It's Not You, It's Me

Would you believe me if I told you that at the beginning of the year, following the example set my Nebraskan friend, I was firmly recommitting to this blog?  Honestly – that was the plan.

But the fact is that I’ve been spending time with another.  That’s right – another blog’s been keeping me warm at night.  Like, literally.  Sometimes, my laptop gets so hot it starts burning my thighs.  Crazy.

While I’ve been focusing on that blog, I’ve neglected my first love – this blog.  So since I’m being a bit more methodical with the other blog – meaning, I actually have a schedule in place – I thought I’d try to implement that tactic here to see how I do.  And somewhere there is a noteverstill friend saying I told her so!

I have no expectation that I even still have any readership anymore.  I have no expectations about much of anything.  So, I will just write and see what happens.  The one good thing is the other blog has reinvigorated my creative juices so I feel like I’ve gotten the mojo back again and there’s something worth writing about.  Oh, and then there’s the whole Top Gun thing I have to fill you in on.

I do want to give a quick recap of January and how I’ve done with my 13 in ’13 goals –

The cooking thing is going really well!  I cooked over 13 times last month and have started a regular grocery shopping habit filling my cart with such things as whole wheat flour, Greek yogurt, and other exciting things! 

I kinda did a random act of kindness although it wasn’t really random.  On my way from work one night, I checked on a coworker who had a flat tire and was waiting for the auto club.  I know, I feel like it’s a stretch too.

I went to Ocean City, Maryland at the beginning of the month and crossed the Bay Bridge – and a couple of other minor bridges which my parents and I decided didn’t count towards the 13 bridge mark. 

I hung a gallery wall of photos and a cool mirror/floating frame wall in my den.  I’m just putting the finishing touches on that before I can call my den finished. 

I finished reading my first book of the year – Quiet.  It was very good and I think I’ll write a review of it in an upcoming post. 

All in all – the year has started off well.  Now, to keep on keepin’ on! 

Thirty Days Hath November

And so sweet November has arrived!  It was touch and go there for a bit, what with all that hurricane business of a few days ago.  But we made it through and now we can look forward to a season of gourds, cornucopias, tiny Pilgrim people salt and pepper shakers, and turkeys made from every sort of craft material imaginable (pinecones, flower pots, light bulbs, socks, palm prints…I’ve been Pinteresting again).  Ahh, the season of giving thanks is upon us.

So too is the season of NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month.  Write 30 blog posts for each of November’s 30 days.  I made the attempt last year and failed miserably.  Then again, I also made the faulty decision to participate in NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month.  I failed miserably at that too – although I continue to nurse the novel that I started writing for that project and on my good days think I could actually publish it one day.

This year, I’m only committing myself to NaBloPoMo.  And this year I hope to succeed.

As I nosed around on the NaBloPoMo website, I came across the article “How to Blog (Better)” and I chuckled.  How can I blog better?  Well, rule number one – I can show up.  It is not lost on me that I’ve only written 23 posts this year.  Have my words dried up?  Have I become boring and routine?  Have I become lazy?  Have I just given up?  Have I lost that bloggin’ feeling? 

It’s not you.  It’s me.  Really. 

There have been really extraordinary things that have happened to me that I’ve fully intended to write about and then just…didn’t.  The words haven’t dried up…but the writing has.  It's time to fix that.          

I’m not sure what this November will bring but I’m going to try very hard to bring you 30 blog posts.

And if I don’t…well, there’s always September, April, and June.

The Voice

I really like the show “The Voice”.  Mostly because of Adam Levine.  The voices on the show, they're not bad either. 

I was going through the writing portfolio that contains most of my major writing assignments from middle school through high school.  It’s been a great trip down memory lane and it’s been fun to see my writing progress from loopy fifth grade cursive to dot matrix font in high school.  Oddly, in the early days, there were a lot of references to food, including a Thanksgiving speech in which I was thankful that I could afford to go out to lunch with my mom (some things never change!) and a report on African food that I ended with the closing line – “I hope you enjoyed my report.  Now I’m off to get a snack.”  What???  I still got an “A” though!

When I started reading the papers that I wrote in high school, I began to notice a recurring comment being made by my teachers.  “Your voice is strong.”  “Strong voice.”  “Strong voice but tend to lose focus.”  (She was never one of my favorite teachers anyway.) 

I never thought of myself as having a strong voice.  My voice was quiet, if it was even heard at all.

