One year since the loony bin

My husband turned into Santa Claus. My sister turned into an angel. I thought Oprah was building an underwater city and that my landlord was one of the engineers. It was 2012 and the world was ending and Mayans were talking to me. I had an idea for a non profit website called literaryresolution.org. I thought I would be a paid idea editor with my own company, Day By Day Productions. I told one of my best friends to quit her job because I would employ her.

Now, I also told her Mayans were talking to me, so of course she did not fulfill my demands.

We were flying from Honolulu to Nevada City to visit family, and I had already gone four nights without sleep. My husband managed to control me enough so that I did not get arrested. It truly is a miracle I am safe (my psychiatrist later told me about a man with bipolar who said he had a bomb in an airport and was gunned down). I ran screaming through the airport because I thought I was on a TV show, I thought every camera was watching me. On the flight, a flight attendant asked me if I needed anything and I replied "Your babies."

I thought the cookies they gave us on the flight were my idea. I thought I was on a mission to sell these cookies and that if I could sell enough they would let me live in the underwater world that would protect humankind from destruction.

My brother-in-law picked us up from the airport and I told him all about those cookies that would change the world. And something about reading out loud to children. My husband and I drove up to Nevada City. We made it.

My in laws tried to give me sleeping pills. I thought they were trying to kill me. I thought my husband and I were soul mates that would meet again in the afterworld.

36 hours later (I thought Michael Jackson was going to invite me to his house, I thought my friend was turning into Beyonce, I thought I was part jaguar) they took me to the hospital.

I thought I was at a Disney hospital and that they were going to turn my eyes blue and turn me into a Dalmatian and that I would have to search for the blue eyes of my husband because I would be a dog and wouldn't remember anything but his eyes. I thought my aunt was Mother Mary. I thought that I was being punished for the actual experiments that my great grandfather did on salamanders.

I was experiencing stigmata.

The only person I trusted in the hospital was a gay guy in purple scrubs. He looked like a fish to me. He calmed me down.

In the hour long ambulance ride down to the loony bin I thought I was going to Hogwarts. The EMT asked me who wrote the lime in the coconut song and I replied "Harry Nilson." I was smiling and laughing the whole ride. The frowny faces on the laminated paper that have a rank of frowns from 1-10 (levels of pain) kept smiling at me and turning into cyclopses.

Then things got scary. People turned into spiders. I thought I was in a church that was judging people and I thought I was going to hell.

I stayed in the loony bin for five days. I made enemies. I made friends. I refused to eat certain things and had the rest of the people in there offering me the things I liked as if I were their queen.

That was almost a year ago. I'm about a week away from the anniversary. And I feel really effing good. I'm grateful for the people who have kept me safe, who have helped me pay attention to the cracked eggshell pieces as much as the beautiful baby bird.

I know how to deal. Before the big breakthrough, I spent months having minor episodes: not being able to sleep, being out of touch with reality, being super inspired and talking to my muses. I don't have inspiration like that anymore. I am like a mule now: slow and steady. But I have something so much more important:

My health.

What do I do now?

So I finished my book a few weeks ago. YAY!!!!

But now I'm wondering, what the heck do I do now? Do I try to go the traditional route and send queries and synopses and first chapters to agents who get thousands of submissions a year, or do I go the new techy way and try to self promote and self publish and sell it for 99 cents a digital copy on amazon? Or do I say screw it and leave it on the shelf and move on to the next project and not even worry about publishing?

What do I want? Sometimes I say I want to be the Ani DiFranco of writing and start my own publishing house. Sometimes I want all the support that an agent provides. Sometimes I just want to share my work with family and wait til the right books comes out to try and publish.

Is this the right book to push? Should I wait to push the next one?

I have written a query letter that I like, but I really don't want to have to write a synopsis. Is it necessary? I don't know.

What do I want to do now?

I don't know.

Status update: Getting so close!

I am on my last run through my book, doing line edits and little tweaks here and there and also hacking away at it to make it shorter. I only have 22 pages left. I've been doing this round of edits on paper, so when I'm done I have to enter the changes into the computer, and then OMG and then........I'll be done. It's already been two and a half years since I started this project, and soon I will be ready to close the book forever (unless of course an editor suggests some changes, but that would be assuming that I find an agent, and that my agent finds a publisher, and that I'm the luckiest girl in the world).

I honestly don't entertain any hope that this book will be published. I mean, hello its only my first. I know I have so much more to learn and improve on. Which is why....

I've started researching for my next book! It is a stand alone book about a character that I made up five years ago. I'm so excited to get started on it. And the best part is that the research is absolutely fascinating because I am enthralled with the subject (which I cannot state at this time. This is my big secret project).

Anyways, just wanted to let you all know that I'm still fighting/still pushing/still moving forward with my goals and dreams.

I'm not saying I'm back, just wanting to say hello

Hello, Blogging world.

