Category Archives: Writing

What Paper Valentine Means to Me: an Essay in Three Parts

Posted on by

I.
I never remember to talk about my books.

II.
This is weird, because I think about them a lot, and not just while I’m writing them. I think about structure and nuance and what things mean, and how I think something should look in order to communicate efficiently or illustrate a point I want to make.

This is because, as much time as I’ve spent inventing made-up people, as much as I love to submerge myself in imaginary worlds, the thing I have always cared more about than anything else in the entire storytelling world is THEME.

And I know that even the broadest, most universal theme can’t sustain a story all by itself—that theme is not the same thing as plot. Themes are not characters. They’re not story arcs or scenes. Maybe most importantly, they aren’t morals or lessons or platitudes or personal statements. Themes illustrate abstract concepts, but they don’t tell you what to think (you have to deal with that part on your own).

I’ve always been like this—aggressively focused on the significance and the symbolism, the underlying implications, and I think now that the root cause of this is very simple. It’s because underneath the fancy English-classness of it, themes are really just ideas.

You already know this about me—I know you do—but I’ll say it again, because repetition is a useful rhetorical device and because I never get tired of saying it : I love ideas.

I love them and collect and hoard them and cuddle up to them like warm, fuzzy fleece blankets that are also made of sunshine and happiness. I would eat them, sleep on them, bathe in them, if there were any way that could result in me not withering away to nothing while simultaneously being sleep-deprived and really unhygienic.

What I’m trying to say is that theme matters to me, because much like the nucleotides that form DNA, theme is one of the most basic building blocks of what something is about.

III.
Now, here is where I describe the book—not what it says on the jacketflap or the website, or even what I say on panels and in interviews when people ask me what the story is.

Paper Valentine has murder in it, but it’s not a murder mystery. It has ghosts, but it’s not a horror novel or a supernatural thriller. It has kissing, but it’s not a romance, and it has grief and loss and bullying and disordered eating, but it’s not an issues book and it’s not an after-school special. And you are one-hundred-million percent absolutely free to read it and consider it and then disagree with me wildly on every single claim I’ve just made, because books are made by writers, but they are understood to by readers, and any time I start tossing around lofty blanket decrees and announcing what something is NOT about, I can and will be … wrong.

No matter how much I might want to, no matter how hard I try, I can’t tell you what my book will be for you. All I can do is tell you what it is for me, and here is the heart and soul of it:

Paper Valentine is a love story about two best friends, and one of them is dead.

There. That’s it. One sentence. And all the ghosts, murders, kissing, social scuffling and jockeying and backbiting—those things are there, they’re story, and story is gorgeously, vitally important. But it’s different from DNA.

So now here’s my longer answer, because there’s always a longer answer (don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t). Paper Valentine is the book I wrote because ever since high school, I’ve never stopped thinking about all the varied and intricate ways that the world can be dangerous to girls—physically, socially, emotionally, psychologically, and how you can arrange those dangerous ideas to make a spiral. A BAD spiral. An eerie, prickly spiral that’s hard to see, but can still exert a tremendous amount of influence, making its own little house of mirrors as it goes, so that death reflects love, which reflects separation and autonomy, which reflects violence and power and sex, which reflects control and hierarchies and expectations, and you walk along it, knowing that every step of the way will mean peril.

Paper Valentine is about peril, and about choosing to move forward anyway, because your life is your life and letting someone else impose a role on you—any role you didn’t choose yourself—is just one more insidious and ill-defined danger.

That. That is what the book is about.

Also, anything else you might feel is happening anyplace in those pages. It’s probably that, too.

(And look at me—for possibly the first time in my life, I just talked all about my book with NO SPOILERS. I think this means I should probably eat some cake.)

All Good Things—a Roundup

Posted on by

It’s New Year’s Day! It’s 2013! Which kind of makes me feel like life is rushing by in one long, ungainly sprawl, but whatever!

