It’s been a little while since I’ve checked in here, because sometimes life grabs your planner and runs away giggling. That and, as I’m sure some of my old regulars know, writing for LitReactor about twice a month and Writer Unboxed every other month (now every three) takes up a lot of my blogging time, so I post here less often. That works out okay, considering personal-level writing blogs seem to be on the downtrend. I won’t fight it, but I do like being able to come here when the urge strikes me and say hi to all my ethernet friends. 😊 (I’ve checked, and at least some of you seem to be made of real skin and not pixels, which is reassuring.)
So before I get into what I’m up to, here are the four posts I’ve had elsewhere since last time (click the images to go to the posts):
Summit Fever is about appreciating the journey of writing instead of constantly striving for goals. Artistic Nemesis is a cheeky but actually pretty useful post about allowing yourself to hate good books. Women in Horror is a totally biased list of kickass ladies you should read (all year round). And the Horror post is a huge, intricate infographic that breaks down everything you’ve ever wanted to know about genre, style, and more; it borrowed hours (okay days) of my life and I don’t even want them back, so I hope you’ll go check it out.
Aside from the occasional blog and infographic and tweet, what have I been up to? Well, I had a pretty intense love affair with Tana French’s books, which are these amazing mystery novels with touches of horror and a whole lot of complex character building. French’s prose is some of the best I’ve read in recent years. I’ve read all there are so far and will preorder the next as soon as I can. My point being, definitely go read those. Probably start with Broken Harbour.
I’ve also been working very hard, quietly, and diligently on my WIPbeast, which is what I’ve nicknamed my seventh novel. Somewhere along the way I actually managed to finish drafting it and tame it into a functional shape, so now I just get to make it pretty. It’s probably my most ambitious project to date, and man am I a person who thrives on a challenge. It’s been a fantastic ride, and I hope I get to tell you about it sooner rather than later.
Notably, this past awards season I was nominated for two different honors. In a super sweet surprise, I was up for the Published Author category of my local community awards, the Denton Arts & Music Awards. And in a huge personal thrill, I was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the Short Fiction category for my story “So Sings the Siren” in Apex Magazine. I think these were my two first nominations, and what a strange and wonderful experience they both were. I didn’t end up winning either of them, but the reality of that gave fresh understanding to the trite old phrase “It’s an honor just to be nominated.”
For the DAM Awards, my first reaction was thrill, followed very quickly by imposter syndrome, followed gradually by genuine delight. I went to the awards ceremony and didn’t win, and it turns out I was just fine with that. I think it’s really cool that someone in my community thought I was worth putting up for the award at all. (I heart my writing community.)
For the Stokers, my first reaction, upon making the preliminary ballot, was… holy shit. Then elation. Then telling myself not to get my hopes up. I mean, real talk, I have always dreamed of winning a Stoker. I knew what the Stokers were before I even knew what the HWA is. My dad used to get his what-to-read-next books from the winners lists. (Which also means many of the books I took from his shelf came from the winners lists.) So when I say I dreamed of winning a Stoker, I really mean, like, long-term dream goal. A someday thing. Maybe in ten, twenty, thirty years I might be in the running for a Stoker. So to be nominated now—well, it’s been the thrill of my career so far. And to make it to the final ballot was way more than I expected, so, yeah, really, it is an honor just to be nominated. The nominees are a swoon-worthy list, one I’m elated to be on. 😊
Now that awards season is over and life has slipped my planner back under the door, I find myself all itchy and antsy. That sense of yearning with no exact object in mind: that happens to me over and over in my life. It expresses itself as wanderlust, as autumn restlessness, as spring impatience, as summer jobs, as poems that burst with need, as feeling called to the ocean in almost mythological proportions. I want, and that wanting has come again. I want spring, and the sea, and my next big project, and deep, sweet things that have no name. Strange needs I can’t name but try to meet anyway.
Something about them, the needs, has had me thinking lately about the meaning of the word retreat. My annual writing retreat with my bestie is coming up—just days away—and I couldn’t be more eager for it. I’m going to use it to dive deep, deep into the WIPbeast and push it towards finished, that good hard work that needs to happen in long chunks rather than short snippets. Concentrated effort. It’s retreat work, and it’s interesting to me how I’ve come to think of that over the past five years of this particular tradition with my friend. What does it mean to retreat? To withdraw, draw back, retire, slink away into privacy and seclusion. All of that to work, uninterrupted, on the art I work on all the time. So it’s actually the opposite of a vacation, where I leave work to enjoy life. In retreat, I leave life to enjoy work.
Retreating is kind of like a second honeymoon with writing. We’re already committed. We already spend most of our time together. But this one trip is extra special. It’ll be fun. It’ll probably be pretty emotional, secretly hard. But if we both put in the time, I’ll leave it feeling recommitted, reinvigorated, and reinspired. To retreat is to renew. It’s to cover a bunch of ground, crank out tons of work, have some fun, get punch drunk, and do deep work that renews all the good things. We don’t retreat from writing; we retreat to writing.
And I am very much looking forward to that.
What have you all been up to? Anyone overdue for a retreat of your own?
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To continue my celebration of National Poetry Month, today I’m sharing a reprint of my poem “Rocking.” This one first appeared in the 2017 Texas Poetry Calendar, an annual regional favorite that I’ve been lucky enough to have several poems in. Then “Rocking” was reprinted in the 2018 edition, which was a sort of editors’ choice/best-of compilation. The 2018 calendar can be found in 
