I usually don’t post dreams on here because a lot of my dreams are a) WTF ridiculous! or b) WTF scary! Also, let’s face it, most people aren’t really interested in hearing about dreams (I am, though! I love hearing about other people’s dreams! I’m usually pretty good at interpreting them, too!). But I was writing this one up for my person journal because it stuck with me so clearly, and when I finished writing it down I realized exactly what it was saying. So, because I try to share what I hope is helpful insight and inspiration on this blog, I decided to share the retrospectively blatant metaphor of this dream with all of you.

~*~

(Disclaimer: the following is a description, to the best of my memory and ability, of a dream. Interpret it as you will, but remember that dreams aren’t fantasies, and they aren’t something that the dreamer [typically] has any control over. They are usually the best symbols and metaphors the brain has access to at the time. Also…I consider my singing voice to be “okay,” no better, no worse.)

So, last night I dreamed that I was kind of in the cast of Glee. I say “kind of” because, in the dream, that life was real. I was a real high school student in a glee club, and I was surrounded by immensely talented people, whose abilities I truly respected and looked up to. However, it took place in my old high school–Williamsville South–not the high school they go to on TV (whatever that is, idk).

I was walking through the halls of the school, vaguely aware that I hadn’t been there in a long time because I’d been fired (dream logic! I guess it was equating the status of “student” with “employed”) but I was there, during passing time, wandering among the students, when someone from the glee club informed me that I would be performing a duet with them later that week. I don’t remember the song–I’m not actually sure it was a real song anyway–but I remember it was pretty soulful and powerful, like Janis Joplin style, only without the, um, Janis Joplin-y voice.

Anyway, I imagined myself having to sing in front of the class, and I felt a panicky mix of elation and terror. I felt like I know that if I was in my car by myself, I could totally belt out that song like a fucking champ…but in front of people? I’ll mess up. They’ll hate it. I can’t do it. Then it occurred to me in a dream-logic way that I hadn’t seen myself perform on Glee all season, and I realized it was because I was just an extra, a background singer at best. I might have enjoyed singing, and maybe even thought I was pretty good, but I’m nowhere near as talented as those kids.

And yet there was still that strange elation…

I imagined singing the song, putting everything into it that I had, come what may. I was scared of what would come out of me, that it would be too big, too powerful, too alarming. I was afraid that, in my passion for the song, I’d hit some note that would scratch just the wrong way, making people uncomfortable. But even though the idea of trying and letting it all loose frightened me, I knew I wanted to do it. Maybe I wasn’t going to sing my song like they would, and maybe I couldn’t sing it as well as they could (in the way that they would), but I thought I could sing it well the way that I could sing it, and the way I wanted to sing it. Only, the way I could sing and wanted to sing–I knew a lot of people wouldn’t like it.

But I still really, really wanted to try. I wanted to do it. I just didn’t know if I could.

I was terrified.

But I wanted to sing.

I was terrified.

But I still wanted to sing.

Could I do it? Would I do it?

Panic. Panic. Panic.

And then I woke up.

~*~

You know, I like to think that I would have been brave enough to sing. But I honestly don’t know. And yet in some ways, I think I’m preparing for my performance right now, as I get ready to release my second novel. I don’t doubt that The Hierophant is a novel that will hit strange, unexpected notes in the reader’s mind. But I like those notes, and I like the songs that carry them. I like when a song is not a perfect balance of verse and refrain. I like performances where the singer’s voice breaks from her expression of need, of feeling, and leaves a note hanging in the air like the torn edge of a love letter, ripped in half.

And I think there are others out there who like those kinds of songs, too.

And I hope they’ll sing their songs the way they want to, too.

It’s been almost 2 years since the publication of my debut novel, The Poppet and the Lune, and nearly just as long since I’ve published anything at all. Oh, I’ve written things. Lots of things. A couple of really big things, and a couple of really great things. But it’s been a difficult two years for me, and the thought of putting my work out there when I was feeling do disempowered just did not jive with me at all.