Due to some general publishing shuffle-y-ness, resulting in a random (and I’ll be honest, not entirely unwelcome) deadline reprieve, I am still writing the first draft of my current book. Yes, that one. Still. Also, it is—hands down—the longest book I have ever written.

However, right now I’m taking a little break from battling the Ever-Expanding Wordcount because I have about nineteen really exciting things to say about Paper Valentine! And by nineteen, I mean six.

Also, when I present you with this list of six things, you have to promise to keep reading all the way to the bottom, because I’m saving the biggest thing for last. You can tell I’m getting better about spoilers, because that is not actually a spoiler, because I didn’t actually tell you the identity of the big thing. Progress!

Now, without further ado, here are the awesome things:

  1. Paper Valentine comes out in exactly one week. That is soon.
  2. Paper Valentine is on the Indie Next extended list (Scroll down. No, seriously—keep scrolling.)
  3. Paper Valentine is a January Editor’s Pick on Amazon, and is in some pretty excellent company.
  4. It has a starred review from Publishers Weekly!
  5. It has a starred review from BCCB, which you can’t see yet, but which I assure you is super-fantastic, because they really, really totally understood and liked every single thing I was trying to do when I wrote the book! (Which, as you can probably imagine, is basically one of those times that writing books is so gratifying I can’t even explain.)

And.

AND.

On a scale of the actual size of things, here is the biggest awesome thing, which is that in February, I’ll be participating in the West Coast leg of this year’s Breathless Reads tour (!!!) It is a week long, and has just a bunch of stops! Needless to say, I am pretty much over the moon.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be back with a post dedicated to the dates, locations, and of course, the lovely fellow-Penguin authors I’ll be appearing alongside! In the meantime, though, you can find out way more by checking out the Breathless Reads Facebook page.

Okay, that’s the big news for today—and honestly, probably for the week—but I promise I will be back with more information shortly. After I write some more scenes about flooded bridges. So stay tuned.

What Paper Valentine is Not About (hint: me!)

Posted on by

I know I said I was taking a blog hiatus. That I was on a deadline and way behind with all-the-everything, and that until I got caught up and mailed stuff and finished my draft, I wasn’t going to be doing much of anything else. But here’s the thing.

I have a book coming out in a month!

I know, right?

PV ARC

Remember this little guy?

To preface what will surely wind up being one giant disorganized ramble, I just want to say that I have the most awful time talking about my own books. It is sort of like when I talk about other people’s books, only even less coherent, with even more spoilers.

There’s this thing that I get asked about periodically—mostly by people at events, where I don’t have adequate time to gather my thoughts, and then I flail around and give terrible answers, but the thing is, I KNOW the real answer. Sometimes I just can’t figure out how to say it right.

The thing people get curious about is, how much of what I write is based on my own life.

Now, if we’re talking about The Replacement, the short answer is … none. As anyone who reads my high school posts could tell you: the real, actual-person teenage-me had very little in common with Mackie Doyle. And by very little, I mean that she probably would have stared blankly at him, blinked in confusion a few times, and then wandered away to eat Skittles and make up mathematical postulates about emo boys with hoodies and persecution complexes, and think critical, judge-y things about Sid Vicious, who died before she was born and is not around to defend himself.

She was kind of pitiless and cynical that way.

Also, fine, yes, I’ll admit it—the wry, loyal, affectionate dynamic between Mackie, Roswell, and the twins is loosely based on a lot of guy-friend-groups I’ve known, so that part is totally something I stole from real life.

In The Space Between, one could argue that I put a decent (ish) amount of my adolescent self into Daphne, and that seems pretty true. She’s curious. She’s dispassionate and analytical. Occasionally callous, but also benevolent. She’s that fish out of water who doesn’t really care that there’s no water. Other parts, though, are totally, totally made up. For instance, the part about being the daughter of the devil.

(Okay, fine. I have been young and alone in Chicago one time.)

(Everyone was super-friendly, and the food was very good, so that part is true.)

But Brenna, you say, because in my imagination you are helping me stay on-task, Brenna, what about Paper Valentine?