What the heck is going on? It would seem that my second to last post was a year ago, but that is not true. In my manic state, I deleted three months of blog posts. Oh well.

Starting clean.

I have not been writing very much. My wrorgan has not been very hungry. I have been developing a new side of myself, one that is not so obsessed with the dream of getting published. A side of me that cares more about grounding from my heart, being supportive and responsible, and most of all....SLEEPING!

Maybe I'll post now and then to get my brain flowing and satiate the small appetite that my wrorgan now has.

Love love love you guys, because love is a state of consciousness.

Goodbye Blogger For Now

Oh my.  I realize I need a psychological and spiritual retreat.  So I'm closing my blog and doing my inner work.  Wish you all the best on your own journeys. 

And the dedication goes to...

Growing up, only one person encouraged me to be a writer and that's my tenth and twelfth grade English teacher, Mrs. Markovich, who was Japanese and born in the internment camp in Fresno, CA. She would work creative writing into our essays in any way she could. One red ink comment on an essay said, "Either quit talking to Erin or loose the nose ring. You're pushing it." The comment on the next essay said, "You should pursue a career in creative writing." I was 15, so at the time I paid more attention to the bossy comments. For the record, I neither took out the nose ring nor stopped talking to Erin. Not then. Not now.

It amazes me that someone told me what I should do at such a young age. I tried to fit myself into other boxes and didn't really internalize my "destiny" until I was 20, but those words are part of what got me to accepting my novel-writing fate. I can still picture her loopy handwriting in the margin of my essay about the difference between my mom's antique porcelain cows and the new funky clay ones, about the story each cow in the collection had to tell.

The next person to heavily influence my decision to be a novelist, and not just a journaler (because I've always Always kept journals on my own), is my husband. He takes the starving out of artist. He oversees all of my plot decisions. Sometimes he overrides me and sometimes I override him. Together, we keep my books from falling to their death off of cloud 9.

In Mrs. Markovich's class during senior year, I wrote an essay about my (at the time) fatherless state of being. I worked at Macy's and helped a man pick out clothes for his fifteen year old daughter. I watched on with something like envy, bittersweet and wistful. I wasn't the only one. All the worker girls were looking on in awe. It wasn't the shopping that got us. It was the sweetness. How comfortable they were together. I wrote about that moment and how boys didn't like me as much as other girls because my father wasn't around. I was a seed that got stepped on and I needed a man to water me, to make me grow into a beautiful flower that others would notice. I was a very odd sixteen year old, I know.

From all this, stems what I once thought would be the dedication in my first book:

To Mrs. Markovich, for planting the seed
and to Gabriel, the one who watered me.

As you can see, it means a lot and it makes perfect sense. But now I'm not so sure. Shouldn't the first dedication go to your mom? Shouldn't everything go to your mom? She has encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be, but always jokingly pushed me to be a journalist and be on TV.

Now I have a slew of people who encourage me.

All this is to say is that I'm not sure what my first dedication would be. It is obviously not something to dwell on. Don't worry folks, I actually do write. But its the little things that make up a big dream, and I know I'm not the only unpubbed writer to wonder what that mostly blank page will say.

Have you given thought to your first dedication? If you're already pubbed, was the dedication important to you or something to make light of? Who did you dedicate to and how did you choose that person?

P.S. No matter who I dedicate my books to, rest assured that I will track down Mrs. Markovich and send her a signed copy of each one.

P.P.S. I blogged about a teacher on Monday. Maybe its Teacher Appreciation Week in some other universe and this is the first sign in what will be the sci fi novel of my life that I am actually an alien.

Animal Writes Blogfest

I'm organizing a blogfest! Yay! It goes a little something like this...

Pick any animal.
Write a scene from the viewpoint of that animal. (First person, I should think. Green light on fantastical creatures, so long as they're not usually sentient. So boo hoo hoo for me--no mermaids)
Less than 1000 words.
To be posted on or before Wednesday October 13th.

In my first creative writing class, the teacher (a native American man who went by the name Brightrope and had many names, the rest of which he would not tells us because when someone calls him a certain name then he knows how that person knows him and if he were to go around telling everyone all of his names then the system would be broken) shared a scene he wrote through the viewpoint of a horse. I remember the sweat, the muscles, the flies, the obscured vision. It was a beautiful descriptive scene, and reading I felt like...a horse.

So have fun with this! How does your animal see and hear and feel? It would be cool to get a variety of animals, so I suggest commenting here on what animal you intend to do. But by all means, feel free to duplicate!

I haven't decided my animal yet, but when I do, I'll comment it. I'm thinking maybe a gecko since I have about fifty in my backyard, but I kind of want to try a lion. Cats are always tempting. Decisions. Decisions.

Sign up bellow and leave a comment :)

Also, use the blogfest badge to let your readers know you'll be participating, and hopefully to get a few more writers playing along. The more animals the better!