little mini-scenes talking to parents or friends in the hallway.

Because the thing as, in my own writing, I’m horrible at this. I skip all kinds of little mundane details like, you know, setting, in my first drafts. Also I tend to skip over transitions. I’m light on descriptions. I forget what my characters supposedly look like, what color their hair is, or their eyes. I forget their last names.

And a lot of this boils down to a personality trait that is probably one of my most dominant: impatience. Okay, that and my horrible memory, lol. But basically, I want to skip over all the stuff that I, well, skip over sometimes when I read. With a lot of books I read, especially if they’re just meh-okay, I’m a skimmer. I’ll read every bit of dialogue, but long descriptions of the room or even internal thought if it goes on for more than a couple paragraphs—I want to skip to the action, to where things start happening again! Which is probably a little evil of me. After all, I know what a pain it is to make sure all those setting details are there in the first place (since I have to go in and painstakingly add them in later drafts!).

At the same time, there are some upsides to this impatience in my writing. It's nice to find the positives in a trait usually considered a negative. The upsides:

• My novels will always be a little shorter
• I get you to the action and the central tension of the book FAST
• Every chapter is accomplishing some work (plot work, that is). Basically, every chapter is pushing the plot forward. My character’s generally don’t hang out just for the heck of it. I’m trying to accomplish something in every scene. If I’m really on my game, I’m doing two things at once: building the character’s emotional arc while also pushing the external plot of the story forward)
• This ideally should make for a tight novel, where something's always happening and you have to keep flipping the pages to find out what comes next
• I write drafts fast, because I dig into the story like a speed demon till I get it out
• Because of my skimming habit, I consume a LOT of books each year, which, I don’t know, just seems like a good idea in general if you’re a writer ;)

As far as impatience in my real life, well… I’m working on it. That’s what’s up with me talking about Zen and meditation all the time ;) And in the meantime, I'm glad at least the impatience serves me well in my writing. What about you? Any negative traits you've turned into positives in your life?

Identity Crisis & Lust for Life

Because of some debilitating chronic health problems, two months ago, this was my daily routine: I would wake up, check email for five minutes because that’s all I could handle of looking at the computer screen, then turn on an audiobook, put a cloth over my eyes, and just lay there listening for hours. For days on end. For weeks. Just me laying in bed, listening. Unable to work at all or write or even watch TV. I listened to 26 audiobooks in the month of February, almost one a day, no lie.

Even though it was just a month and a half ago (I’ve been gaining more and more strength back ever since), it doesn’t seem real. The time had a dreamlike quality, even when I was living it.

It’s kind of throwing me into a weird identity crisis now that I’m feeling better. Which I guess happens to most people during periods of great change. Like culture shock, or when you went away to college or lived on your own for the first time, or get married. Suddenly you’re in all these new circumstances, surrounded by new people, and the patterns of identity that used to characterize you are suddenly all in flux.

The Buddhists would say this is probably an accurate picture of how life is, constantly changing, ever moving. That periods of stability in our life are really only an illusion, an attempt by us to wrestle control from an unsteady world.

And the past two years have been full of dramatic changes like that, often because of the ups and downs of my health. Two years ago I was the healthiest I’d been since I got sick a decade ago. I was able to drive, stay out all day, and come home and take a twenty minute walk. Then last year I crashed so hard I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks at a time. It’s enough to make a person screwy in the head, because sick-Heather is a different person than well-Heather. Healthy-Heather is a confident bad-ass with tattoos and pink hair. Sick-Heather is reclusive, meditative, and very, very quiet.

So, in spite of the Buddhists, I would really love for things to be stable and placid. I would like a period of rest where I continue feeling healthy and am able to work without interruption, and I would like to know that I can plan something a couple months from now and rely on the fact that I’ll be feeling well enough to do it. I would like to figure out faith and what I think about the world and have it remain stable. I’m tired of feeling like the floor can drop out from under me at any moment.

I want so many things. All these zinging firecracker desires.  I feel like the world of wants has suddenly opened back up to me, now that I’m feeling better and am able to do more things. I feel almost frenetic, I want to do ALL the things, ALL AT ONCE! The name of that movie about Van Gogh keeps pinging around my head: Lust for Life. Yes, I think, that is exactly what I’m feeling right now. Lust for life.

