Souls and Poetry

I don't know that I can say I love poetry. I'm not one of those people who can curl up with a book of poems and just read them for a block of time. If that's what has to be true for me to say "I love poetry," then no, I don't.

But there are certain poems that I absolutely love, in the way I love some songs, in the way I love some people. A love that makes my chest feel full, like my heart is physically swelling with warmth and I'm overwhelmed with the intensity of the feeling.

It's moments like this that I am most convinced we're eternal beings. I can feel that I'm incapable of holding all that there is to feel; something inside me is spilling over into a dimension I don't have full access to yet. Poetry stretches the veil thin enough that I can know there's a Beyond, even if I can't live there yet.

As Gabe left the apartment today, we were trading versions of "I love you" and I was reminded of the sign he painted me for Christmas a few years ago. It's a picture of our souls intertwining, based on a poem I wrote about him in college where I described his soul as being green and gold. That reminded me:

"You know the Robert Frost poem about green and gold?" I asked.

He said he didn't think so.

"Nature's first green is gold?" I prompted. "Her hardest hue to hold? Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour?"

"Dang," he said, gathering keys and wallet. "You know a lot of it."

"I do," I said, just as surprised. "It's not very long. It mentions Eden later. You'd really like it."

We kissed and I had to Google the poem after he'd left.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Something Magical happens toward the end of Frost's poems. I'm only very familiar with four, and I love all of them very much, and all of them get me somewhere in their last half/last third. I don't know if it's something Frost did on purpose or if the lines I like just happen to fall in that region.

In "Nothing Gold Can Stay," it's the leaf subsiding to leaf that gets me. There's a turn there. The first four lines are about beginning...but then it's not the beginning anymore. Beginnings don't last forever. Eventually they become middles, and then eventually, they become ends.

Nothing gold can stay.

Leaning against the kitchen counter, surrounded by dishes that needed to be put into the dishwasher, I looked up "The Road Not Taken," and that one made me cry.

It was five particular lines that got lodged in my throat this time, and although they were consecutive, they weren't part of the same stanza.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There's something so beautiful and so sad and so true there. The lines are filled with yearning and nostalgia and regret and contentment and wisdom. I don't even want to touch them with my thoughts out loud. They just make me cry, and if they make you cry too, it's in a slightly different way. I think poetry speaks to the soul, and everyone's soul is unique. No two people can love a poem in exactly the same way.

I'm so excited for the dimension where I can feel all of what poetry makes me feel.

You know what, yeah—I can say I love poetry.

~Stephanie

P.S. Here are the other two Robert Frost poems I love so much.

"Fire and Ice"
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

Did I Actually Win National Novel-Writing Month?

What is NaNoWriMo? It's National Novel-Writing Month. The goal is to write 50,000 new words of a novel in November. It usually goes something like this for me, but this year was different—in a lot of ways.

For NaNo 2023, I had three goals, in order.

1) Have fun: don't stress about voice and point of view, don't get bogged down trying to avoid YA taboos, don't be afraid to write scenes that are "just for character development" or don't have explicit scene goals.

2) Stop if my mental health starts to deteriorate.

3) Write 50,000 words.

Did I win? The short answer is yes, but if you're here for the short answer, you're in the wrong place. This blog is for the long answer, which is...like, it's still yes, but with caveats.

What Was Different About NaNo 2023?

1) For the first time EVER, I did not write part of the Fire Faery Trilogy. I've been writing and rewriting the Fire Faery Story since I was twelve years old. I took a long break after high school, started up again for NaNo 2019, and have been at it ever since. Not only does the story now have a lot of baggage, guilt, and stress associated with it, but I was starting to believe that it was the only thing I COULD write. I mean, I haven't tried to write something different in like twelve years. Gabe and Aaron have been encouraging me to write writing something else for a long time, and I finally kind of did.

I wrote the backstory of a FFS character named Kamaria. This may seem like cheating to some people since Kamaria is still a character in the Fire Faery Story, it's the same world, and a few other FFS characters appear in it.

I hear you, but believe me, it was not the Fire Faery Story. It felt like a very different assignment.

2) I did not write every day, and I didn't worry about it. This was huge and absolutely unprecedented for me. Gabe and I went away for a weekend and I didn't write at all on the Saturday, nor did I let that bother me. No guilt. No preoccupation. I did not write that day, and it was fine. I also didn't write any on November 29, the day after I'd hit 50,000 the day before, which brings me to the next thing.

3) I did not max out my word count. Confession time: Hitting 50,000 words alone doesn't usually mean much to me. NaNoWriMo is never really a question of IF I'll win, but by how much. Every year since 2019, I've ended the month with a higher word count than the year before. Sure, the NaNo website and my Facebook page say that the goal is 50,000 words, but I know about the SECRET goal, which is really to surpass the year before. Anything less than that is technically a loss. I've backslidden. I've deteriorated.