But maybe sometimes, the quietest voices are the strongest.

The Last Post

Sometime last year, I stumbled across a blog filled with misspellings that was written by a woman who wrote about her bipolar disorder.  I thought, well, gee whiz, if she’s brave enough to write about her bipolar disorder, maybe I could be brave enough to write about being a former bed wetter with a craniofacial syndrome who can’t smell and is afraid of fax machines.  And oh yeah, share one or two of my insecurities.  I mean, how hard could it be?  An added bonus, I knew how to use the spell-checker.

And so, exactly a year ago tonight, I sent a draft of my first post to a trusted friend and told her, I’m thinking of doing this blog thing.  Her response?  Do it!  It’s so cathartic.  

I’m not going to be all humble and say, I never expected anyone to read my blog.  I wanted people to read it.  No.  I needed people to read it.  That first post, at least.  I needed people to read what I hadn’t been brave enough to say out loud, except to a few people.

For most of my life, I felt like I was walking around living a lie because of the things that I was too scared to share or admit.  Telling my story was a release.  I began to let go of a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn’t have been holding onto in the first place.   As I wrote, and later began talking, about my insecurities, I realized that I’m not so different from everyone else.  I’m trying to figure stuff out just like the rest of the world.

Cathartic?  You have no idea. 

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about where I go from here.  Where this blog goes from here.  My life isn’t very exciting and the things about me that used to bother me, don’t so much anymore – even when I find myself in seasonal ruts.  Do I keep writing?  Or do I let Tulips and Togas stand as a testament to a really good year – a year of growth, a year of changes, a year of experiencing life?

I am, like this blog, a work in progress.  In this coming year, I want to continue on the path that I started on in 2011.   And there are so many fun things to look forward to in 2012 – a wedding (not mine), babies (not mine), vacations (mine!), and a roller skating birthday party (mine!).  I’m not planning on disappearing from anyone’s Google Reader quite yet.  I hope you’ll continue to enjoy reading my stories as much as I enjoy writing them. 

That first post was the hardest thing that I've ever done.  As I write this post, the last post of 2011, I can look back and say, yes, it was the hardest thing that I've ever done but it was also the best thing that I've ever done.  Thank you for joining me on this journey.  It's been quite the ride.     

Happy New Year!

What Happened to November?

It’s December 1^st already?!  Where in the world did the November days go?  It seems like just yesterday I told you about my grand plans to do both NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo.  50,000 words for the former, 30 posts in 30 days for the latter.  How’d I do?

Well, obviously you can tell that I didn’t manage 30 posts in 30 days.  I had a pretty good run for the first nine days of the month and then I went back to my old sporadic ways.  But you should read all the posts in my head!  I swear, they’re really good. 

That brings me to the novel.  I didn’t hit 50,000 words…I’m about 30,000 short.  But I do have, what I think, are some pretty good chapters and I’m going to keep working on it.  Just because we flipped the calendar to December doesn’t mean the novel writing has to stop, right?

Maybe trying to do both NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo was a crazy, unrealistic goal.  Maybe other people were able to do it.  I couldn’t.  There were so many other things to tackle this November and some days writing just fell off the list of priorities.  Granted, I probably should’ve put writing before naps…but you know how I love my naps. 

Am I disappointed because I didn’t meet my goal?  Nah.  For me, the victory – the satisfaction – comes from attempting it in the first place. 

I can always try again next year.  Besides, November will be here again before we know it. 

Changing Seasons

It is a quirk of my home that the floor in my bedroom is ceramic tile.  Certainly more fitting in a house built in the tropics than my little oasis in Maryland suburbia.  On summer mornings, it’s a treat to pad across the cool tile in bare feet as I prepare for the day ahead.  But as the leaves turn and then drift to the ground, as the days get shorter, and as the temperatures start to fall, I dread those first steps out of bed in the morning.  My feet hit the cold tiles, chill me to my core, and I am sadly reminded that winter is coming. 

Have I ever told you how much I dislike winter?  Not the magical parts, of course.  Just the parts when I always seem to be freezing. 

I think it might be time to break out the cardigans.   

Biting Off More than I Can Write?

November’s NaNoWriMo.  I’m all over that.  Imagine my surprise when I logged into Facebook this morning and saw a post from my friend TopChef about NaBloPoMo.  November’s also National Blog Posting Month!  30 posts in 30 days!  All in an effort to improve one’s writing, grow one’s blog, and maybe win a prize or two.  Any mention of prizes and I'm in!    

