I am currently transcribing my WIP, and I decided to adopt a fairly intense pace of one chapter a day. This is my least favorite part of my writing process, so the faster I get it over with, the better.
Then I went and did something stupid: I let myself get talked into writing a second story at the same time.
The Reddit thing was a fluke. When I wrote and posted The Suit, I was the first response to an obscure prompt, and I figured that I’d get a few upvotes then move on. Over the next several hours, the prompt itself blew up BIG.
I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, in the running to be the most popular response. In fact, I seem to get downvoted a surprising amount, which amuses me more than anything else. However, the people who liked my story, seemed to REALLY like my story.
Including my husband. Which cinched it.
Since I already did the legwork to establish a solid universe, I decided to keep pursuing the story. And you know what I hate passionately? Authors who post three-quarters of a story before abandoning it. I am committed to finishing.
Now, between the kids and writing, I don’t seem to be doing much else with my days.
I’m worried that I may have outdone myself with this one.
I was in the habit of bumming around Barnes and Noble, and took to exploring parts of the store that I had never ventured before. One day, the title Archangels & Ascended Masters caught my eye, and I wound up purchasing the book.
It was the archangels part that piqued my interest, and despite reading the whole book, I could never muster any appreciation for ascended masters. I was a thorough angel junkie by that point.
The book was my first exposure to non-Christian spirituality.
There were several things that happened in 2008 that sealed my fate in paganism, and after about a year of research I knew that I wasn’t remotely the New Age sort at all. I could never accept the idea that humanity was supposed to transcend basic emotions (aka lower vibrations) like fear and sadness, in order to live in the rather emotionless state of peace forever more. How boring. How stagnant. How pointless.
I quickly outgrew Doreen Virtue, viewing her as the equivalent of cotton candy who says a lot of feel-good fluff, but lacks any substance. She made for a good introduction, but the sort of stuff that I ultimately craved wasn’t going to be found in Barnes and Noble.
I suppose this illustrates how out-of-the-loop I am, but I finally learned that Doreen Virtue denounced New Age spirituality in 2017 and is now a born-again Christian.
Wow, isn’t it a funny world?
I wish that I could believe it was an honest-to-God conversion, because I don’t care about the particulars as much as I care about sincerity, and I don’t know many people who are actually sincere about their religion any more. Unfortunately, the heavy censorship that Doreen Virtue is continuing to enforce around herself triggers my cynicism, and I’m inclined to think not.
Of course, I’m coming to the party late and I don’t know much of the story, so don’t take my word for it — I just don’t get a particularly good feeling from her.
The question is, does this invalidate all of Doreen Virtue’s products? She was prolific, and published an enormous number of books and card decks, which she now actively discourages people from reading/using. Am I left with tripe that I might as well burn?
No.
It was never Doreen Virtue who mattered in the first place. She shared her thoughts, but the important part was me. It was the way I felt and interpreted what I read, the parts that I liked and the parts that I dismissed, that made up the foundation of my spirituality. No matter who Doreen Virtue is or what she believes, I am still me. She doesn’t have the power to change my story, and her books will always be part of my spiritual journey.
Like it or not, all of Doreen Virtue’s New Age products still have value, even if it’s just sentimental. There’s magic in honoring where you’ve been.
My personality type is INTP, which accounts for less than 6% of the female population. So when I say that I’m not a typical woman, I mean it; I’m not just trying to seem more interesting. Most women are ESFJ’s, making me the exact opposite of what everyone expects.
It’s the NT part that really makes me weird; intuitive yet detached. I firmly believe that there are at least three solutions to every problem, and if you can’t find the third one then you aren’t even trying. Self-sacrifice? Ha! I can find a way that will make everyone happy without any martyrs. Just watch me. Phishing for compassion is a waste of time, and I don’t care if you feel bad for me.
It freaks people out, because most of them have never met a woman like me. They want to stereotype and pigeonhole me, yet I never respond the way they expect me to. I am unpredictable and terrifying.
My personality type has frequently made me the target of bullying, and the general feeling of “I don’t belong with anyone, anywhere”, but despite that I’m enormously fond of it. I get a kick out of INTP memes, and I openly joke about my own “cold-hearted” nature. I have always prioritized being the sort of person *I* admire over pleasing anyone else, so at the end of the day I am satisfied with who I am without external approval. That’s what happens when you combine introverted with intuitive, thinking, and perceiving.