As a result, my NaNo progress typically looks something like this:



This year, it looked like this:



This year, a huge part of me is still screaming that while, sure, I got over 50,000 words, I didn't get over 55,875, so how good should I REALLY feel about myself?

I'm working on it.

As a result, I don't feel the sense of relief that I usually feel on December 1, which I am kind of missing. Instead of going from "obsessive and exhausted" to "sweet relief," I'm going from "having a goal I'm casually pursuing" to "not getting to track my progress every day on a chart." It's kind of a bummer.

4) I counted more types of words toward my goal than I usually do. The NaNo rules are somewhat flexible. Some writers count only the words in the manuscript itself, some count their outlines, some don't even believe in hitting Backspace during the month. In the past, I've been a "just the actual manuscript" type of WriMo and I definitely hit Backspace a lot. I have even been known to—*gasp*—EDIT during NaNo, which is universally discouraged.

This year, I gave myself what felt like a truly ridiculous amount of grace. I counted everything I wrote toward the story in November, including outlines, character information, deleted lines, and one embarrassing paragraph of 1,300 words that is not even about the story; it's a stream-of-consciousness brain dump from Thanksgiving night. (Don't worry, I still got over 50,000 words of book-related content, so I still won.)

What Did I Learn?

1) Maybe most importantly, I learned that I still CAN write something other than the Fire Faery Trilogy. It had been twelve years since I'd tried to imagine a new culture and I wasn't sure if I could still be creative in that way. As it turns out, I CAN. What a wonderful surprise to find new colors and customs and languages in my brain just waiting to be uncovered.

2) I can successfully meet a goal without sacrificing my mental health. I don't think I believed this before NaNo this year. Something about my personality was CONVINCED that if I didn't obsess over writing to the exclusion of all else, it wouldn't be enough. Well, that's not true, and now I have to rethink some things.

3) I have issues with expectations of myself. I'm still having a hard time "feeling" like I won NaNo, for many of the above reasons. There just seem to be a lot of asterisks. Gabe insists that not only did I win NaNo, I should feel extra good because I did it while taking care of myself, which ought to be a victory in itself. I hear that, but...it just sounds like a participation trophy.

I'm working on this too XD

4) I think I need a stronger prescription in my glasses. This is pretty self-explanatory, but there is no reason I should need Word to be at 180%.

5) There's something wrong with my relationship with the Fire Faery Story. For the past couple of years, I actually feel sick when I work on it. It's like all of my energy goes to the story instead of to digesting food. If I set a timer and only work on the story for one hour at a time with NO exceptions, it seems to be manageable. I did not have stomach issues while writing Kamaria's backstory for NaNo this year—until it intersected with a character from the main trilogy.

On November 15 I posted on Facebook that my stomach had been doing well so far. The next day, Kamaria encountered a certain character, and from there on out, I did have some issues.

The mind is a powerful thing—too powerful for my taste XD

In addition to all the things I learned about myself and my process, I learned a lot about Kamaria too. I've always known her backstory, but being able to flesh it out was fun and beautiful. I now think that I will publish it one day (this is in the universe where I actually get around to publishing ANY of this), but it'll be a little stand-alone that serves as like Book 2.5 of the trilogy. It will not have a grand "story question" aside from answering the question, "How did she get here and why is she like that?"

In the meantime, Fire Faery groupies can listen to Billie Eilish's "bury a friend" and let their imaginations run wild.

~Stephanie

The Missing Element

At dinner the other day, Rachel talked about examining the stories she's written to see if there was an element or theme that appeared in all of them. She found that there was. Naturally, I wanted to see if that was true for me too.

"Older brothers" was the first idea that came to mind, but as much of a chokehold as that trope has had on me for my entire life, I immediately knew that wasn't it, because there is no older brother character in the Fire Faery Story.

I sat down with my journal and two lists: one list of all the stories I could think of off the top of my head, and one list of all the elements/themes I thought might be The One. I assigned symbols to the elements/themes, and wrote them next to the stories they applied to.

None of the elements appeared in every single story, though some came close, like "something is wrong with the powers that be" and "magic." However, 90% of what I've written has been YA fantasy, and those are like the bread and butter of the genre. I also traced "relationships that don't/can't work," but that wasn't every time either.

I put the exercise aside with the intention of mulling it over more later. There abso—

—ohhh, wait, is it the "found family" trope?* Mmmmm not quite. Fire Faery Story and many others, yes, but not The Mirror or The Virtue Chronicles or Powers Story.

Anyway. I put the exercise aside. I wasn't thinking about it at all when I was walking around the apartment complex and a thought hit me:

There are no couples in the Fire Faery Story. It's not just devoid of, like, teenagers who are "together"; I mean NO CHARACTERS ARE DATING OR MARRIED**. Even the adult characters are like single, widowed, etc. No one has a significant other.