But then, a few months ago, I went on a magical vision quest in the dead of winter, in the wilds of E(e)rie, Pennsylvania. I holed up in a monastery and conversed with the gods. I lived on rice and tea, and meditated for hours in two feet of snow. I battled demons, and slayed dragons, and emerged from my quest with my own truth glowing, clutched before me, pulsing like a heartbeat, like a drumbeat, like a beacon. I made a choice, and it changed everything.*

And in a moment of beautiful serendipity, the universe allied itself with my truth, and made the path to my dreams become manifest. (I got fired, and I liked it.)

Shortly after that, I began to work in earnest on a new novel. And as I progressed in the composition of that rough draft, a previous novel waited for its fate to be decided, while all around me I gathered information from agents, and authors, and publishers–the better to strategize my plan of attack. And shortly, a second choice was made, in secret. This clandestine task has been before me for several weeks now, and everything has fallen into place, as if by magic.

But I can contain my excitement no longer! (No longer, I say!) So today I am making the announcement! And I am freaking PUMPED about it.

Coming June 18, 2013: THE HIEROPHANT – Book I of the Arcana Series, a young adult contemporary fantasy trilogy.

And here’s a little taste of the cover page:

Demons are watching you. They move invisible through our world, hunting for rare prey–most humans don’t see the monsters that lurk in the dark, and as long as you can’t see them, they can’t hurt you.

But Ana sees the demons. Creatures once found only in the bedtime stories told by her late mother have crept from the shadows, whispering her name and stirring ancient magic in her veins.

On the day her tarot deck foretells a disturbing change, Ana encounters an uncanny young man who literally stops her heart. Trebor has strange powers, and an even stranger quest, and for some reason wants to help her. But the closer Trebor gets to unlocking Ana’s power, the more important–and dangerous–his own quest becomes. And in a world haunted by demons determined to find the key to their empire, there is much more at stake than one girl’s soul.

The Hierophant is the first extraordinary adventure in the Arcana series, a young adult contemporary fantasy, coming June, 2013.

~*~

Mark your calendars ladies and gents, devils and dames! And be sure to sign up for my mailing list to be the first to know when The Hierophant becomes available!

Cover reveal, pre-order information, and a fancy schmancy book trailer COMING SOON!

—————

*only two of the things mentioned here are metaphors

Call me Martha Stewart (thank you!) but I have to start sharing with y’all some of the things I’ve discovered that I LOVE. I know I made a post a little while back on cool documentaries I think everyone should watch, and now I’d like to discuss two of the tools I’ve found on the internet these past couple of weeks that are AWESOME. Not just awesome, either: they’re also FREE.

Mind42.com

I am terrible at outlining. It’s not that I don’t get it–I mean, I think I get it–I just have a really hard time taking a story I’m wanting to tell and breaking it down into EVENTS, especially when a lot of events happen internally. I don’t know why–maybe it has something to do with the reason why algebra took forever to click, because LETTERS IN MATH? is kind of like REMOVING SOUL FROM STORY? in my poor, tired brain–but I am envious of all you writers who just seem to know how to do it.

Part of my problem has always been in organizing the outline itself. I can ramble on (and on) about what happens in a story, but that doesn’t help me break it down. But then I discovered MIND-MAPPING. Mind-mapping is basically a way of spewing your thoughts onto a page, rearranging as you see fit, and nesting events within events. So I can write 1) Girl meets boy 2) Girl falls in love and then go back and add 1.a) Girl realizes she has no interest in boy 1.b) Girl realizes she has romantic interest in her lab partner Lizzy. And I can flesh it out even further.

For me, mind-mapping is the solution I’ve been looking for. It helps me dump my brain contents out into a digital page, chop it up into manageable, bite-sized pieces, and rearrange, expand, and delete as necessary. Mind42.com happens to be the program that I use. It’s free, easy to learn, and saves everything online so you don’t have to worry about losing it. I highly recommend it, especially if you have trouble outlining like me!

