Posts for category ‘body’

Yes, it’s a crazy mixed-up world and I’m doing links today instead of Thursday, because my brain is still sort of clogged up with breakfast casseroles and peanut butter cups so I need to save my creative writing for the book. And so:

- Ally Carter’s Eleven Myths about the Publishing Industry post is well  worth reading. I especially concur with numbers 1, 3, 5 and 10.

- Lara Zeises goes public with her weight-loss surgery experience after reaching a significant milestone. I am impressed – it’s really hard to talk about weight stuff in public, but – as is the case with a lot of personal topics – sometimes the thought that you might help someone else overrides the fear of self-exposure. Thanks for sharing this, Lara!

- LK Madigan’s 2008 roundup of writing advice in 5 words or less! 

- Sara Ryan’s take on the writing life. Or at least parts of it. Such as: “as a writer, you spend a lot of time in your own head, which is not always a pleasant locale.” Ooohyeah.

- The topic at the Teen Fiction Cafe this week is movies. I’ll be adding a post sometime, myself. I watched/saw a bunch of movies last week so I could write about those. Or maybe I ‘ll just ponder Christopher Plummer’s hotness, which was a burning topic on Twitter during last night’s airing of The Sound of Music.

Hey, thanks for all your responses to my last post. I almost discarded that without posting, and am glad I didn’t.

Depression sucks. I am very fortunate in that mine is usually pretty mild, and manageable without medication if I’m doing good self-care—which includes nutrition, sleep, exercise, the right balance of busy-ness and down time, talk therapy once in awhile, spiritual connection, and, writing.

I’m reading this book on eating disorders called Regaining Yourself: Breaking Free from the Eating Disorder Identity by Ira M. Sacker. It’s interesting. I’ve never really read much about eating disorders before, because for a long long time I thought disorders were either anorexia or bulimia, and that binge-eating and compulsive eating were just…well, being a pig. (I write about this in my piece for Does This Book Make Me Look Fat, by the way.) Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff in the Sacker book about identity and anxiety and perfectionism, and how many who have eating disorders get so far into it because it gives them an identity. “The person with an eating disorder is adept at picking up cues from the outside world. Unfortunately, that person is not so good at listening to her own intuition or developing her own expecations. She has trouble creating an identity of her own…”  When I read that the other night, I sort of had an epiphany:

I realized that one major reason I was so dogged in my pursual of writing during the 10-12 years I was seeing no success was that it gave me an identity, and I desperately needed one because I did not want the only other identities that seemed like options: depressed girl, lost girl, child of alcoholic, voted ‘most likely to succeed’ in the eighth grade yearbook poll (could that really be the apex for me??), girl who sits in front of TV night after night eating way too much food. I had no idea what I could or wanted to do career wise, what I should be experiencing or expecting from friendships and marriage, how people saw me, who I was. Even when I wasn’t published, being an aspiring writer gave me an identity, and it was the only positive identity I had at the time. I realize now that I clung to that, hard, and in a lot of ways it saved me, and it keeps saving me.

One day soon I will go back to writing about ANTM and other fun stuff! Maybe!

Okay, Salt Lake people. Where are the cafes, book stores, bars, etc. that do not have free Internet? Where are the cold, dead spots around town where you couldn’t even pick up a faint signal from someone’s house to save your life? Not that I’m having trouble focusing or anything. I just want to know.

Hey, I am doing jonowrimo this year! This is Jo Knowles’ answer to Nanowrimo. You get 2.5 months to accomplish whatever goals you want. Not that I don’t already have plenty to keep me busy, but I think I’m going to take something off my mental back burner and use a little bit of time everyday during jonowrimo to do something completely different from what I usually do. Like write a one-act play or a TV pilot or a historical novella or a poem a day or something. It starts on Monday! 

John Lennon is the artist of the week on KRCL. So good. When KRCL first announced all the changes to the station, like the ousting of most of daytime volunteer programmers, I was sad and pessimistic about it. I have to say that over the months the new format has really grown on me. I think it’s working out. If you are not in Utah, you can stream it online through iTunes or whatever you use. 

In exercise news, my back has really been bothering me since starting boot camp. I don’t know if I hurt it, or it’s sore muscles and I’m not used to having sore muscles there, or I’m doing things wrong, or what, but I do know that my body is in protest. I got up at normal boot camp time but spent the hour inside the gym, doing a lighter workout and a whole lot of stretching. 

This weekend: Utah Symphony doing Beethoven’s Ninth. 9th and 9th Street Festival. And maybe the Utah State Fair for my annual corn dog. Because really, the State Fair is all about the food. Here’s one of the promos they’ve been running locally…

I went to a dance performance tonight: a three-night only showcase by this particular choreographer, including the world premiere of a new piece. When it comes to modern dance, I really have no intelligent opinions, but what I can say is that after a day of five hours of writing and three plus hours of talking and listening (not including the NPR in the morning) sitting back and soaking up something with my other senses and other parts of my brain was a welcome relief.

The dancers and dance crowd are so different from the writers and book people that I’m used to seeing. They speak a different language, they wear different clothes. I like listening to them talk about dance, which is a lot like the way writers talk about books, only instead of being excited about what a certain writer can do with a sentence or an emotion, they’re talking about envying the way one dancer can hold her leg, or the lovely loose arms of another. There is one thing that dancers have that writers don’t: nice butts. Seriously, there were some excellent behinds on stage and in the audience that people who sit at computers all day can never hope to have. Or, maybe I’m making an egregious generalization. Maybe you need to take a picture of your butt and post it on your blog to prove me wrong.

This weekend we are in for beautiful weather and there’s the Avenues Street Fair, and movies to see and breakfasts to have. But I don’t get to do any of that because the revision marches on. It will not relent. Much like time, it will wait for no man. Or woman. You enjoy the weekend, though, on my behalf, okay?

Boot camp was kind of rough this morning. Not physically—it’s still pretty tame compared to last year’s—but emotionally. I blogged about it over at the Teen Fiction Cafe for the ever-popular Embarrassing Moments Week. I don’t know why the feeling this time is so different from last year. Maybe the fact that last year’s was away from home made me feel more brave about things. It’s hard to feel so capable and accomplished in my normal daily life and then go into a situation where being a National Book Award finalist really doesn’t help you out. 

Speaking of feeling capable and accomplished, the IMAGE Journal Update gave Sweethearts a really beautiful review. I think my favorite line is this: “[Zarr] has an eye for what matters to teens, and what makes them good–friendship, loyalty, courage, the ability to change.” You can read the whole thing here.

In movie news, we watched Talk To Me the other night and very much enjoyed. (Not to be confused with Talk To Her, which I did not enjoy – me and Pedro A. are not on the same page.) Definitely one of the better rentals of late. Don Cheadle, who I already adored, is amazing in it.

What else… I’ve been kind of brain dead lately as I’m using up 98% of my mental energies on this revision, and the other 2% thinking about politics. Hopefully in about a week and a half (or so?) it will be off my desk and I can recover some gray matter for other tasks and interactions. Still no title. Trying to be relaxed about it in hopes one will magically float into my head. The Random Book Title Generator has not proved helpful. The Hard Gift, for example, just sounds dirty. Forgotten Danger has a nice ring to it, but nothing to do with my story. And I will not soon be writing a YA novel called The Sucking Emerald. Hopefully, no one will.