And I devote some serious thought to your question, and then conclude that my main character, Hannah Wagnor, is yet again nothing like me.

However, many other things in this book are true.

I wrote Paper Valentine because I grew up in a city very much like Hannah’s fictional city of Ludlow—clean, sprawling, suburban, full of city parks and open spaces. It’s routinely ranked as one of the most livable cities in the country. It’s really very lovely.

I wrote Paper Valentine because even though it’s a very lovely city, we still had bad years. Because once a guy was dressing up as a cop, pulling girls over and killing them. And once the Dutch Elms all got sick and died, and a man was breaking into girls’ houses and the reservoir dried up and the state park was on fire for so long one summer the whole sky turned red and ash rained down like snow and once the birds got sick and died and the creek flooded and washed a train off the tracks into a trailer park, while my friend Tony stood outside of Chuck E. Cheese in a mouse costume with a cigarette in his hand and watched it happen, and so a lot of my memories feel very surreal.

Paper Valentine is about those feelings. Not those actual things, but about the way bad things can happen in nice places, and a city can become a kind of bright-and-dark fairyland and there’s nothing you can do about it but grow morning glories on your balcony and eat snow-cones and drive around and not pull over for cops unless it’s in a public place, and even though it’s insanely hot out, you still lock your windows at night.

So those are some true things—some feelings I put into the book, even if I didn’t put them on the page—but the truest thing of all is that my aunt and uncle own a photo shop, where I worked for most of college.

Which means the part about the crime scene photos—that part’s true.

The thing about the crime scene account is, nothing shows you faster or more clearly what your city is actually like.

When you do the crime scene account, you always know how many people have died. You know when and where. Even the ones that didn’t make the papers. You know how many assaults happened last week and how many break-ins and drunk and disorderlies, and what it looks like when they have to use the jaws of life to get you out of your car.

You know the dark corners of a city—how the inside part doesn’t always match up with the surface. You know that even though you’re quick and methodical and really good about case numbers and multiple sets of instructions and never accidentally giving the original negatives to the assistant from the DA’s office, you’re mostly only in charge of the crime scene account because you’re the one who doesn’t wind up sobbing in the bathroom, which makes you feel a little bit like a sociopath.

And okay, fine. That last part is not in the book.

But still, it’s where the book came from, along with all that other stuff.

(Hannah is not a sociopath.)

(Neither am I.)

(But I was still really good at the crime scene account.)

(Hey! Someone had to do it!)

Monstrous Guidance

Posted on by

Yesterday, I officially turned in my copyedits for Paper Valentine, which means that it is now closer than ever to being a Real! Live! Book!

Also it means that now I have all this time to Think About Stuff again. And what I’ve been thinking about today is the broad and fascinating spectrum of author influences.

I’ll be the first to admit that my books aren’t exactly keeping any secrets in terms of my personal interests. Even the most casual reader could probably infer that I’m a big fan of horror movies, and the more academically-minded might go so far as to identify prevailing themes of autonomy, or observe that I clearly have a longstanding affection for Shirley Jackson and Gothic literature and moral ambiguity.

Today, though, I want to talk about an influence that might not be so obvious. Specifically, the trope of the Monstrous Fairy Godmother. (Also, I just made that last thing up, but I don’t care because it totally exists, and I will prove it!)

Before we go further, I want to officially notify you that somewhere below, I’ve included several images of horror-movie grotesquery and they may be disturbing. I can justify this to myself because I really want you to understand exactly what I’m talking about, and it’s a known principle of the internet that people enjoy blog posts with visual aids, and also TNT used to show this movie constantly, meaning that if you happened be channel-surfing on a Saturday afternoon you could very well stumble across the same upsetting content, only it would be live-action and you would be seeing it entirely by accident. See? I am giving you more warning than Turner Broadcasting would, because I’m conscientious like that!

And now, the actual salient point of all this:

When I was twelve years old, I became mildly obsessed with Victor Pascow.

