Notes I Write to Myself when in Pain

· Leave a comment ·

I wrote the following while feeling really depressed last night (it’s unedited and really personal but because this is a blog about writing for beginners I figured this may help someone out here):

I’m feeling that pain again. It sucks. 24 years, 6 months, and 24 days. This is how long I’ve been alive. Everyday I try and try again and trying hurts. A lot. But: 24 years 6 months and 24 days. I tried each and every one of those days. And I’m still here, trying, knowing that when I have my “good days” I’ll read this and go WTF suicidal Rosie… your posting shit to over 100 people to read, some of them family you don’t talk to much, let alone call. But I know some people among the 100 + that follow this silly stream of feeds knows what it feels like to be in this kind of pain and right now I’m thinking of little 14 year old me alone in her room without internet, with no working phone, in the dark, trying to suffocate herself with a plastic bag and all I want to do is make it so that anyone of my loved ones who is going through this pain knows what I didn’t know back then: you’re not alone; you’re are loved; life won’t always suck and you have to learn to live for those bright happy moments like the smile of a new born baby, a perfectly constructed line of poetry, moments where you see the good in others and can imagine a world where you don’t have this pain. ‘Cause if you can imagine it, it can happen. Humans are amazing that way, and you are human and therefore amazing. Remember that you’re not an “accident.” Remember that you’re not a “waste of space.” If not God, believe in Math: there is nothing in the universe that is not accounted for in math. You’re a part of an equation you will never know about or can even imagine the gravity of, but if you didn’t exist that equation would be lost. Lost forever. Like 2+2 4 instead of 2+2 = 4. Imagine the world without the concept of zero. Zero allows for us to have computers (google it), go into space, achieve great feats of wonder no other species can yet accomplish. And zero is nothing. Nothing but an idea. A human idea. You’re not nothing; you’re human. Therefore, greater than nothing. Don’t delete yourself from life’s equation, the ripple effect is beyond the pain you’re feeling now. It would stretch far and wide and hit people you never knew. For the worst. Never for the better. Live if only to know you played your role. Little me, if I could I would tell you all this because you needed to hear it from someone who understands, who went through hell with you and is still here. You’re in a better place, just not the one we thought we’d be in, but little me the outside world isn’t hitting us so hard any more. Little me, we’re helping ppl in small doses even if it feels like we’re up against a large concrete mountain with a platoon of Nazi-loving giants. We’re brave enough to face our demons each week, to wake up on start the day even when we still want to pretend to be dead. We no longer sleep for 3 months straight! We no longer hide in our rooms hoping for death by starving ourselves. Even on days when we do starve ourselves we get up and do things for others until we can eat. Little me, WE’RE THE ONLY TUTOR THAT RECEIVES HUGS FROM STUDENTS! Last semester we help over 10 brilliant young adults see that they were brilliant and, little me, isn’t that what our middle school teachers did for us? Didn’t we look like them: scared of failing an English class because we never learned what a 5 or 10 letter word meant? Now we’re teaching others! Little me, we had the balls to through a resignation letter to our supervisor on the grounds that we’d rather stay in school and learn to write our truths and chase our dreams even if we are constantly scared of failure. And that’s okay to still be scared of failure, that’s natural. We just have to face failure and be willing to try again and again and again. We haven’t failed until we give up and Little Me, you haven’t given up. This pain is proof of it. Death is scary because you stop feeling pain. You feel nothing; not even the relief from this. And that is scary.

Writing this felt very therapeutic in the moment. Yet, I woke up still feeling down today. I’ve been slowly getting back on my feet. Finally ate a nutella sandwich and had some water. Called my therapist, texted my loved ones, called a loved one, talked it out. Felt like if I kept reaching out the feeling would go away and it slowly did. Only got worst when I stopped, thinking that it wasn’t worth trying again. I sorta look like I’ve given up right now: still in my PJ’s with a mess up of papers at my feet and my curly hair going mad (I look like a cross between a mad-scientist and a 19th century writer who woke up from a bad trip). But I do feel better. To anyone, young writers, artists, random web surfers, etc who have gone or are going through pain, remember that it’s temporary, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And man, it never feels like it when you’re in the moment. When I do feel better (not 100%; I’m aiming for 75 or 80), I hope to make a poem from the above free-write. Maybe include more specifics. Heck, maybe this will start my new manuscript; I will call it, Things Do Get Better.

