I grew up in a town of 700 where we left the car running in the parking lot and didn’t lock the doors to our houses.

These days, I live in the city and watch too much Criminal Minds and SVU. 

Now I don’t open the door without checking who it is. I call 911 when anything seems fishy. I hurry to my car in a parking lot and immediately lock the doors. I am vigilant. When I take my favorite kiddos shopping, I barely blink, let alone take my eyes off them.

Sometimes I have nightmares, which means I need to shut off the TV.

But these episodes also give me hope. So many people are rescued at the last possible second. I have a better understanding of what “victim” means.

Does watching shows like this influence your behavior?

I crawled into bed at 8:30 tonight, early for almost anyone, super early for a night owl like me.

I feel like I haven’t blogged much lately because I’m not sure how to do it without sounding whiny, and I hate that. I just imagine everyone is so damn sick of me saying how hard 2018 has been.

So then I try to write about something else entirely, but it just feels so fake, and I hate fakeness even more than whining. 🙂

Poetry almost feels like the most perfect language right now because you can obscure everything, stay passionate but obscure everything else. So I write poems.

Here I will attempt to be authentic without complaining. Just the facts.

I’m in survival mode. My house is a mess. I miss working on my novel and long to be reunited with the writer part of my identity, but I’m melting in the summer heat, which makes me feel like a bucket full of holes. My back has been spasming as if it were water on the boil. It leaves me full of knots that feel like cement, or like the stone “eggs” that work themselves out of Chan Dan Ya.

I’m lonely. After being dumb enough to let the same guy ghost me again, I dont have much energy around online dating, and even though I know that a romantic partner will not solve all the problems in the world, it does feel like it would be easier to be sick if I could just hold someone’s hand. I’m sad, but it has more to do with circumstances than straight-up depression, I think.

I guess the best summary of 2018 would be to say that I’m grieving a lot of things. Wow. It actually feels really good to be able to summarize it that way. I’m grieving.

Wow.

Okay.

Wow.

I’m grieving. Had to guide myself there, but I got there, and now I get to just grieve. That’s not whining. That’s real. It’s grief.

(I know this doesn’t seem like a huge breakthrough to everyone, but clearly it is for me, haha!)

Because I have compassion for those who grieve. So maybe I can find some for myself.

I want the night, the cold, the rain.

I want shadows and shade,

adrenaline and kisses.

A storm through an open window,

Low repartee of you, me, and thunder.

1. Kitten videos on Instagram. Always.
2. Lip liner.
3. Kiddos.
4. Young people who are passionate about writing.
5. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
6. Rewatching SVU with my roommate.
7. 4096.
8. The Chronicles of Narnia. Over and over and over again.
9. Poshmark.
10. The rainstorms earlier this week.
11. Banana-Nutella smoothies.
12. Ativan.
13. Scripture.
14. CPAP.
15. Possibility.

Hi friends from the Northwestern Christian Writers Conference!

As promised, here is the link to my presentation: Topics in YA Lit.

Feel free to look around my website. Here are a few suggestions of places to start:

Truest

Why Christians Should Write

Query Letters & Literary Agents

Writing: Getting Started

Writing: Query to Contract

Writing: Publication

OCD

I want to be honest on my blog, but I feel like this year has been so difficult that I sound negative, and I want this to be a place of hope.

To be clear, I DO have hope. Lots of it.

But there’s also been a lot of darkness this year.

Today is a day when I’d love to write a post called “Raw.”

Instead I’m writing one called “Balance.”

Any ideas?