Desire strikes me as this deeply human and beautiful impulse. The Buddha might say desire is the cause of suffering, and that’s true to a point, but there’s also something explosive and beautiful-unto-weeping about wanting to gulp in the whole world and savor it on your tongue.

So that’s me lately: gulping it all in. And writing a ton, as if I’m making up for those months where I couldn’t write a thing by writing like a speed demon now.

Review of DARE YOU TO by Katie McGarry

This is a book I've been dying to get my hands on from the second I finished PUSHING THE LIMITS (which was one of my favorite reads last year). Sometimes when I anticipate a book this much, it can't live up to all the hype. Yeah. Not the case with DARE YOU TO! I loved it just as much as the first book.

Summary from Goodreads:
If anyone knew the truth about Beth Risk's home life, they'd send her mother to jail and seventeen-year-old Beth who knows where. So she protects her mom at all costs. Until the day her uncle swoops in and forces Beth to choose between her mom's freedom and her own happiness. That's how Beth finds herself living with an aunt who doesn't want her and going to a school that doesn't understand her. At all. Except for the one guy who shouldn't get her, but does....

Ryan Stone is the town golden boy, a popular baseball star jock-with secrets he can't tell anyone. Not even the friends he shares everything with, including the constant dares to do crazy things. The craziest? Asking out the Skater girl who couldn't be less interested in him.

But what begins as a dare becomes an intense attraction neither Ryan nor Beth expected. Suddenly, the boy with the flawless image risks his dreams-and his life-for the girl he loves, and the girl who won't let anyone get too close is daring herself to want it all....

Review:

There’s so much to love about this book. I loved Beth, with her dyed black hair and no-b.s. attitude. Her hard life has made her both street-wise and world-weary, but that doesn’t mean that that she can’t be so much more if she just lets herself. Then there’s Ryan, seemingly Beth’s opposite with his jock status and boy-next-door good lucks. Watching the sparks fly between them as they go round after round was so much fun. This is just a fabulous opposites-attract story where the person you can’t imagine falling for might just become the one person you can’t live without.

Make sure to pick this one up when it hits shelves next month, May 28th!

YA Scavenger Hunt!

Welcome to YA Scavenger Hunt! This tri-annual event was first organized by author Colleen Houck as a way to give readers a chance to gain access to exclusive bonus material from their favorite authors...and a chance to win some awesome prizes! At this hunt, you not only get access to exclusive content from each author, you also get a clue for the hunt. Add up the clues, and you can enter for our prize--one lucky winner will receive one signed book from each author on the hunt in my team! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online for 72 hours.

Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. There are TWO contests going on simultaneously, and you can enter one or all! I am a part of the RED TEAM--but there is also a blue team for a chance to win a whole different set of signed books!

If you'd like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt homepage.

SCAVENGER HUNT PUZZLE

Directions: Below, you'll notice that I've listed my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on the red team, and then add them up (don't worry, you can use a calculator!).

Entry Form: Once you've added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.

Rules: Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian's permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by August 5, at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.

APRILYNNE PIKE
 

I am hosting the fabulous Aprilynne Pike for the YA Scavenger Hunt!

Critically acclaimed, #1 New York Times best-selling author Aprilynne Pike has been spinning tales since she was a child with a hyper-active imagination. At the age of twenty she received her BA in Creative Writing from Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. When not writing, Aprilynne can usually be found out running; she also enjoys singing, acting, reading, and working with pregnant moms as a childbirth educator and doula. Aprilynne lives in Arizona with her husband and four kids; she is enjoying the sunshine.

Aprilynne Pike's Website

About Life After Theft:

Moving to a new high school sucks. Especially a rich-kid private school. With uniforms. But nothing is worse than finding out the first girl you meet is dead. And a klepto. No one can see or hear Kimberlee except Jeff, so--in hopes of bringing an end to the snarkiest haunting in history--he agrees to help her complete her "unfinished business." But when the enmity between Kimberlee and Jeff's new crush, Sera, manages to continue posthumously, Jeff wonders if he's made the right choice.

It sounds amazing! I loved her Wings series, can't wait to get my hands on this one!

Go preorder Life After Theft Today!

