Sara Bareilles has a new single out – Brave.  I really like it.   I like the music, I like the message, I even like the lyrics video.  And even though I’m no longer a child and the message may not be meant for me, it did touch me.  So here’s a poem (something I’m not good at At All) that it inspired.

*Sigh*

You haven’t shown any interest
Probably because I’m no good at this
Snatching attention for my wobbly projection
Of a girl that knows what’s written on her heart.

But the unrest has taken hold
Spurning me to do things untold
And writing this letter, though I should know much better
Seemed like the only coward’s way to start.

Starched collar and bright tie,
Impressive figure you cut as you walk by.
You’re much too professional, I too conversational
And words, spoken or typed, just keep spilling into the divide.

There may be a spark, an unnoticed portent
But eyes stay blind and demeanors diffident.
I see all the potential, a sad referential,
And the chasm, though not insurmountable, just seems too wide.

A question asked and summarily answered,
Information garnered and the meaning unheard.
But always circling, spinning and reeling,
Two feet never able to find solid ground.

Because it all seems a game,
Too teasing and jovial for this level of shame.
You don’t hear me, can never reach me.
I am but a possibility, no assurance of being found.

So I sit and I write,
Share my secret unwillingly on an offhand flight
Of fancy and melancholy and blue, uncalculated folly
Yearning for something to break free and light within.

All of it is but ruminations in my head,
Thoughts and feelings that shout but are left unsaid.
Only me full of dreams, preposterously harebrained schemes,
Wondering at what might have been.

Why is it so hard to admit to what I want – to myself and others?

I’m trying to be more honest – answer the phone when it rings and don’t pretend that you can’t hear it, don’t tell yourself you’re going to the gym if you know there’s no chance in hell you’re waking up in the morning – but it’s hard.  Because the more honest I am with myself, the more I realize how crazy I just might be.  And crazy?  Crazy doesn’t really get the happy endings.  They get insane stories and weird looks and entertaining conversations.  But happy endings?  Nowhere in sight.

I could list a lot of random, crazy things that people don’t know about me (and was considering it) but that wouldn’t get me any closer to the point I was trying to make, would it?  So instead, a list of scarily honest things that you don’t know about me.

• Sometimes I worry that I may actually be the evil twin.
• It worries me – and shakes my confidence – that no one knows anyone they could set me up with.  Sure, I don’t know anyone, but the collective of my friends, really?  How bad is that.
• What if my writing really isn’t good enough?  Or worse, it’s good enough to be exactly what it is – a book good enough to be downloaded for free but never purchased by anyone I didn’t have to cajole.  What if this is exactly where my writing is supposed to be?
• What if I have too much faith, so much that I completely miss the lifeboat come to “save” me?
• I love to read but don’t do it often because I worry that I’ll get lost, swallowed whole by the words of others and never find my way out again.
• I could have never written my first book without pancakes.  And now that I can’t have pancakes, will any book I write ever be that good again?  What if gluten IS the secret ingredient to greatness.  I mean, come on, that’s what beer is made of.
• Some people don’t get the happy ending.  Maybe I’m the sidekick in my own life and I don’t get one either.  Not everyone does.
• What if the life I have now is exactly the one I’m meant to have and I’ll just be mildly unfulfilled, restless, and unhappy . . . forever?

Life is full of worry and fear and hard truths.  We try to ignore them most of the time – package them away in the attic so we can’t see them, thinking that out of sight can truly mean out of mind.  But that’s not the way life works.  Sometimes bad things happen, sometimes horrible things are true, sometimes life is nothing like you wish for it to be.

What do we do then?  Keep on wishing or find something else to search for?

Valentine’s Day is here! Yeah!!  . . . .

Such sentiments are why we need a sarcasm font (which I have decided inventing and getting adopted needs to be my new goal in life).   I could list a lot of reasons why a sarcasm font is needed here.

• Valentine’s Day is a totally made up holiday.  It’s named after a Saint that went to jail – how romantic.
• I heard a commercial that said “tired of the traditional dinner and a movie date.”  Does everything have to be extravagant nowadays?
• Should we really reserve one day a year for telling people how much we care about them?  That flies against the all the “seize the day” logic the Internet is famous for.
• Chocolate is NOT to be regulated to one day a year.  Period.

And by now you might be thinking “You just hate Valentine’s Day because you’re single.”  Both of those things are true, yes, but I’m not sure they’re exclusive.

I remember being in college and wearing a bright red shirt and walking about telling everyone to have a happy “VAL-entine’s Day” (get it?  cause my name is Val?  Get it?  Oh, I crack myself up!) and smiling all the time.  Then I was putting on a brave front;  I wanted to be in a relationship.  Valentine’s Day made me sad.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want that – though growing up means less drama to go along with it.  I don’t feel like my world is ending because there’s no one to buy me dinner.  I can buy my own damn dinner – and often do (I’m kick-ass company if you must know).

