Happy Halloween!

I’m Not Here.

I’m in San Diego.

At World Fantasy Con.

Your jealousy is justified.

Photos and what not to come next week.

(Yes, I could’ve written a SMART post or something. But why?)

Look Up

Look up.

There’s so much to see around you, but if you keep your head down you’re not going to see it. Take in the sky, the buildings or trees or birds. Nobody ever looks up. Try it. Look far down the street while you’re walking, instead of at the sidewalk. You know which shoes you’re wearing, how about the girl in front of you? Meet people’s gazes. Smile.

Look up.

Think far ahead of yourself, far above yourself, allow yourself to think in ways you wouldn’t normally. Try anticipating victory. Things can look up for you if you let them. Let yourself out of your box.

Look up.

I’m looking at the same sky. You are not alone.

Nikhedonia

I have a friend who likes lovely words. (Okay, I have a LOT of friends who like lovely words, but I’m referring to this one at the moment.) He recently shared one with me: nikhedonia. The pleasure of anticipating victory.

Just, relish it a minute.

Everyone wants to succeed. But do you anticipate it? Anticipation is almost better than its pay-off. (Most things don’t live up to their hype, right?) Even so, anticipating success makes you more likely to achieve success because if you anticipate something you can be ready for it. Thus, you put yourself in situations that make success more likely. This is the truth behind the power of positive thinking, by the way. It’s less that we’re self-fulfilling prophesies and more that we act according to our beliefs about ourselves and our situations.

And just like discipline builds momentum, so does success. If you anticipate success, you live a life open to it, and it breeds more of itself. (I have seen this happen in my own life.)

Not only that, even if your victory doesn’t come to fruition, because of the anticipation and the accordant lifestyle, you’re more likely to enjoy the process and focus less on the pay-off that might not come. (The letdown may be bigger, eventually, but there’s always a price.)

Don’t misunderstand: I am not advocating entitlement. I would never advocate entitlement. There is a difference between thinking you are owed a thing and anticipating that thing happening and doing what you can to ensure it does.

That’s the trick: doing what you can to ensure it does. (See: own thyself.) Anticipation is passive. It’s waiting. Because you anticipate something in the future, it is by definition inactive. Victory isn’t something that just happens, though. Anticipation usually involves imagination.

So. Imagine yourself victorious.

What does that look like? Sitting in the corner office? Walking down the aisle? Your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble? The image itself gives you clues to what you need to do. For instance, complete your next report on time. Leave your apartment at least once a week. Open MS Word already, dammit.

You can work backward, too. To be on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, you need a publisher. To get a publisher, you need an agent. To find an agent, you need a query letter, but to write a query you need a finished manuscript. Don’t have that? Open MS Word, dammit.

Engage in a little nikhedonia, friends, and then do something with it.

Own Thyself

Delphi got it wrong. It’s not enough to know yourself; it’s what you do with the information.

I was chatting with my girls the other day and we have an ongoing joke about my, uh, prowess with boys. That is, I get flirted with regularly. And I will usually file away the interaction to regale my friends with as anecdotes later. I turn the most mundane exchanges into silly stories for them because I’m a writer and it’s what I do.

(Note: I do this with all my conversations, not just flirting. You can make an anecdote out of anything if you do it right. So if you happen to be a person I talk to, don’t go getting all self-conscious on me. I’m a writer. It’s all grist for the mill, and I promise I don’t make fun or laugh at anyone’s expense. I’m not that way.)

This somehow turned into my giving advice on the procurement of interest from boys. That is, flirting 101. Or as Abby instigated, how I do my groove thang. So, Groove Thang Tricks. Maybe I will do a series of posts. (This post is honest-to-god not as silly as you think it is. This is all lead-in! Exposition, if you will.)

Anyway, I mentioned one trick is that you need to own your groove thang. I was being facetious at the time, but I said, “Just, admit to yourself you’re hot stuff and it flows out of you and then everyone else knows it too.” And you know what? It’s not actually facetious. Confidence is noticeable and attractive.

I don’t even mean flirting. In general, people pay attention to people who believe in themselves. You get taken seriously when you act like you know what you’re doing, because then people think you know what you’re doing. It’s simple, really. I’m not espousing fake it till you make it, though there’s a place for that. Somewhere. I’m saying, be self-aware (know thyself) and use the information to your advantage.

For instance, if you know you’re reasonably attractive and people may notice you, you can anticipate being noticed. (:cough: Some may even call you a cynosure. Isn’t that a lovely word? It is.) If you don’t feel like being sociable on a given day, you know not to wear the bitch boots and full make-up. (This is true for anyone, of course.) Conversely, if you’re kind of shy but you know you need to get sh*t done and be noticed, maybe that’s the day you do wear the bitch boots and full make-up.

Also, don’t apologize for yourself. (Pot, kettle, I know.) Don’t downplay yourself is perhaps a better way of putting it. I joke about being high energy and high drama and I apologize for it a lot because, well, my friends have to deal with a lot of shitstorms, but again, that’s my life, that’s who and how I am. I try not to entertain more drama than is necessary, and I try not to *create* any, but it happens. I can either apologize or I can spin some more anecdotes for my girls to laugh about.

If you’re an introvert, don’t force yourself to be something you’re not. You’ll have to interact with people sometimes, but not engaging with every person who crosses your path isn’t a bad thing. Own that. Cultivate the close friendships you do have. Use your comfort behind-the-scenes to make sure things get done. Be your best self.

