2013: What I've Learned This Year

I'm sadly not one of those helpful authors who give all sorts of advice about how to live this writer life. Frankly, most of the time I feel like I'm doing it wrong, so who am I to tell anyone else how to do it? But 2013 was my debut year and I do have some things I learned and hopefully some of this will help you all too.

1. "Write every day. Write 10k on the weekends. Write only when you feel like it." There are a million pieces of advice out there for how to do this. And that's because we're all different human beings and work differently. Do what works best for you. If deadlines work, give yourself one. If NaNo works, do that. There is no answer. There is no "way" to do it. Give yourself the time to figure out your own system. Try different things. Allow yourself to fail.

2. Find a community of other writers. Your rejections will sting less, your hurts will heal faster, your shitty reviews will be less of a big deal, everything will go better when you have people lifting you up and telling you that you are lovely and amazing. I got to know spectacular writers this year. Everything is better because of that.

3. Let go of GoodReads, Amazon/B&N rankings, blog reviews, number of FB fans, number of Twitter followers, etc. Or don't, it's really your call. But for my part, I breathed easier when I stopped checking on these things. The same with Google alerts and piracy. These are things I have no control over. Every time I got involved with them, I ended up prickly and ready to fight windmills. To what end? If I'm going to be prickly, I at least want to be mad about something I can do something about.

4. Have something other than writing in your life. Do this for your own sanity, so you don't end up engaging in shenanigans that you shouldn't. It is super easy to get sucked into a vortex of writerly/Internet drama. No good comes out of this. It's a bad reenactment of the elementary school playground and who needs to go through that more than once?

5. Do something fun. Try something new. This will make you a better writer and a better person. Earlier this year a good friend and I sat in the vibrating massage chairs in the O'hare airport oasis talking about his book. The chairs were "enthusiastic" and we ended up having this serious plot talk with our voices shaking and this constant pounding on our backs. It was hilarious and fun and stupid and I won't ever forget it and I'll probably write it into a book one day.

6. Go on a writing retreat or to a conference if you can manage it. They're fun. They make you feel like this is what I do. They allow you to commune with other people who do this too. They force you to wear clothes that aren't your jams to work. They allow you to meet the people you talk to on the Internet and decide if they're really your people.

7. Volunteer. Do something good without asking for anything back. Help other people. It doesn't matter if it's other writers or other people who are in need, just say "yes" to helping. Example: I hate asking people for money, it is way out of my comfort zone. And yet this year, more than anything, the organization that I'm a founding member of needed me out there raising funds so we could do a writer's workshop for rape survivors in New York City. So I pushed past my comfort level and did it. And now we're doing a workshop in May, and everything else about my book and my life seems less of a big deal knowing that 25 survivors are going to participate in a workshop where they learn how to tell and share their stories.

8. Approach things with grace and humility. No matter where you are in the process, someone is ahead of you and someone is behind you. That's the way of it. Remember that it's a journey not a race. If you win, it doesn't mean that someone else loses, and vice versa. Recognize victories for what they are and acknowledge yourself for them ("I finished my WIP"), but don't do this at the expense of others. No one gets EVERYTHING they want. Just like no one ends up with nothing. There are no losers here, just different stops along the way.

9. Forgive others and yourself. Everyone has days of being an asshole. Everyone has a worst self that they sometimes unleash on the world. If you say something stupid, apologize for it. If you see someone else doing something stupid, assume they're having a bad day and give them the space to later apologize for their own assholery. That's not to say I'm giving R. Kelly a pass anytime soon, but there's a difference between being a sexual assault perpetrator and saying a dumb thing on the internet about romance novels.

10. Make good choices. Support local bookstores, support libraries, support authors, buy books for gifts, tell authors you like their books, encourage kids to read, etc. You are part of a community and in my mind, the best thing you can do is to work toward the continuation of this community.

I hope you all have an amazing New Year's! Thanks for being in my life, supporting me, believing in me, and making this community awesome.

On Contradictions, Gratitude, and Faith

Last week, my agent told me I was a walking contradiction. A sex-positive feminist building an army to deconstruct rape culture. An erotic romance editor who teaches Sunday school. A brutally dark writer who watches Nicholas Sparks' movies. None of these things feel contradictory to me, but I suppose from the outside they might. To me, there are no absolutes, and the more you know about people, the more you realize we're all contradictions in one way or another.

So. This post is going to be about gratitude and faith. And if you don't believe in God, that's okay with me. I stay on my own yoga mat as a general rule, but I also try my best to tell the truth about my life. And this is what I'm thinking about today.

