Girls, Assassins & Other Bad Ideas {Release Party}
Category: books
a forbidden love…
In the spring of my sixth-grade year, my friend asked me if I wanted to skip school with her. She was part of an eclectic group of middle schoolers who left campus often for things like fast food, hanging out, and anything other than dull afternoon periods. I was terrified, but coming into a braver version of me, I agreed.
As we were walking the streets of our small desert town she asked me what I wanted to do– hanging out at one of our homes wasn’t an option for either of us. Without much thought, I asked, “Can we go to the library?”
I knew it was a nerdy response for a middle school girl, in 1988, to make. She was reluctant in her agreement, but this was what we did.
Our town library was fairly small by public library standards, but it was amazing to me… mostly because I hadn’t ever been. I had begged my mother for years to take me to the library for books, but she always said “No”. She told me it was too expensive. She told me a lot of things to discourage me from asking, but her excuses never took away my deeply rooted desire to walk among the stacks.
Someone saw me going into the library in the middle of a school day and called my mom. I sat curled up and looking through a stack of books, in absolute heaven, when I caught sight of her storming up the walkway to get me. This marking of my first time in a library would also be the only time I ever saw my mother in one.
When I was fourteen I had a not-so-secret relationship with a boy named Michael. This boy wouldn’t be my first kiss, but maybe my first love. He definitely became my first love OF kissing, as we were swept up in kissing pretty much anywhere we could manage.
Fourteen is such a magical, difficult age. Especially for us. We were both kids in a very conservative Christian children’s group home. Things like dating, and especially kissing, were not allowed. A million years later I have to wonder if part of the magic of those days was in discovering the secret places to make out, in addition to discovering each other.
Of the many hiding spots we found, my very favorite was on Tuesdays when our high school class took trips to the nearest public library. Living in a new town, this library was filled with nooks and crannies to duck into and explore. It was magic.
The books were magic too. As restricted as almost every aspect of our lives were–there seemed to be little overseeing of what books we checked out. I suspect certain adults thought reading kids were quiet and behaving kids. This is not true.
I still feel my knees go a little weak when I step into a library… the smells of decades of books and possibilities… Everything about it feels like untapped magic.
Possibly though, there is still that slight prick of something forbidden and beautiful to be had there and I’m not going to lie–I love that part too…
Psst… hey you, did you happen to see that my memoir Girls, Assassins & Other Bad Ideas is finally out? You can learn more about it and grab a copy by going here!
If you’d like to keep up with what’s happening and the scoop about other awesome and amazing things ahead of schedule, you can do that by going here!
July moments…
I have procrastinated this July lesson post because I’m just not in the mood. I’m tired. I’m stressed. In these two ways, I am just like the majority of us… I get it. This month felt long, short, and like it dragged on forever while it also somehow sped by in a blink. My biggest adult lesson may eternally be that the passage of time makes no sense. I thought I was getting the hang of it until 2020 hit and messed us all up.
- I learned that I may get super tired of drinking water so often, but when our water cooler died I became a woman who has never craved water more… make it make sense.
- I took our dog Elenor and our cat Darcy to the vet this month. They each needed vaccinations and our vet is a bit of a drive. What’s the big deal? I thought… The cat is in a carrier. It will be fine. It, in fact, was very barely fine and I’m still regretting the decision days later. I learned never to do that again. Separate visits and making the drive twice are the new way to go.
- I’ve been planning my book launch event, in another state. It seemed easy enough, but it turns out it is very complicated and the next time I plan to travel home, it will not be for an event. I’ve learned my lesson.
- I released a small number of book boxes for my up-and-coming memoir Girls, Assassins & Other Bad Ideas. I am obsessed with this activity–it’s safe to say it is bringing me life right now… BUT while I figured I’d planned far more than would sell, it turns out I didn’t plan near enough. I am deeply touched, ecstatic, and humbled by the whole thing. I’ve learned not to sell myself short and to not be afraid to go for it. (May we all learn this lesson!)
- I’ve learned to do the spontaneous thing sometimes. I have practiced spontaneity in several areas of my life this month and haven’t regretted it yet. In fact, it made the best memories!
July Bests…
- Movie (New): NOPE
- Movie (Older): Red Dawn
- TV Binge: Stranger Things 4:2
- Read: Every Summer After by Carley Fortune… Pretty predictable but also nostalgic, fun, and a great summer read.
adding fuel to the flame…
Have I forgotten what fire feels like? I mean, not real flames of fire, but the heart kind… the inside. The sort of fire attached to cliche sentiments like “pursue what sets your soul on fire”. That sort of fire, not to be confused with the harsh moments of life which feel as though they’ve burned my inner core to the ground.
What does set my soul on fire? For so long it was writing, and I think in comfortable ways it still is. Writing is that thing I need to always remain tethered to, or I simply cease to function well. Do you know what else impairs my ability to function well? Not being creative. The less I’m trying to be artistic (and listen, try as I might, I don’t do well, but I simply don’t care about that. It is the doing that is healing and life-giving, not the perfection!) the less I want to tackle the nurturing, daily bits of life…
the things that encourage me to
- wash my face every evening.