Which is unprecedented and a little weird, because Victor Pascow is not a real person. In fact, Victor Pascow isn’t even a main character. keep reading…

Brenna’s A-Plus Number One Rule for Creative Professionals

Posted on by

Okay, so I have This Thing that I’ve been thinking about for awhile (but a lot more during my last couple rounds of edits for Paper Valentine). And now, I’ve finally thought it about so much that I made up an official rule about it.*

First, some background:

Almost immediately after The Replacement came out, something happened that I hadn’t anticipated, which is that people started asking me where I get my ideas. Before becoming a mildly-public** figure, I hadn’t known that this was actually a pretty common question. But it is, and it is usually asked by junior reporters doing local author profiles, and at first, I gave really bad answers that sounded vaguely combative and looked terrible in the paper. Meaning, the first words out of my mouth tended to be, “I don’t know. Where do you get YOUR ideas? Because it is probably the same place.” (Sorry, reporters! I promise I was not trying to make your job harder.)

Also, one thing you should know about me is that I nevereverever try to be rude or unhelpful. I just sometimes am anyway, by accident. This is at least partially related to how disorganized my brain is, because as anyone who has ever received an email from me already knows, I am completely devoid of transitions. It’s not that I don’t understand how they work—I just forget to use them and then say the next thing that’s on my mind after the first thing, and don’t really include a bridge of how I got there.

As a semi-related observation, I am also a person you should not, under any circumstances, invite to grown-up parties. I try so, so hard to act like a reasonable adult and not say bizarre, upsetting things, and to listen attentively when people talk about what curtains they want to put in their guest rooms, and be gracious and decorous just like Betty Draper on Mad Men, because she is a person who can always be counted on to know exactly what to say about factual, unambiguous things like curtains and guest rooms.

And I’m getting pretty good. I can hold it together for about an hour, which is a vast and startling improvement from my teenage years, when I could hold it together for approximately five seconds. After an hour though, the social acumen starts to go downhill fast. (The inner/outer monologue of Brenna-at-a-party typically goes don’t talk about zombies, don’t talk about zombies—“Hey, did you ever think about what if there was a hippopotamus-zombie?”—shut up shut up shut up stop talking!—“Zompotamus!”)

Also, one time at D’s Christmas party for work, this ACTUALLY HAPPENED:

Brenna: “I read on the internet that the average American eats roughly 2.7 spiders a year accidentally, while they are sleeping. But I’ve been thinking about that, and it is totally not true, because if a spider walked on my face, I would wake up!”

All the other work-wives: O_o

Okay, now this is turning into less of a discussion of being a creative professional and more of a discussion of how I can’t be trusted in polite company where people drink white zin and know how to play tennis, because no matter how hard I try not to, I will talk about eating spiders by accident, over the sound of my own brain screaming shut up shut up shut up!

Anyway. The place I’m going with this is that I eventually started telling people my head is like a junk shop, because whenever I need an idea, I go up there and pick through the shelves until I find something cool. And people nod at that and accept it with relative ease, because it’s a metaphor that conjures up the randomness and unpredictability of ideas, and also, I think they might think I’m just being coy and facetious and making a little joke.

But I am not.

You guys, it is weird in here most of the time.

And I don’t mean in the capricious-yet-totally-human way that people are occasionally self-conscious about, where they feel like the only person who ever worries about the possibility of a bridge collapsing at the exact moment they’re driving over it. I mean in a What if mice were robots? way.

The thing about a person who makes things up as their job is, a lot of times they wind up thinking that totally imaginary things (robot-mice, for instance) are very, very important, while simultaneously finding other, more practical concerns, like why is that box sitting in the middle of the floor, to be very unimportant.

(Answer: it’s sitting on the floor because I was carrying it upstairs and then in the middle, I got bored.) (Also, I don’t mean the spiteful, resentful kind of bored where you’re like Forget this, it’s stupid and I don’t want to do it anymore. I mean the other kind, where you’re like Lalala, taking this box upstairs to put it in the closet—oh look, a bird!)

Anyway, yes—my one important rule!