It is the reason why I write. I enjoy observation and introspection, and I see the philosophical value in every day life. I love the depth and complexity of human emotion, but I often approach it as something to be analyzed rather than swept away by. I am, in many ways, a narrator rather than a character.
Whenever I take a gander at the hottest new releases on Amazon, I can’t help but feel like there really isn’t a place for me in the literary world. It’s not that I don’t believe that I have the skill to write, but rather, I think that society’s tastes have drifted too far for my novels to have much appeal.
I’m old fashioned, and I like sentences that flow well together as an easy thought, that can be read out loud to others. I like to focus more on straightforward storytelling, and I don’t particularly care about impressing anyone with my command of purple prose. I’m nothing like Game of Thrones, and I don’t feel any desire to erase my own voice in order to imitate the bestsellers. I don’t have any points to prove; I’m just make-believing because I like to, and savoring the process of filling up page after page.
I really couldn’t care less about what celebrities or the New York Times say about anything. Their opinions are more of a disincentive, to be truthful, and I will feel like an epic failure as an individualist if I gained their approval.
Sometimes I think that the real world is all about hyper-conformity, and trying as hard as possible to be “3 edgy 5 you” to prove how thoroughly you belong in the 21st century. Me? I’m enamored with the basics of True Love and Motherhood, and it doesn’t bother me that I don’t particularly belong to any century.
Ultimately, it doesn’t much matter. I’ve never been one for approval seeking, and in many ways I’ve lived my life to the opposite. As long as I’m happy and fulfilled, nothing else really matters.
I just kind of wish that I wasn’t so gosh darn weird compared to everyone else. Why can’t there be more weirdos in the world?
About ten years ago, I purchased a book that described demonic possessions in the summary on the back cover, and the first chapter was about the main character performing an exorcism. Seemed legit, and I had yet to learn to be jaded, so I went ahead and paid my scant pennies for the thing. However, after about a hundred pages in, the book was spending far more time and attention on gay BDSM than demons, and by the end it had never turned around. It turned out that the exorcism in the first chapter was the only exorcism in the entire book.
I had really wanted the demons.
Around the same time, I had purchased my field guide to demons (on clearance at Barnes and Noble, lol) and was ravenously studying everything I could find on demonology, so I thought it would be fun to throw in some brain candy on the same topic. When I had purchased the book that I had described above, I had been looking for a very specific sort of story, but what I got was completely different genre. The description never mentioned anything about BDSM or homosexuality, and I had been too naive and earnest to risk spoiling the plot by turning to page 150 to figure out what I was actually getting myself into.
It was such a huge disappointment, that it was the last newly released fiction novel I ever purchased. The best way I can describe it is that the author didn’t actually know what to do with her initial idea, so defaulted to the adage “sex sells” with the hope that no one would notice. As the reader, I felt like I had been sold fetish erotica in disguise, and I hate it when the product doesn’t match the labeling on the box.
So where on Earth is the literature for a girl obsessed with spiritual themes?
In the past, I used to try to socialize more. My oldest is very outgoing, and when she was 4-years-old, I felt guilty about being such a retiring introvert. Unfortunately, at that age, her social circle was my social circle, so I decided to put myself out there and see about those mom groups. The neighbor who was heavily involved in them seemed to be an okay person (I found out later that she was duplicitous AF), so I thought it would be a safe bet with at least one other “friend” already there.
At 22, I had danced naked in a forest during a thunderstorm (there was no chance of anyone else being around to see me), and I had felt magnificently connected to all of the elements of the Earth. I can still vividly remember the dark clouds overhead, the pink flash of lightning, the prickle of goosebumps in the cold rain, and the elation of nature and magic. I felt that I could never be struck down.
At 28, I was shrinking into myself, feeling hopelessly like an outsider around my peers, small and insignificant in their eyes. In turn, I found them to be boring, controlling, and generally unpleasant, and I was miserable around them. I hated being there. Hated being the only mom who carried my baby in my arms instead of hauling around a car seat, and the defensive reactions I got when I simply commented that it was because I thought car seats were cumbersome. Seemingly, everything about me was not only wrong, but actively offensive.