Now, I’m not the most disciplined of bloggers.  I mean my high point was in August when I managed to write 16 posts (what was going on in August?)  Let’s not even talk about October when this blog almost disappeared.  Sometimes, I just don’t have anything interesting to write about – I mean do you want to read about my commute back and forth to work every day and the eight-ish hours in between?  I didn’t think so.  And you certainly don’t want to hear my rants, like the one I almost posted last week about finding corrugated cardboard in a neighbor’s trash can on garbage day.  It’s two-thousand-eleven!  You should be putting your corrugated cardboard in the RECYCLING bin.  Doesn’t anyone care about our landfills anymore?  Okay, back on point…

I’m going to try really, really hard to post for 30 straight days.  I’m not sure I’ll have a lot to write about but I’ll do my best.  I can always fall back on the writing prompts on the NaBloPoMo website if I get really desperate.  Or I might just post random pictures of the kittens (they really are cute!)  Hey, it’s National Blog Posting Month….not National Blog Writing Month!   

So, it looks like I’ll be doing a lot of writing this November.  I’ll let you know how my fingertips are doing on December 1^st!

A Not So Novel Idea

I wrote my first book when I was in third grade – a biography about Abraham Lincoln.  It wasn’t for school or anything; I was just really into Lincoln and wanted to add my two cents to the historical record.  I typed it up on my manual typewriter – an ugly green hulk of a thing that I hated at the time but wish I still had – and took it to school to show my teacher.  I was so proud.  She told me it was a bit short.  A future Doris Kearns Goodwin, I was not. 

I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I learned to read.  I’ve always had grand dreams of becoming a great novelist or at least a half-way decent mass paperback author.  But aside from a short stint writing for my college newspaper – we parted ways due to literary differences – most of my writing was private.  Password protected and not to be revealed to actual readers.

There was the next Great American Novel that turned out not to be that great.  One night, I decided I hated it so much, I deleted all 700 pages.  700 pages!  What was I thinking?! 

There’s the historical fiction book that I’ve started and stopped a hundred times but continue to research just in case I ever do decide to finish it one day.  Okay, it’s really just my excuse to collect family trees of European royalty.

There’s the mystery story that I started a few months ago that I can’t seem to figure out how to solve. 

Then there was my foray into romance – writing, not an actual romance, of course.  As someone once said to me – you, writing romance?  What do you know about romance?  Point taken.  I don’t know anything about romance.  And I certainly don’t know about those parts that really make romance books sell.

Of course, there was my autobiography – hey, former superstar QVC host Kathy Levine wrote an autobiography!  Why can't I?! 

For every story that I’ve written though, there are ten more unwritten.  Sometimes, I think I might be schizophrenic with all the characters chattering away in my head.  At least I’m never alone with my thoughts!

Recently, my friend Nebraska Outback – a fellow Deadliest Catch fan, fellow blogger, and proud Nebraskan – encouraged me to do NaNoWriMo.  A quick Google search indicated that NaNoWriMo wasn’t some sort of babbling nonsense but actually a pretty cool event – National Novel Writing Month, an annual event during November when writers…write.  The goal – write a novel in a month.  50,000 words in 30 days.  Possible?  Entirely.  Especially if you have a good story to tell.

All my stories?  They weren’t good.  It’s easy to delete a 700 page manuscript when you know it’s crap.  For the most part, what I’ve written has been crap.  I was trying to write stories about things that I didn’t don’t know about and because of that my stories were unbelievable - and not in the good way.  Worse than that, I didn’t believe in my stories…or in my ability to write. 

But this year, I’ve learned that when you write from the truest part of yourself, your words, your stories…they’re not only believable, they’re good.  And every once in the while, even funny.

There’s a lot that I don’t know about.  But there’s a lot I do know about.  Like good friends, strong families, loneliness, overcoming fears, good times, laughter…

The makings of a good story.  Maybe even a great novel.   

The Earthquake - Part 2

I don’t know if it breaks blogging rules to post twice in one day but oh well!  This is too weird of a coincidence not to post.  My mom called a few minutes ago and began reading this story that she found today while she was looking for her marriage certificate (note:  you should always keep your vital records in a safe, secure location).  Anyway, I wrote this when I was in middle school.  Clearly, I knew as much about earthquakes back then as I do now.  And apparently,  I was scared of falling trees back then too.