#13: the life kinda beautiful (the deepish thoughts post-birthday tinyletter)
I should have significant thoughts for you, right? After taking two weeks off (sorry) and having my sixth book and first comic book release amid a whirlwind birthday vacation and turning 40 (yay for round numbers! I'll be able to remember how old I am for at least a year!)...and so I'll do my best.
It's been an interesting year, as those of you who've been following along know. I left my day job of 17 years in January, and haven't looked back. Well, except to hate-read the state newspapers and feel sympathy and fury for my old colleagues watching a cascade of wrong-headed decisions from a governor who genuinely seems to hate the media and a not insignificant portion of the people he serves. Yeah, if you're thinking I got out just in time, you're correct and it was not a coincidence.
But it was also because I'd finally gotten to a place--past the place, if I'm being honest--where I had to make more room for what I always considered my real work. And that brings me to what I've felt most of all the last couple of weeks: a profound sense of gratitude.
Friends kept asking: so what now, what next? These are the kinds of questions that get asked at the round numbers. And...I found I didn't have a good answer.
My answer boiled down to something that sounded pretty boring: I want more of this, what I have. Which, after I thought about it some more, is also kind of the best possible answer.
Sure, I have wishes to do more/be better. I want to keep making leaps in my craft, keep doing the work I want to do and work I don't even know I want to do yet. More money is always nice. I am pretty sure I'm a money-as-happiness-enhancement expert, just give me a chance to prove it. ;-) But, by and large, what I want is to keep on doing this, stay the course. The writing life is often a precarious one, filled with ups and downs out of our control, and so it's not as small a wish as it might seem.
My part is to keep doing the work the best I can. I'll admit, I took a little breath for the first few months of the year. I've told a couple of people going full-time since I did to think of it as getting a new job. Because it is. But I was lucky in that my schedule conspired to give me a break from deadline flurry for those first few months (it didn't last!). Work was happening, but I also spent a remarkable amount of time thinking and walking and enjoying not being chained to a desk inside a cubicle. Our friend Gavin said something when I mentioned this, along the lines of, you took a rest because you needed it.
And I think, yes, that's true.
We kicked around various options for how to celebrate my birthday, but ultimately decided after it was proposed by a friend (sorry, Kelly, if you were just kidding! ;-) that we go to an SF con in the Boston area, Readercon, and then out to stay with said friend and family in Northampton. It felt like the right option immediately. Simple, no big elaborate party, just seeing and spending time with people I've known and adored for a very long time. Christopher and I met because of Kelly, at an SF con, after all.
It was a magical week.
We decided in February to add on a trip to New York to see Hamilton, for which we paid an exorbitant amount (but not nearly as much as we would have a month later!). It was worth every penny to be in the room where it happened. It was Christopher's first Broadway musical, and he began to cry almost as soon as it began. In truth, so did I. It was a spectacular, electric live theater experience, all of us in the crowd and the performers on the stage knowing it was this cast's final few performances may have made it more special--but I suspect it always feels that way.
It made me want to keep creating, to strive to get better, and, most of all, remember how lucky we are to be alive right now.
Even a much as the news is a sorrow and there's so much imperfect in this world, there is still beauty and wonder and we're all breathing. I know a lot of artistic types and writers, myself included, look at the news and feel helpless, as if sitting at our desks and doing what we do can't possibly matter.
It can. It does. I left that theater convinced of it.
I would say more about how great Hamilton was live, but then I know you'd want to kill me.
So, anyway, we got to hang out with some of our favorite people in New York (if nowhere close to all of them; we were there too briefly)--old friends, dear friends. And new people in our lives--our fabulous middle grade editor, for one. Then it was on to Boston, where I got to reconnect with a friend I hadn't seen in YEARS AND YEARS (too many), who I'd spent many past young birthdays with. And he brought La Grande Dame.
Which was shared with a group of friends. There was dancing and lipstick sharing and much fun, and then we went out for a relaxed couple of days in the country where we joined or were joined by other friends at various times and considered philosophical questions and swam and ate pie.
I continued to feel very lucky.
And I came home and immediately got back to work and it felt good. The rest period is over. There's final revisions on a book, a first draft of another book and a short story revision all due by the end of summer. I just finished a proposal for a book I desperately want to write.
Life is kinda beautiful, at the moment. I'm not throwing away my shot.
Seriously, I'll stop with the Ham refs now.
The newsy bits! I have a new book out, after all:
A super-fun new interview with Jennie Law at Women Write About Comics;
I did a Between Two Lockers interview with Forever YA, which is one of my favorite things on one of my favorite sites (who also have said very nice things about the Cirque American books *happy feelings* pointed in Mandy Curtis’s general direction);
I also did an interview with USA Today’s Happy Ever After on Girl in the Shadows’ release day;
There was a whole blog tour with excerpts and reviews and interviews;
And, um, on my birthday the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision feature ran this amazing piece about the Cirque American books and comic and !!!
Last but not least, Kate Leth, Ming Doyle and I were ALL on the Comixology podcast(listen or read the transcript at that link).
If you've read Girl in the Shadows (or Double Down for that matter) or Girl Over Paris #1 and feel so moved to leave a review, that would be an excellent post-birthday pressie.
I hope wherever this finds you, your life feels kinda beautiful too. And, if not, that it does soon.