No, this year I just wish it wasn’t so hard.  I have great family and friends, don’t get me wrong, I just wish sometimes I wasn’t the one that had the burden of the effort.  I wish I wasn’t the one who always had to remember – scheduling, emailing, texting, facebooking, etc, etc, etc.  For one day I’d like to be the person who hears “Just wanted to tell you I was thinking about you – hope you’re doing awesome!”  I want to be the person that gets emails instead of sends them.  I want to know that I crossed someone’s mind.

That’s why Valentine’s Day – no matter how overpriced, cloyingly sweet, and stunted – still has hold of people.  Because the dinners and flowers and jewelry – what they’re really saying is “I Care.”  And that’s something everyone needs to hear every once and awhile.  Everyone.

I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions.  I mean, I do them – every year I write myself a long letter (at varying degrees of soberness), seal it, and lock it away until I read it a year later (at varying degrees of drunkenness) to have a laugh.

But rarely do I follow them because they set you up for failure.  I have to keep them for 12 Whole Months – that just seems doomed.  So instead this year I gave myself a month off – January – to see what I wanted to do, what I could do.  It’s much less pressure to think that I could stick to something for 92% of the year instead of 100%.  That’s all still an A, right?

So, without further ado, here are the things I want to get done in the next 92% of 2013:

• Stop eating fast food – STAT
• No more gluten – lots of different types of flour to cook with
• Writing in this blog – once every two weeks is the plan
• No Procrastinating! (the only reason this made the cut is because I’ve actually been able to do it for the last month – I never saw this one coming)
• Learn social media marketing
• Keep writing – self-publish two books this year (one is already written but one needs to be decided on, stat)
• Clean my house – I really, REALLY, need to start putting things away.
• Be Happy!  (This one is harder – but may be the most important.)

So world, this is my plan for the next 92% of 2013.  I know a lot of people who have had quite a rotten January so far (the dreadful 8%) but buck up – that’s not even enough to turn an A year into a B, maybe an A- but hey, no one pays attention to the signs anyway.  🙂

750 copies of my book have been downloaded today!

Okay, so based on numbers that I’ve heard, these aren’t the best numbers around.  BUT with minimal advertising and only 3 reviews on Amazon, my little book that could has moved up to #33 in the Free section of Contemporary Fiction and #92 on Contemporary Romance – those aren’t easy categories people.  At one point today my 285 downloads DOUBLED in 90 minutes.  That’s pretty much one book every 18 seconds or so (I think, math is not my strong suit) – that’s ridiculously cool!

So yeah, I’m way excited.  And loving life, Amazon, the KDP program, baby giraffes, and (as always) cheese.  Free is our friend people – Our Friend!  You may not be able to get a free lunch but who needs lunch – read a book instead.

Oh wait, make that 771 books!  🙂

Okay, so today my book – RomCon – is available on Amazon for FREE.  That’s right, zero, zilch, nada, bubkiss, Free.  So if anyone out there is thrifty and have been waiting for deals and rock bottom prices on some of the best literature in town, today is your lucky day.  Have your mouse scurry on over and click that button and soon you’ll have awesome electronic reading material parts of your whole family will love!!

Enough with trying to sound like a literary used car salesman (told ya, BAD at selling stuff).  But you really should go download it – it is pretty awesome.  And then tell all your friends about it too cause I know you.  You’re reading this blog so you’re a trendsetter baby – I can see it in your eyes. 😉

RomCon – it’s well worth the time. 🙂

I am writing a novel in 30 days.  This is hard in and of itself.  But what makes it harder?  Zombies.

Nope, I am not predicting the zombie apocalypse early.  And no, I have not been dared to put zombies in my quaint tale of small towns and friendship.  I am the zombie.

I have a cold.  And I want to power through.  I should be using this afternoon when I got sent home from work to be writing up a storm but instead I’ve been staring at walls.  Literally, I really have.  My brain can’t seem to process things very quickly (you don’t even want to know how long it’s taking me to write this post).

So, see the moral of the story (wait, was I telling a story?) is that sometimes you have to cut yourself some slack.  Because yes, I want to write 50K in 30 days – but I also want it to not be a surrealist treatise on the color of the air.

Below is the beginning of my novel though – I really like it. 🙂

“No one gets it,” she said, staring out across the lake, her feet kicking back and forth idly.  “They say they do, everyone says they do, but no one really gets it at all.”

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the page her notebook had been open to for days.  The page itself was worn, like a hand had been drawn down it multiple times, trying not only to erase the words but their meaning as well.