 

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

Click here to go to the exclusive content, the first three chapters of Life After Theft!

___________________________________________________________________

And don't forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of signed books by me, Aprilynne Pike, and more! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 10. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the red team and you'll have all the secret code to enter for the grand prize!

BONUS CONTEST

Also, while you're here don't forget to enter the bonus contest for a signed ARC of SHUTDOWN along with a signed copy of Override. I am running exclusively during the YA Scavenger Hunt. Click here to go to my Rafflecopter giveaway on Facebook!

CONTINUE THE HUNT

To keep going on your quest for the hunt, you need to check out the next author! Click here!

A Question About Faith, and then an Answer

I wonder, now that I am feeling better, if faith is easier when I am sick. When I was so ill, I was constantly reminded of my need and there were few other distractions from lying quiet with God.

I’m not dumb like when I was younger to pray that God make me sick or bring hard times if it will make my faith stronger. We used to toss around so cavalierly prayers like ‘break me, God!’ Instead I pray that somehow God teach me faith through wellness. I pray he teach me faith through gentle and good and happy days. Sure the Israelites were always at their most earnest when they were being oppressed, but please God, can there be a faith that blossoms too in prosperity and joy? I would like for that season to stay awhile.

Then really, I wonder again if prayers matter at all, if they change anything. Good and bad times will come on me either way, no matter what I pray. And even if tomorrow manages to be a happy one where I remember God all through the hours, it doesn’t mean hard times will disappear. They’ll come back, the unfortunate side effect of being human. Old age at least will make sure of it, and probably a thousand other beat-downs from life before then.

Instead, I should remember my Buddhism. Tomorrow might be good or it might be bad. It does not matter if I want it one way or the other. In fact, the wanting might just make me miserable in the here and now.

But still, my initial worry is this: I don’t want to be faithless in the good times. I forget so easily. I’m like the Israelites Moses led out of Egypt, seeing all those signs and wonders, and then a few weeks later complaining that all I have to eat is the same old boring bread and for God’s sake could we just get some quail up in here?! I can still do so little, but I fill my time and energy and mind with all the things I’ve been wanting to do to the exclusion of all else. I forget God for half a day at a time, a day, two days, and do not think once of prayer. I worry it will stretch to weeks and then months.

I wonder, what does God want from me? What does being faithful mean? Is ‘pray without ceasing’ literal? Is it humanly possible? Because I want to count the day as pass or fail.

Oh Heather, silly girl, listen again to the wise men. That is all to do with ‘me’. My twisty squirrel mind obsessing about this ‘self.’ The Buddhists say to live now in this moment, and God too says do not worry about tomorrow. My worry over my future faithlessness seems valid to me, but maybe all it does is separate me from God now.

God here right now fulfilling his promise that he is with me. Here on these couch cushions that are bent around my shape, the low vibration of trucks on the highway below, the ache of my bruised tired eyes, the empty sensation in my stomach, the biting of the underwire in my bra, this moment in the dark, typing with my eyes closed, the gentle tension of fingers pressing memorized laptop keys, the moment of pausing with each of my senses and wondering what else there is to discover here while simultaneously mediating the moment through words. And smiling at myself, because right now the two are so close, which is rare, that my mediating the moment is still actually the moment.

And here I stop and pause, because for a moment I’ve managed to catch the hummingbird answer and hold it still. Now. Here. Being still. With God. It’s everything. It’s all that matters.

Meditations on Illness & Zach Sobiech

It’s hard to read about sad things. I’ve been sick for twelve years, and lately, life has ground to a halt as the illness hits a new all-time low. Yet while I lie here struggling so much with being too sick to even be on the computer or watch TV, spending weeks doing nothing else except lying quietly in bed listening to audiobooks in the dark or simply lying still without anything to distract me for hours, I think often of my friend’s daughter’s best friend, Zach Sobiech, who is dying of cancer with only a few months left to live (his amazing song Clouds has gone viral in recent months).

I’ve never met Zach personally, so maybe it’s not my place to talk about him, but I’ll say a little anyway. When I’m this sick, it’s all a little groggy and the days pass in a kind of fog, which feels like a blessing. Then I think, these months which I want to pass quickly so I can start feeling better again, Zach must want so badly to pass slowly.