You can either bemoan who you are, use it, or change it. (You can do all three, too, but you can’t just bemoan. That’s not allowed.) But the only way to do that is to first know yourself. So Delphi just didn’t go far enough. What will do you about it?

I am on the verge.

In many ways, my life is restarting. The divorce, the career, all of it. I’ve been told so many times how I’m starting over, I have a clean slate, etc. I’ve talked about the idea here before, even.

And yet.

I’m not, really. I get my own apartment in a couple weeks and while I’m supremely excited, it’s just another move. The book coming out is new and exciting, but it’s my eighth manuscript. I’m already working on my tenth. It’s another step in the process, not a complete re-structuring of life as I know it.

A true tabula rasa is impossible because we are the same people in the next moment, in the “new” situation, that we are now. Sort of. We change and adapt and integrate new thoughts constantly. We’re not exactly the same. But we have with us the backlog of who we were. That doesn’t go away, thus, no blank slate.

So, I am on the verge of my life,  seeing where it goes and where I am taking it, since both are true. We are constantly in the middle of something, things cycle. I will have my new apartment but my divorce isn’t final. My divorce will be final but my book won’t be out yet. It’s like leap-frogging through events, and they all carry along behind like a cosmic trail of influence.

That’s not a bad thing. I am who I am; I can’t be anyone else. Frankly, I don’t want to be. (Well, okay, I would accept being me with less drama, but I’m not, so that’s that.) Since my book deals with time travel and undoing things, I’ve been asked a few times what I would change if I could, what my regrets are. I always come up blank. Perhaps those super embarrassing moments, I’d erase those … or would I? I learn humility; I learn limits. I shouldn’t erase those any more than I should erase my super sad moments or my super anything moments. They are all a part of me.

Which is kind of a strange answer for someone with a book about time travel, but there it is. Because I’m constantly on the verge of something; moments cannot be separated out. I can’t pluck my most embarrassing moment out of my life without it cascading somehow. I may not like everything about myself, but it’s who I am, it’s my history. I have to accept that. And learn from it going forward, or what’s the point? We have these stories; we have these lives of  moments that seem insignificant, and they all add up to something so much bigger than their sum. That’s beautiful.

It does mean that life is a continuum, though, and wherever we stand on it we are on the verge of something – both in front of us and behind.

You Can’t Take It With You

What are you waiting for?

I was talking to a friend about my life and how I was “taking everything one day at a time,” and how I couldn’t plan more things for the future because everything is so tenuous for me and how I basically think in terms of weeks, no further.

And it occurred to me how damn passive I’ve become in my own life. For how much I worked to get here, there’s still so much I’m waiting on. Even the phrase “taking things a day at a time” implies reaction. I … am not a fan.

Sometimes we have to be in this sort of spot. I am a case in point. And yet, there’s so much I’m hoping will happen thanks to other people, so much handing over of control. It’s unavoidable, like in my career, but I’m not talking about that. (Suzie, I’m happy to have you navigate for me. :bows down:)

Where do you draw the line? Where do you say, I’m done waiting, I’m going to go do something else? When do you look back on the emptiness where your goal should be and realize you missed the boat? What are you waiting for before you jump? What stars need to align before you go after your happiness, your dreams, before you test the waters of what could be? You can’t take anything with you, so all you have is what you have now. Is this what you want to carry forever? Is this what you need?

I find these questions difficult. I’m not sure what my dreams are anymore. Like I said, I can’t think further than a week or so in advance, so to imagine my life in a year makes me feel sick. I have no idea. It could be anything. I have certain things I want to do – continue to write and sell books, spend time with people I care about, but beyond that? Larger, life-goal aspirations? I do not know.

My therapist, who I had only so much time with, was careful to drill in to me that it’s okay not to know things and I need to learn to rest in that ambiguity. I am very good with ambiguity as a general rule, I feel we can’t know much of anything. But this drifting is new; it takes some getting used to.

And I don’t want to look back and think, I wasn’t carrying anything to begin with, let alone attempt to take it with me. I want to be active in my own life. I can take my days as they come, what they give me, or I can take them as they come by seizing them. The phrase can go either way, even if my default interpretation is passive.

That said, I will not be making a five-year plan anytime soon.

Book of the Month: Making Waves, Tawna Fenske

I love this book. I love this book. I LOVE THIS BOOK. Tawna Fenske‘s MAKING WAVES is the funniest book I’ve read in ages.

WHY I LOVE IT: The characters are cute. The romance is adorable. Mostly, THE HUMOR. I laughed out loud, honestly, every other page. I wanted to buy all the copies in the store and hand them to frowning people. I’m not even making that up; I actually had that thought while standing in Barnes and Noble.

WHO SHOULD READ IT: Everyone who needs a smile. Or, you know, anyone who likes quirky characters and straight romances.

We Interrupt This Blog

to mention that Jessica started working at Barnes and Noble and is on deadline and has zero time for the internet at the moment. Blogging will resume momentarily, but give her a week to settle down and ice her feet and finish her book and sleep.

Thank you for your patience. In the meantime, check out the cool people on my blog roll!

I Believe In Magic

Sometimes things happen.

Sometimes things happen and we don’t know why.

Sometimes things happen and we don’t know why but we suspect.

Sometimes things happen and we don’t know why but we suspect the universe.

Sometimes things happen and we don’t know why but we suspect the universe is trying to tell us something.

Sometimes the universe is.