And they do.

Now watch Kid President.

Week14Year1

· Leave a comment ·

I cannot write today
I cannot read
I can only sing
in off and on keys.

I cannot write today
I cannot read
I can only dance outside
on wobbly bowlegged knees

I cannot write today
I cannot read
I can only laugh out loud
while watching kitties sneeze

I cannot write today
I cannot read
I can only stroll along
enjoying the evening breeze

I cannot write today
I cannot read
I cannot be productive
in any capacity

I can sing
I can dance
I can stroll along
I can give  life a  chance

A chance to show
a chance to know
a chance to feel and to see
what all those books
were trying all those years
to tell me.

Week14Year1 WordPress Version

(c) Rose Booker

Rejection

· Leave a comment ·

Hi all,

I live! It’s been a while since I last posted so I have a bunch of updates to get to. First, last fall I applied to 5 MFA programs. Three in California, one in Texas, and another in Virginia. I’ve been anxiously waiting to hear back from each so that I could make some serious life decisions. Earlier this month, I started to receive responses from each school, in a very slow trickle. The first was a rejection. Now, before you start thinking that this is a post about “oh what a pity, this young writer was rejected,” I want you to watch this clip:

I watched this video each month between December and March to prepare my little writing nerves for the responses. And it worked. When I received my first rejection, I’m proud of myself. If you know me in real life (IRL), you know that I tend to be a perfectionist when it comes to anything written. Part of the reason why I don’t post as often as I should, to be perfectly honest, is because the articles I wish to post aren’t “perfect.” I see grammar errors, leaps of logic, silly random ticks of my own personality (like going off on tangents and losing my original point), and several other not-perfect elements. I forget that I started this blog in the hopes to reach out to other artists, beginners and professionals, and to show the process of a young writer growing into their own skin. I fear rejection. It is scary. Yet, what Frank says is true. Rejection is good for you and really awesome.

I’m reminded of some Japanese cartoons (anime for other Otaku’s out there) where the main character gets beaten a lot. A HELL of A LOT. They never give up, though. Each beat down teaches them something new. Random fact: Starbucks was rejected as a business plan a way over 100 times. The guy who started it, never gave up and now its everywhere! Rejections, then, aren’t a sign to you to give up; they are a sign to keep trying, to keep playing with your “upper-limits.”

For the first time, in a long time, I felt like I am playing with the big boys now. It also helps knowing that for every rejection, an acceptance is out there. It is a mathematical issue: the number of attempts is directly related to the number of successes. The more attempts, the more successes. So far, I received 2 rejection letters and 1 acceptance. The acceptance came from a private school, to boot, which I never dreamed of applying to in the first place (one for money and two because I thought private schools are so how “tougher” than public). I have to wait on the other two schools before I can make a decision, but whatever happens I feel more prepared to face admission decisions than I ever did before.

With that in mind, I’ll be signing off.

Happy creating.

A Friend In Need

· Leave a comment ·

Bunny_Toad

This is a Bunny-Toad. Bunny-Toad came out of the mind of one Vencenza Surprise. I’ve know this woman for over 12 years, which means I’ve known her over-half my life. She is a wonderful artist and a courageous person. Yet, like everyone, life happened to her last year. Early 2012, Ven got pertussis. The doctors caught it very late, so late that it damaged her lungs and to this day she has problems breathing. Due to this illness, she was unable to continue her studies at an Atelier in SF, known as the Safehouse. Ever the fighter, Ven got better but she had to quit the Safehouse for her health. After letting herself heal, she now feels strong enough to attend again. Yet, life likes to pull nasty punches. Medical Bills. Family Emergencies. Flooding. You can’t make up half of what she’s been through.