We're going into Thanksgiving and Christmas and I'm admittedly very sentimental about the holiday season. I can't wait for Christmas music to air on the radio. I start knitting in early November to make teacher gifts, etc. I watch the holiday Hallmark movie every Sunday. I start prepping my kids for the Christmas Eve pageant.

Part of the reason I hang on to the holidays is that it includes traditions my sister and I started when we were kids and I'm grateful to pass those on to my own kids. For me, the holiday season is sort of a protected time. Which is strange because a year ago, we were dealing with kindergarteners shot in Connecticut, and I was dealing with the death of one of my best friends from college. So I guess the truth is: there's no protected time, not really.

And yet, I can't help but be grateful going into the next month. Grateful for my family, my friends, my job. Grateful that dreams can happen. Grateful that I've found a supportive community of writers who understand me.

Yesterday in church, our pastor talked about being grateful even in the hardest times. About taking grace and faith with you when faced with darkness. To be honest, this is not my inclination. I've always thought God was with me when I was at my best, not my worst. For me, gratitude is knowing that the gifts of my life aren't really mine and that when I'm given a gift, I need to acknowledge it's by the grace of God.

And to be really honest, when Michael died a little less than a year ago, I wasn't looking to God for solace, I was looking to God in anger. YOU let my friend down. He needed someone and I wasn't there, and neither were YOU. But of course, that's not how it works. We don't pick and choose the times we are protected. We are and we aren't. This doesn't have to do with God, it has to do with us. Our humanness.

Two days ago, I said to a friend: "Most of the time, I can't imagine that God is down here with me in the dark. I look up and think, can I ever make it out? Can I ever get closer?" But then, my friend said, "Of course He is. It's all inside. If you're quiet, if you still yourself, if you turn inwards, you'll feel Him. He doesn't ever leave." And of course, my friend is right. And I'm grateful for that. But I am still me, so I couldn't help but reply, "You mean She."

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

On being Haitian and "staying" with rape survivors

One of the questions that has come up several times in book clubs or classroom settings around Fault Line is my choice to make Ben half-Haitian. Even though I've heard this question a bunch, I'm still startled by it. My lens is occasionally so narrow that I forget that not everyone interacts with Haitians on a daily basis like I do.

Usually, my immediate reaction is, "Yes, he's Haitian, why else would he stay?" Which doesn't really answer the question, but it's where I go first. (Note, fwiw: there's also a part of me that thinks Ben being half-Haitian informed his decision not to tell anyone & keep the matter private).

I'm married to a Haitian man. Most of what I know about Haitians comes from my relationship with Julio and his family. He and I have been together for over 15 years (married a few less than that). A few days ago I was talking to my brother- and sister-in-law about the book, and this question of Ben staying came up again. Not from them, obviously, but in me talking about how Ben's cultural background was an important part of his decision-making. That this fierce Haitian loyalty that I've experienced for half my life spilled over into my fiction.

And part of our conversation included a discussion about whether boys would stay, and how much their own backgrounds would inform that decision. For my own part, I didn't tell my story to Julio right away when I met him. It carries so much weight and it's hard for survivors to lay all that bare before they even know if someone is a keeper. But a few months in I told him, and why that was so easy was because I knew that would never be a deal breaker for him.

To the point that I forget it IS a deal breaker for a lot of guys. Especially younger guys. And I wonder if part of that is because they don't know how to talk about it. They feel paralyzed to change something that already happened and so they pull away. Or maybe it's more. Maybe they don't want the drama. Maybe they don't want to have to deal with the work required to be involved with a survivor. Not that it's work, but I do think there's a part of survivors that are always survivors and that partners need to be prepared for that.

But open communication about the issue can go really far in solving this. And the reality is that every time you get in the boat with someone else, you're inheriting their stuff. You're inheriting crazy uncles and dysfunctional family dinners and present-opening on Christmas Day instead of Christmas Eve and movie-talkers and everything else that comes with merging a life with someone. We all have stuff, and it only is insurmountable if we decide it is.

So yes, I will take Haitian loyalty any day of the week, but I don't think it's the only impetus to stay in a relationship with a survivor.

Maybe if there was less of a stigma against being a survivor, and more honest conversation about it, then it would be easier to stay. Maybe it would be less about loyalty and more about compassion and understanding. Maybe it would be easier to get the right help. Maybe the question for the Bens of the world one day won't be "why would he stay?" but "why wouldn't he?"