As much as I admire the stereotype of the self-sacrificing mother, there’s a huge difference between sharing my last bite of brownie and selling my soul to fit in. I have my limits.
Shortly after I quit, it filtered back to me that they had all been calling me a “doormat” behind my back. Um, what? I’m supposed to prove that I’m not a doormat by . . . abandoning my natural personality to become what someone else thinks I should be instead? No thank you, I’d much rather be a doormat; there’s more dignity in it.
No matter how others try to cajole or criticize me, I stubbornly stick to what I am. Why? Because I remember how it felt to dance with the wind and rain as the thunder kept the beat. Because I actually look at my peers, dressed in unflattering leggings with their hair tied on the very top of their heads like Teletubbies, and I know that I could never in a million years take myself seriously if I looked like that. Because my Jupiter is in Aries, so I need to be an uncompromising individualist in everything I do. Because I know what makes me happy, and what doesn’t.
As for my oldest, I adore the way she naturally is, and I don’t want her to learn to sacrifice her personality to have fake friends. It would break my heart if I lost her like that.
As a writer, experiences like that always get filed away in the back of my mind, along with all of the emotion and aftermath, to reappear as overarching themes in my stories.
I don’t consider myself to be a phone person. More than once, I’ve been the only mom working on crochet while waiting for the kids, while everyone else played on their phones. Mine lived and died in my purse, so if I was ever in the yard, or in my sewing room, I was unreachable — the old fashioned “do not disturb.” I like it that way.
But when the darn thing wouldn’t turn on, my first reaction was anxiety. How am I supposed to know when my appointments are? NOOOO!!
And I kind of hated that I was dependent on my phone.
I don’t think that technology is evil, or anything like that. It’s convenient to enter everything into my phone at the same time I make the appointments, to always have my grocery list handy for impromptu visits to the store, and to text random things to my husband all day long for the reassurance that he didn’t die in an accident while we were apart. I just also believe that I should be functional and not have a meltdown without all of that.
I decided to buy something newer, for the “pedometer” feature that my old phone didn’t have (I’ve had to think a lot more about fitness since baby #4), and ordered something from Ebay. While I wait for it to arrive, I will be 100% unplugged.
I’ve spent most of my life this way, yet now the prospect seems strange and a little unnerving.
I don’t have much heat tolerance, and the summer months are spent chugging electrolyte mixes while waiting for the hottest part of the day to hurry up and be over with. Popsicle’s are not so much a treat as a necessity around here.
Of course, there’s nothing quite like sitting outside on a warm summer night and listening to the crickets. Sometimes, the best part of life can be found in the quietest of moments.
This year, I’m going to play as hard as I can, heat tolerance be damned. I’ve got a big freezer and Popsicle’s to spare.
While mega popularity is a fun daydream, in practicality, I don’t think that I’d enjoy it at all. Having people read my books just because everyone else is reading them feels rather antithetical to who I am as a person. It’d be a great way to be completely erased.
Then, of course, there are always the ones who feel obligated to create entire websites devoted to tearing apart your novels and proving that you are a bad writer after all. The harshest part is, those websites are usually right, too.
I’ve dedicated a lot of time to practice and research with my writing, and I try very hard to produce quality; but ultimately, I chose to be a wife and mother first. I still have plenty of sensitive feelings, and stumbling across the wrong criticism at the wrong time could hurt deeply. I’m just doing my thing to express my soul, and I just want to live my life with my husband and kids.
Like most writers, I have several ideas on the back burner in my mind, but if I reduce them all to a one-sentence summary, I start to wonder if I really have just one idea in different clothes.
On one hand, readers like to know what to expect from an author. Sometimes, we really want the same core concept dressed up in different colors. There are plenty of professionals who churn out a gazillion books that are all fundamentally the same, and they make a good living doing it.
But am *I* like that?
I care about free creative expression, first and foremost for myself. Is the evolution of my mind destined toward sameness forever and ever? Do I even make any sense?
Will I eventually grow bored of Mr. Perfect marrying Ms. Beautiful? Or am I too enamored with the simplicity of love and family to ever grow tired of it?
I’ve had a fairly tumultuous life, so enjoying stability feels a bit weird to me. Perhaps I was meant to land in this wonderful place, or perhaps I still have more stormy weather to endure while I continue to evolve further.
By Autumn Rain 