And still she keeps going. By March, she still hopes to go to school and eventually apply as a concept artist to gaming companies.

I’m writing this post to ask all my readers, who can and are willing to, to please help get this artist back to her paintings and fund her education.

Click on Bunny-Toad and give as much as you can.

Please.

Thank you.

God bless.

To the Only Once: Black Tea

· Leave a comment ·

A disposable cup
comprised of compressed cardstock
bleached in an acid dissolving solution
stamped with red ink.
Folded by mechanical limbs
guided by a computerized brain
designed by industry,
schooled in mathematical arts,
to hold 16 ounces of boiled water
only once.

Heat escapes
Energy runs out
Burns the hand that holds it.
Dress it up
cardboard sleeves
to shield the hands
only once.

Black tea,
harvested from Chinese fields
where camellia sinensis bloom
white petals golden centers,
dried in cold rooms,
welted sits blacken
inside a porous bag of plastic.
only once

Dip into boiling water
leaves bleed
through and into.
Their essence
leached from them
only once

When the cup runs empty
when the heat is gone
when the tea is colorless
then the cup is thrown
then the tea is thrown
then the heat is thrown
to the only once.

Week48Year1Version3

Finals Week…some musings

· 1 Comment ·

Yep, it’s that time of the year! When everything becomes due…so many due dates.

But that doesn’t mean the writing has to stop. Writers should be able to write under the harshest conditions! If we didn’t, then there would be no stories from far off places or chaotic news from war torn countries. Be it bullets flying past you or a research paper due in a week, a writer must be able to write.

I’m, by no means, perfect. There are days I don’t write because other things seem to call for my attention louder than the voice that says “where’s that new poem.” Somehow, either by sheer luck or perseverance or both, I was able to meet my year goal of 52 poems. In fact, I went past the mark and wrote 53 poems. These range from unpolished first drafts and published pieces. The most recent published piece appears in the SFSU’s literary magazine, Transfer #104. I wrote it back in June and it was the 25th poem drafted this year. I edited it about 5 times total. There’s something amazing about having drafted 53 poems in a year. I never thought I could write so much in a year. Some I may never revise and others I feel still hold a spark of that special something that made me sit down and write  the first time around.

I began the journey of a year in poetry to prove to myself that I am serious about writing, that poetry is not some hobby but an integral part of myself. I had feared that if I ever was out of a classroom setting, I may never write regularly. The strange thing that happened this year was that I wrote less regularly after August than I did during the semester off. Moreover, the poems I wrote during that time off were some of my proudest moments. I don’t know what that means for my practice, but I do know that I need not fear my craft deteriorating after I live my program at State. Poetry can’t get rid of me and I can’t get rid of it.

As for prose, I have begun a long journey discovery through my struggles with this current novel draft. By the end of November, I had 10, 282 words, less than 40,000 shy of 50,000 words. Yet, I haven’t stopped writing it. The main character, Bastion, won’t stop nagging me to finish his story. Currently he is stuck in a men’s restroom with 2 High Elves, a wood elf, a half-giant, and a humanoid lightning bird…oh and Bastion’s a dragon and doesn’t know it yet because he is a mentally ill wuss.

Truth be told, I’m not very confident in prose writing unless its nonfiction (not about me, per se, but about a subject or a research article, etc), so this is a big challenge I’ve undertaken.

It’s been both struggling and entertaining. It’s as if I am watching my daydreams take form in words.

Currently, the plan is to continue writing the first draft without editing until I reach what I believe to be the end. Then I’m setting it aside, for a month or so, and then going back with a red pen and a pot of strong coffee.

With any luck, Bastion will be my very first novel. Here’s to completed another huge project!

