I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with my birthday. Love for all the obvious reasons, hate because it’s in December, smack in the middle of snowstorm, flu, and holiday season. My ideal birthday celebration is to surround myself with friends and family—but travel plans, illness, and holiday party fatigue often get in the way of that.
But this year. This year. Continue reading “A Birthday Wish”
Hello lovelies.
This is the first year Z’s really been excited about Halloween, and we are rocking it hard core. She wanted to decorate, so we put a few tombstones in the vegetable garden and have been creating “mosaics” with bats and witches and other spooky things to hang indoors. In related news, I am now the proud owner of an adult sized unicorn onesie, complete with wings and tail.
Continue reading “The (belated) Sunday Review: Unicorn Onesie Edition”
I’ve more or less gotten to the point where time zone shifts don’t bother me. Another week, another city. I tell myself where and when I am and hold to it. Flying to the East Coast and back every few weeks isn’t crazy; it’s what I do.
It didn’t occur to me until after the fact that I might have hit my limit last week.
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I planned to go to New York the week of the 10th for some much needed face time with my team. Passover was on Monday, though, which meant I’d fly in Tuesday and leave Saturday. Easy.
The day after I bought my ticket, plans changed – I had to be in Dallas on Wednesday the 12th for an all day meeting. Less easy, but manageable. I changed flights around, flying into Dallas Tuesday and New York Wednesday evening.
Friday of that week, plans changed again – I now had to be in DC for a meeting on Wednesday the 19th. Any other weekend I’d have stayed on the East Coast. Easter and Christmas are the two holidays that firmly belong to my psuedo-sister, though, and while she’d have forgiven me if I missed it, I wouldn’t have. So I changed my Saturday evening flight home to a morning flight (to maximize Z time over the weekend) and booked an in-Tuesday out-Wednesday trip to D.C.
Monday the 17th, our Wednesday meeting got moved to afternoon, late enough that I’d miss the last flight out of both National and Dulles Wednesday evening and would have to fly home Thursday.
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After a while, pretty much anything acclimates to normal. I expect the last minute travel, the meetings that change times and dates half a dozen times. I never plan on taking the flight home that I booked – I’m almost always catching something earlier or later. So while I was a bit frustrated by the time I got on the plane to D.C., it was mostly because I had very much wanted to come home Wednesday night.
It was when my paralegals emailed me a simple question Thursday afternoon, and I replied that I’d been through four cities and five time zones in the last 10 days and could they PLEASE JUST HANDLE IT WITHOUT ME, that the full force of how insane the prior two weeks had been came crashing down on me.
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I fell into How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful on the plane ride home from D.C. Headphones on and the album on repeat, wondering how I’d waited so damn long to listen to it. Except that the music always finds me when I need it. This one wouldn’t have resonated the way it does now if I’d listened to it when it came out two years ago. I’m still breathing it in, letting it play over and through me, waiting to get to the point where it’s inked into my memory.
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Lately, I’ve been trying to make more time for connections. Looking at where I am in the world and who’s nearby. Reaching out to one or two people in a city rather than doing the blast email trying to see everyone and failing thing. I’m happier for it, seeing and talking to the people I want to spend time with.
February is Letter Month, and I always mean to do it then never do. Too much time on planes, on hikes with Z, juggling bedtime and dishes and laundry and the jungle-that-is-our-yard. I miss it, though, miss the quiet silence of ink and paper, miss the tangled rush of thoughts into sentences. I miss the summer my best friend and I spent writing to each other, miss the long notes I used to write, the ones that rambled and meandered.
So. If you’d like a letter, let me know in the comments or by text or whatever.
Last week, I emailed Brian White from Fireside Magazine and told him I wanted to help with the Kickstarter. I offered to match pledges, up to $1000, for an hour. Truth be told, I’d kind of been kicking myself for not trying to get on board with Fireside earlier. I backed the first three Kickstarters, but that was the extent of my support. When it looked like the third one wasn’t going to fund, I shrugged and was a bit sad but figured that was what came of trying to use crowdfunding on an issue by issue basis.
In the year since Brian started Fireside, though, I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and even more thinking. For better or worse, the traditional publishing market is dying. Within the next five years, there’s a good chance that people will be able to trade and sell used e-books the same way they trade and sell (and give away and leave in motel rooms and bus stations) paper books. There are so many, many books being published each year that the chances of any one standing out from the crowd are even slimmer than that of finding the proverbial needle. And this market, where people no longer believe that a new book is worth $25, where people will be able to sell books for pennies, where each book is competing with millions of others, is the market I’ll be publishing in.
So how does Kickstarter fit into publishing fit into trying to make a living off my writing?
Connections. I think, more and more, we’re moving back to a place where the artist needs to come down from the ivory tower and be accessible. This means connecting with people. Yes, connecting with fans and readers is important, but it goes beyond that. It’s connecting with the people who read and/or write the same kinds of things you do and with the people who’ve never read a word you write but follow you on Twitter and the people who pass by the blog and leave the occasional comment. Because over time, the connections start to matter.
It also means supporting other artists. It’s no good to go out, hat in hand, if you’re not willing to chip in a bit when someone else comes asking. Because Fireside funding another year means more than having another literary mag that pays above market.
It means there’s a community of people out there who think that stories are worth supporting. And that’s a community I want to be part of.