Coffitivity

I’m not very good at working from home, even though I wish I was (much like I wish I was good at outlining, I guess, but you can’t always get what you want, etc.), because it’s cheap and convenient. But it just so happens that when I go out into the world and find a nook in a coffee shop somewhere, buy a hot beverage and open my laptop, I can bang out words like a freakin’ champ. I was a municipal liaison for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo if you’re cool, WHICH YOU ALL ARE!) for four years, and in those four Novembers alone I was able to write over 250,000 words (there was one year where I was feeling sassy and made a goal of 100k). I attribute that mostly to the fact that it was my responsibility to go to all of the write-ins hosted during the month, each write-in yielding me several thousand words.

See, there’s something magical about writing in a cafe, something that’s absent from silent libraries, from moderately quiet homes. It’s the magic of ambient sound. Studies have shown that the right amount of noise, loud enough to drown out details of sounds, quiet enough to think, enhances your ability to focus and makes you more receptive to creative insights! Unfortunately, we can’t always get to a coffee shop, or drop money on beverages to make us patrons instead of just loiterers.

But lo! Some saintly person(s) created a website with a looped recording of the sounds of a coffee shop that you can listen to AT HOME, to help drown out the neighbors kids or your kids or your husband’s video game sound effects, without giving you a headache. Coffitivity is that brilliant website. Since my career situation improved/I got fired, I’ve been using Coffitivity any time I find myself working at home, and the difference between before I knew about the site and after is astounding.

That’s all I’ve got for you today, but I’m sure more will come up as I expand my work-from-home routine.

What about you? What free tools do you use to increase productivity?

My favorite YA author [not going to fangirl, not going to fangirl] Nova Ren Suma is celebrating the release of her newest work, 17 & Gone, all week by asking fellow authors to blog about what haunted them at 17. Her first YA novel, Imaginary Girls, is to-date the greatest YA novel I have ever read, and it single-handedly renewed my faith in the genre (go read it or else we can’t be friends). So I’m very happy to have the chance to participate in one of her blog series! Admittedly, I’m also pretty nervous, too. So, here goes…

Thats me on the right, in that inexplicable polyester shirt.

Being 17 wasn’t a bad time really: I was dating an older boy (+1 cool point) from a different high school (+1 cool point), who was the lead guitarist in a decent rock band (+100 cool points). I had my night license and a hand-me-down $500 car from my older brother, so I could drive anywhere, anytime, and that’s what we did most weekends. We’d drive out to haunted roads and cemeteries, or to rock shows downtown, or to out-of-state Denny’s where we would sit in the smoking section burning through soft packs of cheap cigarettes, drinking bottomless cups of coffee, thinking we were so damn cool.

So what haunted me at 17, you ask, when I was so clearly living large and loving life? Well, like most hauntings, it was complicated, vaporous, and hard to define. The past haunted me. A moment in time haunted me. Being silenced haunted me.

Being silenced still haunts me.

A little back story: I’m the youngest of three (well, 3.5 but that’s a tale for another day), and one of the most unobtrusive people you’ll ever meet. I learned from a young age that if I wanted to get a word in edgewise at the dinner table I had to shout, or cry, which itself never produced any desirable outcomes. Instead, I learned to be quiet and patient, and to bite my tongue instead of raise my voice. Among my friends, I was known as the quiet one–the shy one. I disappeared in the classroom, in the halls. And in high school, even with dreadlocks and piercings or bright green hair, I somehow managed to pass unnoticed, unheard.

I filled notebooks with the words I didn’t say. I wrote essays to give voice to the thoughts I never spoke aloud, and novels to tell the stories that my friends and family didn’t have the attention span to hear. By the time I was in high school I was used to my words going unheard. But there came a point when being unheard became absolutely unsustainable–only, I wouldn’t realize that for nearly a decade.

I was 15, and I’d just broken up with my first longterm boyfriend. And, as 15-year-old douche bags are wont to do, he was telling people we’d had S-E-X, because at 15 nothing is more interesting to others after your breakup than that one big question: did you guys do it?

I was so angry, but I was powerless to do anything but refute it–as if they’d believe me, the girl, who would of course not want anyone to know what a slut she was, because that’s what everyone thought (/still thinks) of girls who had (/have) sex in high school. And there I was, the girl no one ever noticed, suddenly the topic of scandal.