NaNoWriMo

· Leave a comment ·

Hi all! Rosie, here, reporting from ye olde laptop with a special announcement. This is the first Monday of NaNoWriMo! I’m already about 7,000 words into the event and wanted to update you find folks with that bit of info. Periodically, I will update this blog with an update as to how many words am I in. The goal is 50,000 by the end of the month. That’s roughly 1, 667 words a day. After completely 47 rough drafts of poems for this year (not counting classroom poems and random freewrites), I’m feeling confident that at the very least I’ll end November with the beginning of a novel.

Let’s see, in other news, I’ve been submitting word to various places around the Bay Area and I’ll update you on that progress as I hear back from them.

Thank is all, for now.

As always, keep on writing.

 

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

· Leave a comment ·

Review of The Boy in The Suit Case

Book by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

Review by Rose Booker

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

What would you do if you found a boy in a suitcase? What if your friend led you to the locker where the suitcase was found? What if said friend was later found dead? What is one poor Red Cross nurse to do! Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis explore these and many more intriguing questions in their novel, The Boy in the Suit Case.

This novel is a wonderfully dark Scandinavian thriller about Nina Borg, a Red Cross nurse with a bad habit of doing good deeds. When her old friend, Karin, suddenly leaves her a token to a public locker in the Copenhagen train station, poor Nina is plunged into her most daring good deed yet. Once she opens the locker, she finds a suitcase containing a small boy: naked, drugged, but alive.

What pulled me into the story was the style of the prose. The novel is tightly written and presented in a series of brief vignettes told through the eyes of the various characters. Each one serves as a puzzle piece, a clue, to why the boy was left in the suitcase. This structure adds to the suspense and the feeling of anxious confusion as each character plays their part. By the time Nina opens the suitcase, we are sure of only one thing: that child and Nina are in danger.

For the casual reader, the transitions between vignettes may seem sharp and sudden, only announced by the chapter-like breaks in the text and nothing else. However, this adds to the tone of the novel and by the third vignette I hardly noticed the transitions. In fact I began to read faster because of them – seeing each one build upon the other or fill in the gaps of the jig-saw puzzle that is this mystery.

I highly recommend this book to all those who love thrillers, mysteries, and high literature and to those who love a good puzzlers.

This review first appeared on Writers Advice, Hooked on Books page.

Update + Short Story Draft

· Leave a comment ·

Hi all!

Sorry for the extreme lack of posts. It’s been a busy semester/year. This is just a quick update that I may, as the tide tells throws me, post drafts of works I have no intention to publish at the moment. To begin this new trend in posts, here is a short story I wrote for class this past weekend.

Enjoy.

________________________________

How to Ruin Someone’s Life in Five Minutes

She’s in there now. She’s in the house at 3535 Elmwood Drive. The house is surrounded by a white picket fence, lined with geraniums and tulips. A yard of blue-green grass stretches out from the front steps, lightly brushing against the sidewalk. A blooming hawthorn shades the windows while a tire swing sways in the breeze. The house is a pale pink, trimmed with white, to her taste. The woman, the mother, the wife, is in there now, doing what she always does on a Sunday morning.

She is baking. Usually, she is baking bread, preparing for Monday’s tuna salad, Tuesday’s ham and cheese, Wednesday’s Reuben, Thursday’s salami, and Friday’s BLT. Usually, she is kneading the bread with her computer on, playing NPR podcasts. Usually, her brow relaxes as the chemical reaction of eggs, yeast, flour, and water release a pleasant perfume into the air. Usually, the perfume lingers and seeps into the curtains, the leather chairs, her denim jeans and white cotton blouse. But that’s not today.

Today is her son’s birthday. He has turned 7 at exactly 5:35 am. That morning, she had prepared breakfast as he was getting dressed. Today, he would chose his clothes; the X-Man T-shirt he worn the day the Giants won the World Series, the tattered denim shorts bought the previous summer (peppered with stubborn grass stains). His mother laughed at the sounds of his heavy feet as he stomped upon the hardwood floorboards upstairs. She cracked an egg into the pan, imagining him rushing to the bathroom in the hiking boots his father had bought him last August. The sound of 7 years of life mixed with the sound of sizzling bacon, eggs, and pancakes.