My rule of creative professionals is that if you want to be productive and innovative and happy—if you want to be your best—you’re going to need at least one person in your life who is somehow convinced, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that you are not weird. Who thinks your job is cool and worthwhile and interesting and enjoys your junk-shop brain, and when they come into a room and say “What are you doing?” and you say “Just measuring how high this marshmallow bounces if you drop it on the floor,” they nod and go make a sandwich.

This is a precious, precious person.

For me, I’m especially lucky because I get to LIVE with a person who thinks I’m reasonable and interesting and also not completely incomprehensible—a person who will talk through ridiculous scenarios with me and remind me that popcorn is not remotely a real meal and it’s time to go to bed now.

And this is why D is awesome. Why he is my absolute favorite. And now I want to make a list of things that explain how awesome he is, but it would be long, so I will just give you several examples.

D and I are not clones of each other, but it doesn’t matter (your person of awesomeness doesn’t have to be another you). For instance, D doesn’t really read that much, and he thinks a lot of my movie choices are inexplicable and kind of terrible. But even though he doesn’t really read that much, he will still always, always read my drafts and help me with problem-scenes, and he still got a me a giant set of shelves for my out-of-control book collection. And even though I have really questionable taste in movies, he still drags a blanket off the bed and naps next to me on the couch to keep me company while I watch Pet Sematary for the millionth time. In the middle of the night. Because he is nice.

You need a person (I need a person) who will always let you do whatever work you need to get done, and not complain when you go from zero-to-insomniac in forty-eight hours, and remember that when they are ordering Chinese food for the third time that week, it’s all temporary and if they just sit tight and eat the Kung Pao chicken, soon the book will be turned in and life will go back to a dependable series of home-cooked meals.

(Also, I may or may not have just written this entire post simply because last month, I basically completely stopped cooking, and D just took it in stride and ordered Chinese food three times in one week and never once said a word.)

*Also, in retrospect, it seems like a pretty self-evident rule, so someone else probably made it up first.

**Not really. Like, three people know who am. But one was this totally cool author-guy named Tom Pollack at BEA, and he’s British, which means he knew who I was from five thousand miles away, which was the first time anything like that has ever happened and it was exciting.

Introducing THE CURIOSITIES!

Posted on by

This is not a book report. But. It is about a book.

So. Wow. Okay.

I feel like I’ve already been talking about this for a long time. No, seriously. For like a really long time .

But now, we’ve officially moved beyond the Realm of Vague Talk. We’ve entered the Land of Imminent Book, and I can finally (finally) give you a look at what’s been going on behind the scenes for months (years!).

As you may or may not be aware, Tess, Maggie , and I have been critique partners for a very long time. So long that when I post about something we’re doing, I often forget to give you any sort of context. So long that it’s hard to conceive of a time when we were not critique partners. My writing career has literally not existed in any significant form separate from the three of us knowing each other.*

Okay, let’s back up. Right away, from the beginning, before everything—before books on shelves—we started doing this thing.

At first, it was just a little thing.

It was a fiction blog shared between the three of us, and we’d write short stories really fast and post them the same day and egg each other on and get tons of practice at narrative structure and economic character development and not procrastinating.

And then, so slowly it was kind of hard to pinpoint, it stopped being a little thing and started being a big, awesome thing, and that wasn’t us—that was you guys, and the way you showed up every week and got involved and talked to us and talked to each other and made it less like three writers shouting stories into the internet, and more like a community.

And now, after four pretty incredible years, the Merry Sisters of Fate has grown into this:

the curiosities

For real.

The simple version is, here is a book that’s an anthology of our stories. And the complicated version is that it’s also way more than an anthology. It’s a retrospective and a conversation and a scrapbook and a diary, and it’s coming this fall from Carolrhoda Lab and we are so, so happy with how it turned out! And to celebrate our happiness, we’re giving away three shiny brand-new ARCs and the contest is very, very easy, so go enter!

Now, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here’s a video about our motivations, where we look neat and brushed and are wearing makeup.