- go to bed when my body and mind tell me it’s time.
- pick up a book to read instead of a remote to watch.
- stop doom scrolling.
Attempting creativity on a regular basis corrects all of this. It insures that when I do want to listen to music or watch something, it is of a higher quality and less fast-food, mass-made consumption.
It all seems like a no-brainer sort of problem, doesn’t it? And yet… And yet I struggle.
I’m trying, in this new month and second half of an otherwise difficult year, to do better–be better. I’m also trying to release expectations because I am a chronically ill person who struggles with occasional depression. I am forever planning things that old-me could do, and then being reminded IN THE ACTUAL MOMENT that mistakes were made and I’m not that girl anymore. It makes it hard, and to be honest I am feeling a stupid amount of anxiety over my trip home next month, paired with my book launch. There’s so much pressure, especially since I haven’t been there for three years and I am just so different now.
I want to harness the fire I once felt, the flames that fueled the making and doing… the fire that motivated that girl. In truth, I’m tired. Most of us are. These past few years have not been kind to us, and yet they’ve taught us to take note of the little moments that keep life beautiful. These thirty-eight months have educated me on the vitality of being more intentional and prioritizing connection, community, and kindness.
Perhaps the flames are still there, it’s just that now they are the slow, steady burn of a well-connected and creative life.
What if…
So many years ago, (it’s hard to believe how many at this point) I was introduced to this growingly popular YA novel called Twilight. I wish that I’d heard it was about vampires and thought “yeah, that’s not for me” but the truth would have been (and still is) that vampires will always be up my alley. The super bizarre thing for me was honestly picking up a book to read at all, even when I had no clue what it was about. I hadn’t read for fun in years. I was testing non-fiction books for Harper Collins and blogging full-time. I was so far removed from the literary world that I had no idea what sort of fiction books existed beyond mysteries and Harlequin romance–neither of which had ever appealed to me.
After some intrigue at a few bloggers I followed raving about Twilight, I grabbed a copy. I didn’t sleep, or do much of anything, for two days. I couldn’t put it down. After reluctantly packing our family for vacation, I ran to the bookstore to purchase the second book of the (then) trilogy. While I hadn’t been much of a reader, at that point in my life, it is also important to note I had always suffered from car sickness. Even so, I read the second book, New Moon, as we drove throughout the mountainous Pacific Northwest. The Twilight world had sucked me in and I was unable to think of anything else. You’d think my family would have been annoyed, but they thought it was funny. They especially got a chuckle out of us having to detour our trip through Portland so that I could grab my copy of the newly released third book Eclipse.
It was somewhere into the first chapters of Eclipse that I found myself a passenger in a car with friends, as we navigated a mountainous road that was thick with heavy trees, at actual twilight. My mind began to wander at what was watching us, waiting, in the black line of those trees? I thought about the Quileute wolf legends existing in a heavily forested region with one of the highest “big foot” sightings… could it be?
Around this mountain side we traveled as the shadows chased the irrational wanderings of my mind.
~
Several years before, my first Christmas eve as an adoptive mom found me staring at our daughter as she slept sweetly. The magic of Christmas suddenly meant something completely new, and then out of nowhere panic plunged my insides toward the ground… What if Santa is real? What if this strange, magical being exists and comes sneaking through our home while we sleep?
What if?
What if…
Over the weekend my husband and I were inspired to have a Twilight movie marathon. It was so fun, and I was once again swept up in the memory of these life changing books… life changing because they inspired me to fall in love with reading again, and in doing so they inspired me to think deeper than the surface level I’d been handed–deeper than the very one-dimensional level I’d been writing at in my professional life.
The revisit, though thoroughly nostalgic and entertaining also made me think about that mountain drive, and that first Christmas eve. My mind began to think about fear. Then this morning I came across a news story about an asteroid sailing past earth and another report about the dangerous weather expected to kill many and render areas of the world disaster zones this summer. In even skimming each headline I felt that same fear pop its head in for a minute.
Fear.
We are living in a weird time when so many fear-motivated tragedies are happening on a daily basis. Instead of vampires and Christmas elves though, these fears are based in viruses, vaccinations, political powers, religion, sexuality, gender identity, skin tones, and on and on and on… any difference that divides us is connected to a fear-motivated tragedy that has taken place in recent days. The biggest difference between these fears and the fictional ones is it might just be a bit harder to call them irrational when the things we fear are really here. They aren’t possibly hiding in the shadows, but instead they are everywhere. Also everywhere are the printed and spoken stories about why we should fear them.
At the end of the day they are still stories. Whether it’s a fear of whats in the shadows, or a fear of something real in the world that you’ve been told is scary, we still have the opportunity to surrender to the boogeyman and let that fear control us. What if we didn’t?
What if we pushed past the fear and listened to someone outside of our normal scary-story-circle?
What if we tried to connect with someone else, something else?
What if we pushed past the usual sense of nausea we get from being a passenger in the car, and immersed ourselves in an experience so different than our normal, every day one?
What if?
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