Her husband came down before their son, walked up behind her as she was washing her hands, placed his thick arms around her waist, and pulled her close to him. She leaned back into him, taking in the cologne and after shave with a kiss. Her husband was muscular, but his height always gave the illusion of a slim frail man. As their son raced down to dining table, hopped into his favorite chair (the one closest to the living room and TV), and began piling his plate with food, both smiled at the stubby child they’ve made. Her son poured strawberry syrup straight from the bottle onto his pancakes. Her husband had winked his left eye at her as he took his seat at the head of the table. She had chuckled, then, before announcing the necessary errand. They were out of several sundry items but she needed to be home to watch for a special delivery from Grandma. She had already missed the delivery man twice this week; if she missed him again, the package would be sent back to sender. Her husband volunteered to do the shopping and urged their son to come along for the trip. At first, their son looked up at them, wide-eyed with strawberry syrup dripping from his lips. He had asked why he had to go too and what about his birthday and several other questions of the like, but eventually her husband convinced their son to join in on the grocery expedition. Before he entered the blue-grey station wagon, she kissed her son on his forehead, brushing flaxen strands of hair away from his eyes. His eyes were the color of hazel nut butter and shone in the morning light. They were the same eyes as his father. They were lovely eyes.

She had watched them drive off towards the Safeway in the next town over, waving her hands as the car faded out into the distance. Once the car was out of sight, she went back inside and began making phone calls. First she called her brother, who lives three streets down the way. Then, she called the families of Emily Johnson, Thomas Fresno, Erik Bernard, Jacob Featherweight, Michael Ocean, Jessica Bunny, Susan McLanester, Anthony Bee Suzette, Rachel Airline, Desiree Jones, Frankie Miles, Jonathon Jacob, Ginger Jiggle, Frederick Hammersmith, Abby Church, and Mitt Vandersmith. She called each in turn, announcing her son’s departure and when they would be expected to make an appearance at 3535 Elmwood Drive.

“Oh, I hope you can make it Mr. Johnson. How is Tommy today, Mrs. Fresno? Are you free today Mr. Bernard? Yes, they just left, Mrs. Featherweight. Their welcome to come, Mr. Ocean. Yes, of course Mrs. Bunny, thank you. No, Mr. McLanester, that isn’t necessary. Yes, thank you Ms. Suzette. Whenever you’re able to make it, Mr. Airline. Yes, please bring the streamers, Mr. Jones. Please be sure Frankie will behave this time, Mrs. Miles. Oh, that’s fine Mr. Jacob, no need to worry. No, thank you Mr. Jiggle, I have that covered. Of course, Mrs. Hammersmith. God bless you too, Mr. Church. See you soon, Mrs. Vandersmith.”

That was a while ago. Now, the backyard is full of colorful streamers, packages wrapped in ribbons, cards signed with happy wishes and stuffed with the occasional President Jackson. Adults are wandering around the yard, children are playing around their feet, and she is inside, baking the birthday boy’s cake. She has preheated the oven to 350 degrees and lightly oiled and floured three round pans. In a large clear bowl, she sifts together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder. In another, she whisks together the oil, buttermilk, eggs, red food coloring, vinegar, and vanilla. She uses the standing mixer she got on her wedding day to mix the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, until the batter is smooth. She is dividing the cake batter evenly between the three pans. She is placing them into the oven. She is sighing and wondering where her family is.

Five minutes from now, the cake will be forgotten. After my car pulls up to the house on 3535 Elmwood Drive, after she opens the door, after “Hello, Officer Hammersmith. What brings you here? Frederick is out back with the others.”  Five minutes from now, I will have to sit her down and say “Mary, Henry was in an accident.” Five minutes from now, she will ask a torrent of questions, “What accident? Is Henry okay? Where is he? What about Bobby?” And to each question there is only one answer, an answer that will toss a black shroud over her small frame.

But that’s not now, that’s five minutes from now. Currently, she is baking a cake for a little boy who will never see the sunset on his 7th year and for the man who kissed his wife goodbye.