Also, because it’s kind of hard to describe exactly how The Curiosities happened, here is a video about the behind-the-scenes. In this one, we’re wearing pajamas and making a huge mess and very little sense.

It probably goes without saying, but the finished product is kind of a synthesis for these two videos.

(But the manically-productive pajama part more.)

*Except for a few times when I sold some short fiction to horror markets, but I was totally flailing back then and really, really didn’t know if I was even pointed in the right direction.

Sh*t Writers Say (also, I am a bad blogger)

Posted on by

First things first, I am a bad blogger.

Things that have contributed to blog-silence, in order of occurrence, 75% work-related:

Final stages of Merry Fates anthology madness
Knee surgery
Edit letter
Writing retreat

With that in mind, I’d like to take this moment to assure anyone who might be wondering that—you know the drill—I’m not dead, and things will be returning to normal very shortly. At least, shortly when considered in the grand scheme of things (continents drifting, stars colliding).

But it still might be a while.

Currently, I’m revising the hell out of Paper Valentine. And that is always its own special kind of monster. I love and hate and love revising, because it’s where I get to see what I’m really made of. Which, no matter how exciting and rewarding the process turns out to be, is always a little bit disconcerting.

So, I had all these things that I probably wanted to tell you and now I don’t remember them. They went somewhere else. (My editing-brain ate them, is where.)

Instead, I’ll stick with this: I just got back from a really wonderful writing retreat with some really wonderful people, and as she is wont to do, Jackson Pearce made a video.

So here we are in all our pajamaed glory. Also, you can see me in a hat. Which, from November to March, is my natural state.

Brenna Revises

Posted on by

Okay, so. This is the last post before Enforced Blog Silence, and I wanted to make it count. What I’m giving you now is what’s known as actual writing-related content. (I know, I know—we don’t necessarily see a lot of that around here.)

What happened is, Maggie Stiefvater recently wrote a wonderful and highly detailed post dissecting the intricacies of revision, and the response was tremendous. The resulting discussion involved a lot of people saying they wished more authors would share their process with this same level of detail, and since Maggie is by nature a helpful and motivated person (also, she is organized), she asked a bunch of us if we’d be willing to participate in what has essentially become a series!

When I signed up for this, I thought for sure that I’d be making an absolute fool of myself— possibly even revealing the depths of my crazy-looking writing process. But I’ve surprised myself.

It turns out that while my early attempts at story-telling are always plagued by rogue commas and brackets, full of strange gaps and cryptic notes, by the time I reach a completed draft, it actually looks pretty … normal.

The post that follows is really long.

Really.

Long.

Also, there is one F-bomb, just so you know. I try to keep this place at least marginally compliant with school and parental internet filters because I don’t want people being FORBIDDEN from my blog. However, since the F-bomb is contained in a screenshot of my manuscript, I think we’ll be okay. To put it another way: I don’t actually write very clean books.

I know—you are not surprised. But I felt I should probably say it anyway.

Here are two pages of The Space Between, documenting Daphne’s first moments on Earth. (Click to embiggen.)

ROUGH DRAFT

Rough draft 1

keep reading…

Why I Love Survival Horror (or, Wasting Time Is Sometimes Okay)

Posted on by

There are days when people look at me and see a vague, flighty girl with too much hair and not enough common sense. And yes, I’ll admit it—I don’t always do a lot to dispel that notion. And honestly, why should I? After all, that girl exists. She’s a real, true (-ish) version of me. Part, but not all.

Here’s the thing: when I’m on, I’m ON. I mean, it’s like being a person-sized nuclear reactor or some sort of freaky futuristic human battery that’s the opposite of those lazy, comatose ones in The Matrix.

I don’t need food or sleep or social interaction. I can literally live off the warm, quick-burning fuel of ideas. I dismantle things and put them back together and get stupidly ambitious. Sometimes, if I spend enough nights not sleeping, I make bloody anatomically-representational hearts out of cake. I go off on wild, incoherent tangents. I can’t tell the difference between a good idea and a bad idea, and what would be an unequivocally awesome idea if that last elusive piece would just drop into place. Basically, if I concentrated hard enough, I might accidentally catch on fire.