Through this protracted downturn in my own illness, I’ve come back to God after half a decade away. It’s a fairly quiet affair, coming back to faith. I’m tender-stepped and unsure. I’m not sure if I can believe that there is purpose in this, in my being bedbound or Zach dying. I’m sure there will be lots of people trying to come up with suggestions of how there is God’s purpose in it all. I have no clue if there is purpose in suffering or if that it is simply the way life works—some prospering and others sick and dying, apparently with no direction or design. I get mad at least when people talk confidently about God’s purpose in situations of suffering not their own.

So being with God in these long months of enforced quietness and solitude is less about finding any purpose in it all, and more about feeling the blanket of peace that comes occasionally in spite of all the hurt and anger and pain. Over and over in the Bible, God promises that, “I am with you.” I also like that Jesus’ path on earth was one of great suffering. It makes him more relatable. It makes me think that even down here in the shadows and depths, there is hope. For me at least, being with God is that joy that comes sometimes in the silence. Seemingly out of nowhere, when by all accounts I should be miserable, comes peace and even more strange, a strong sense of thanksgiving. No clear voice or sense of divine interaction or direction, just peace and joy where, according to circumstances, there should be none.

In Buddhism, there is a practice where, instead of breathing in peace and breathing out all the negative feelings to cleanse yourself, you do the opposite. You breathe in all the pain and suffering, both your own and that of others, holding it in for a moment, and then breathing out peace and loving-kindness to all who are connected by suffering. Sometimes when you hold it all inside, it’s such an overwhelming flood of hurt you think you can’t bear it. But then breathing out grace and peace and loving-kindness to the afflicted, to others and myself, feels like it changes something. Even if it’s only me that’s transformed. It’s where compassion is born.

I think this is the same principle when praying for others. I don’t know if prayers for others do anything other than help us grow in compassion and connect to God. I don’t know if they change anything externally, or actually affect the person we are praying for. Still, I think of Zach and everyone who loves him and I pray for them. I pray they have long moments of peace amid everything else in the upcoming months, and afterwards.

I think of the angels supposedly in heaven who do nothing but pray and praise God all day long without ceasing. I think of the centuries of monks and nuns from many faiths spending their lives in silence and prayer, and then I think, maybe that is the purpose of my own sickness— so that I can live a life of prayer and meditation. I remember I used to think that sounded terribly BORING, but now it begins to make more sense to me. Because as much as I might get angry of other people trying to deduce God’s purpose in suffering, I guess deep inside, I still want there to be one.

Anyway, listen to this amazing song by Zach and my friend’s daughter, Sammy. Every time I watch it, compassion wells up and spills over into tears.

Sometimes the video doesn't show up, so here's the link directly to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvSYZHmhIAM

 

You can find more about Zach here: http://www.childrenscancer.org/zach/

Override Releases Today!

Yay, happy birthday to Override! I'm so excited for it to be out in the world so you can all find out what happens next for Adrien and Zoe!

Book release days are weird as the author, at least I say that with the little experience I've had with Glitch and Override. The big day doesn't feel as big or momentous as you think they should. Or maybe it's just me. I worry sometimes that I don't react like other people to big life events. For example, when the nurses handed me my son after he was born I just kind of stared at him and was like, ok, wow, this is weird. I hear all these stories about moms going on and on about that first moment of overwhelming love and joy when they finally meet their child, and I was just like, all right little alien creature, let's try to figure out how to feed you.

I feel similarly about my book releases. I've heard other authors cry with a sense of joy and accomplishment when they get their author copies in the mail, and I've just been like, oh look, it's that book I wrote and isn't it weird to see it all type set in pages instead of in my Word document. I've been a little out of it this week since my fam and I've all been sick, and realized at eight o clock yesterday that, whoa, my book comes out tomorrow! *blinks in surprise a few times*

So um. Yeah. Weird baby syndrome strikes again. Being an author sorta feels real when I go into bookstores and see my book on the shelf, and when I see a bunch of the other books that are written by friends and acquaintances. So I think, well, maybe I'll feel like a real author when I've written ten books, or some other arbitrary number. Or maybe not. Motherhood still doesn't feel like any of those stories I heard about how it would feel, so maybe being an author won't either!