She leaned her head against his shoulder with a sigh.  “Just something I wrote,” she murmured reluctantly, drawing her feet up onto the dock.  She’d been away for too long, been trapped in a house where no one paid each other any mind far too much, to forget that he’d notice.

“Read it to me.”

“You don’t want to hear it.”  But it was an empty protest, even to her ears.  Smiles darted across their faces.  She knew the expression on his without even needing to look, a side effect of a decade of friendship.

“We both know that’s a lie.  Come on, I showed you mine.  Show me yours.”

She took a deep breath, a slight catch in her throat – she’d never admitted any of this out loud before – and then started to read.

“I had a friend once.  She’s gone now.  I mourn. . . .”

It’s almost November and you know what that means – NaNoWriMo is here!!

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org – visit them!).  No Plot, No Problem – just write 50,000 words in 30 days.  Easy, right?  Ha, I laugh!  This is one of the most creatively insane things that can be done.  1667 words a day?  Every Day?  For a whole month?!

I’ve done this before – twice in fact, always a winner! – and every time it has jump-started me.  What I usually write is fantasy insanity.  The first time the plot had holes big enough to drive a semi through and the tone could never make up its mind (am I a family drama? a mystery? an absurd fantasy) but there was a crime ring set at a circus.  The second time I created an awesome fantasy trilogy that will one day be published but currently, yeah, has plot holes big enough to drive a minivan through.

This time I’m planning on being a lot more focused – no fantastical elements, no supernatural powers – just a hopefully arresting story that I can look back on and be proud of.  This time I want the emotion to come through, loud and clear – this Published Author’s no longer joking around.

I’ll be proud when I make it to the end cause I’ll have written thousands of words in a month.  People brag about running 5Ks – this 50K sprint is much harder to achieve.  And much more up my alley – I don’t much like running.

So wish me luck!  It’ll be a crazy journey but you know what they say, it’s all about the journey baby, not the destination.  T-minus 27 hours and counting . . .

I turn in 30 in about 14 hours from now.  I’ve spent a lot (and I mean A LOT) of time thinking about what this means, all of the things that I thought I would have done, seen, and accomplished before I turned 30.

And then I got up this morning, and thought “Girl, seriously, you’re looking at this all wrong.”  So today, instead of listing all the things I’ve yet to do, here’s all the wonderful things that I’ve accomplished.

30 Things to Be Proud Of

• I’m a homeowner – all by myself!  Never thought that would happen.
• I earned a graduate degree – an MBA.  Never thought I’d have those letters after my name, that’s for sure.
• I no longer HATE driving.  In fact, sometimes, I think I actually kinda like it.
• I became a concert junkie!  I still remember when I thought, wait a minute, I’m making money and this is what I want to do with it.
• I went to Fan Fair in Nashville – saw the humid, the crazy, and the crazed and slept 18 hours in 5 days.
• I traveled to Spain and got that stamp in my passport – tapas totally rock.
• I lived alone – and hated it – then lived alone and didn’t so much.
• I won $15,000 because I was just so good at telling the story of my patheticness – patheticness for the win!
• I discovered what I wanted to do with my life, early enough that I might be able to make all my dreams come true. 🙂
• I had a literary agent rip me to shreds and years later had another one tell me I can write. 🙂
• I’ve made friends and lost friends – and thankfully made more than I’ve lost.
• I wrote a book that’s awesome but no one’s ever going to read.
• I wrote a book that’s even more awesome and hopefully thousands of people will read.
• I ran a 5K – I didn’t even know I wanted to do that (the word ‘run’ is used very liberally here).
• I sang karaoke in a bar.
• I did NOT beat up my brother in the womb when he was getting on my nerves – and no matter what he tells you, he IS the evil twin.
• I got lost in the worlds of others – tv, movies, books – and learned to never apologize for it.
• I figured out Bruce Willis was dead at the end of the Sixth Sense WAY before anyone else did (and yes, I still brag about that).
• I got a job right out of college and made it into a job I’d want.
• I fell down – literally, I’m the clumsiest person you’ll know – but I never let it stop me from getting right back up.
• I discovered that I could live without cheese – but life wasn’t worth it – and I could live without gluten – and life still is.
• I once flipped my brother over my shoulder in a fight – don’t know how I did it, was never able to do it again, but it was epic.
• I got my sister to make me delicious gluten-free bagels – though I am eternally still waiting on that cheese soufflé.
• I taught my nephew to say my name in the cutest little baby voice and to smile every time Aunt Val walks into a room.
• I started liking my family as people and people as my family.
• I painted my bedroom bright yellow so I’ll always have something to smile about.
• I shot a gun – and felt appropriately bad ass doing it even if it did injure me and I couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn.
• I discovered that an attitude is the biggest factor in what side of the bed you wake up on.
• I learned that the most important part of making lists is knowing when to stop measuring yourself against them.