This is all starting to sound like a superpower, and it’s not. Or at least, it’s not a very good one. Similar to a number of chemical elements, when I’m in my most productive state, I’m also massively unstable, and I don’t mean in a mental-health way.* It’s more like I’m walking a fine line between sustained fission and full-scale meltdown. One false move and the whole structure will go up in a tower of flames.

It’s exhilarating, but unnerving. Let me just say, when I feel the productivity-switch flip, I tread very carefully.**

This is me taking an unnecessary number of paragraphs to say that I turned in my first draft of Paper Valentine, and then spent the last two days doing nothing.

And it was weird.

Oh, I did stuff—I slept ten hours a night and watched three different football games and made banana bread, and played video games. I read some books and did some Christmas shopping. I have yet to tackle my laundry.

But I didn’t do anything that really qualified as work. Later, I’ll probably make some floral-themed hair ornaments out of paper. I’ll snuggle up on the couch with a sandwich and a blanket and kill some more zombies. I’ll sleep really well.

Whenever I finish a project, it’s hard to adjust. There’s a big, important part of me that needs this—this complete powering down—but the quick, puzzle-solving mastermind part hates being put back in the box. That part panics and thrashes and tells me things like I’m falling behind, wasting time. Malingering.

No matter how stark and eerie sleep-deprivation starts to feel, it’s always kind of a rush to be in the heightened state. I can’t help it—I have a soft spot for the version of me where I write fourteen hours a day and bake ten pies and watch Arrested Development at three in the morning because it’s just going to be light in four hours anyway.

But she is not okay.

It wasn’t until grad school that I truly started to understand I was stuck with this part, maybe for the rest of my life. She wasn’t something I’d eventually grow out of (in fact, she was getting stronger), and so I was going to have to learn to deal with myself one way or another. I developed a strategy.

This is where the video games come in.

See, the mastermind part hates dithering or wasting time, but she loves survival horror. Whenever it’s time to ease her back into a normal schedule, I placate her with creaky ghost-towns and decrepit zombie-filled mansions, because if she feels useful and like she has a task, she shuts up. She lets vague, dreamy Brenna clean the kitchen and make barrettes and do Christmas shopping.

So, for the next few weeks, this is what’s going to happen: the hyperfocused, task-oriented part of me will sit quietly, shoot her zombies, hone her strategies and solve her puzzles. She will do this without complaint. Cheerfully, even. She will stop fidgeting and get a grip.

The rest of me will be doing good if I make it to the post office.

*I should check with D on this one, having lost absolutely all objectivity.

**Figuratively speaking. In real life, I bump into the furniture a lot.

Some Thoughts on Time/Drafting

Posted on by

I know I’ve said this before, but I’m not all that good with time.

Yes, I’m ridiculously punctual. Yes, I can execute a recipe or follow a schedule, and on a purely intellectual level, I understand that time is always passing and this particular moment—right now—is not the same moment it was even a heartbeat ago. I get that.

But I don’t really understand that it’s true.

Here is an example. I have a wedding ring, and I always wear it, except when I’m cooking or doing the dishes. In this picture, I’m not wearing it. That’s because when the box of ARCs for The Space Between showed up on my steps, I was doing the dishes, but I wanted to know what was in the box right away without waiting, so I opened it, and I was really excited and I took a picture.

And now, every time I see the picture, I irrationally panic and think I’ve lost my ring somewhere, even though I’m currently wearing it, because something in my brain can’t tell the difference between now-this-minute, and a photograph that happened six months ago. I do this every single time.

Basically, what I’m saying is, my brain is sort of like the Overlook Hotel—all times are now.

Which is why I find it so incredibly fascinating, so impossible, that my first draft of Paper Valentine is due to my editor in two days, when I’m pretty sure this deal was announced an hour ago.

Also, I should probably finish writing it.