I had to tell someone, I had to make somebody hear me, because I hadn’t spoken back when everything happened, back when I should have broken up with him, back when my life fell apart for the first time in a long series of breakdowns. So I told my best friend, in the locker room, after gym class. I told her the hardest thing I’d ever forced myself to give a voice to: “The truth is, we did have sex. But I said no. And he didn’t listen.”

“So what?” she said, dismissive, shrugging, looking away, turning and talking to someone else like I hadn’t just carved out my guts and held them up for her appraisal.

At a time when I needed to speak, and to be heard, more than ever before in all my life, I had never felt more silenced. And I wondered if…maybe she was right? Maybe it was no big deal, after all? Maybe he hadn’t heard me. Maybe I was a slut. Maybe it was my fault. Believing that felt slightly better than believing I was someone else’s victim. Blaming myself, and hating myself, was infinitely easier than accepting the truth.

He transferred schools shortly after, and I didn’t dare mention it to anyone again. Those awkward days when I ended up in the guidance or social worker’s office at school, I told them my “irrational crying” was just stress, hormones, that I’d been sleeping poorly–anything but the truth, or what might have been true, or even an approximate version of the truth.

Then, the summer before our senior year, he came back to town. 17 would be the last year of my life that I would have any contact with him, but it was a hard and bitter year of silence, shame, and insidious ghosts. I ran into him at parties, his pupils dilated, tripping on cough syrup or god knows what. He tried more than once to corner me and talk to me, ask me about my new boyfriend, tell me how much he missed me. When fall came, he was back at school, sliding notes into my locker that told me in excruciating detail about his time in the psychiatric hospital, his drug-induced suicide attempts, his visions of God telling him how I still loved him, that I would be with him again in time. And even then, I was haunted by a kind of guilt–guilt that he was destroying himself under the guise of loving me, and guilt that I honestly felt he deserved to suffer.*

I survived. I graduated, and life went on. I fought hard to forgive him (yes, I did forgive him eventually), so that I could have my own life back. But in the end, as life after high school changed everything about my world, I realized it wasn’t a loss of innocence that haunted me at 17, or the ruins of a boy I once loved falling at my heels. It was the years and years of allowing myself to be silenced, of allowing my anger and sadness to go unheard. It was his betrayal, yes, but it was also the betrayal of the friends I had given my heart to as well, and a family that didn’t realize they were nurturing my silence. Every time my friends joked with him in class and I had to hold back my anger, every time he scared me with his horrific notes in my locker and I wanted to tell someone, but couldn’t–every time I wanted to shout or cry out, but didn’t–that was the thing that haunted me the longest, the deepest.

And on my darker days, it still does.

But, true to form, I don’t like feeling like a victim. And I’ve realized, finally, so many years later, that it was my own betrayal that hurt me most of all. I betrayed myself by buying into the silence, by buying into the lie that what I had to say was not worth saying, not worth taking up the lesson I had learned as a child, at the dinner table: that I could be heard if I shouted, if I cried. But learning to raise my voice–allowing myself, now, to be seen and heard–that’s probably the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn.

(So that this doesn’t end on a totally dark note, enjoy the caption my husband gave me on this picture of me climbing through a window when I was 17.)

This is some “Clarissa Explains It All” shit right here.

*I haven’t seen him since I graduated from high school ten years ago, but I did hear, about 7 years back, that he’d been shot point-blank in the chest during a drug deal (or a robbery because of drugs? I don’t remember/care), and I actually laughed. He survived, but… I didn’t know that when I laughed.

So long story short I’ve been trying to transfer to a new host for my website, and in the process I accidentally deleted my website forever! And then, like some kind of magic, it reappeared this morning. This is impossible, because all the files were hosted on one host, and the domain is actually hosted on another (the new one). But somehow, the website and the wordpress dashboard suddenly still existed.

Not taking chances, I exported EVERYTHING from wordpress. And just now, everything went back to making (some) sense and the old website vanished (again). But I was able to import almost everything from the wordpress export! Most of the images failed to import, so all my old posts are going to look a bit wordy and barren, and I’ll have to re-do the book page. But I will take that over losing ALL my blog entries from the past 2 years.

Meanwhile, the site is under construction! I hope you’ll bear with me while I find a new look for the site.