I couldn't believe I'd never noticed this before. It wasn't an intentional choice; I had never even noticed. I just hadn't met any characters in my head who were married or together...ever.

Gabe's theory was that as a kid, I was still exploring the concept of relationships, so subconsciously, I didn't feel qualified to write about them. But how much do you really need to understand about relationships to throw in "oh and this man has a wife" or "oh and this character has both parents." Most of the adults I knew as a kid were married. Most of my friends had both parents living with them at home. My subconscious had plenty enough fodder for a cursory couple to EXIST IN MY WORLD?!

It was several hours later, while stir-frying chicken, that another thought hit me and I froze, wooden spoon hovering over the pan.

It's not just the Fire Faery Story that is devoid of couples.

It's ever story I've ever written.

No one is dating. No one is married. Single, widowed, widowered, mom's dead, dad's dead, both parents are dead. Usually there's some kind of secondary romance plot for my main character, but 1) it's conspicuously, intentionally, almost-breaking-the-fourth-wall-level secondary, and 2) it doesn't work.

Is that The Thing? Is that the element that's present in every one of my stories?

Well, first of all, yes. But does it count as The Thing if it's something missing instead of something present? And is that...really it?

What would that mean?

This post is a result of texting my parents about the revelation and ending the conversation with "Maybe I'll blog about it and see what happens."

My dad reminded me that as a kid, I had asked him why there were so many songs about being in love. To me, romance is still the least interesting quality of relationships. It's genuinely boring to me, like someone showing me pictures of their cat***. Like, I'm happy for you, but I really don't care.

"Romance" is different from love though. Even if I avoided "romance," I should still be able to have, like, John and Jane Doe living together in the periphery of the story, right?

I don't think it's a head-heart conflict either, which was my dad's first theory. I'm heart-repressed as an Eight, sure, but I'm other-people's-Feelings dominant in MBTI.

Since I haven't written any new stories or characters since I started self-discovery and personal growth work, I guess it's possible that if I were to write something new now, it would have a couple in it. Maybe maybe one day we'll see?

As I try to puzzle it out, the only reason I've come up with is that I'm most interested in characters as individuals. I see people as individuals, not who they are as a team or a couple. I see the individual first. I want space—I want to give the character space—to be who he/she is, without all the baggage of another person. I don't—well, I haven't—ever write two people trying to come up with a stance together as a unit. The whole "two become one" thing isn't part of my default.

Is that it? I'm not satisfied with that. It doesn't feel like the big Truth at the bottom of this concept. I totally believe in marriage; I've never had a problem with "one flesh."

I don't know.

I guess I'll keep thinking and talking and writing and see what happens.

What a weird-o quirk.

~ Stephanie

* This is happening in real time, by the way. This isn't a stylistic device XD

** One tertiary character has parents that we know are married, but we never even so much as see them in the same room.

*** There are exceptions to this. I would follow an Instagram page for Aaron's cat, Sombra, and the video of Cassidy's Mia fake sneezing is one of my favorite things of all time.

One of the Inherent Dangers

I didn't mean to write a main character so like myself.

Of course, when I first wrote the Fire Faery Story, I did; the FF Story started out as a fantasy story starring me and my friends, ages 8–12. (Dear heavens. Actual children.) But when I rewrote the story at age eighteen, the characters became characters. I needed different personalities for the story, and—let's face it—there are major hazards to writing a story about actual people in your life. My main character also became a character, though there were shades of Young Stephanie in her.

When I rewrote the story again at age twenty-seven, Ember remained a character. Sure, I put some shared quirks in there (we both take promises too seriously, we both wear crop tops), she loves to dance, and she'd rather be angry than sad, but she was different from me. I had matured beyond the things that plagued her. If anything, she was a really young, slightly alternate-reality version of me. A bolder version. A less empathetic version.

*steeples fingers together and looks deeply into the camera*

As it turns out, that may not be quite true. Apparently my subconscious has been clawing its way to the forefront for the last seventeen years, kicking and shrieking, and it's only been in the last year that I cocked my head and frowned and said to myself, "Hang on. Do you hear something?"

It's not that Ember and I are the same person. She really is a younger, bolder, and less empathetic person than I am. But we share some fundamental similarities that I never knew about myself. Her relationship with romance, her general MO (ready, fire, aim), and her use of anger as energy have slowly been creeping up on me. My unrelenting drive to work on the story even when the wise thing to do would be to stop, ponder, and recalibrate bears uncanny resemblance to the way Ember pursues her goals when there is literally no way for her to succeed until she takes the time to acquire the necessary skills.

I've lost track of the number of times that I've been thinking about the story and grunted out an, "Oh," from the gut punch of walking face-first into a mirror.

On one hand, how freakin' cool. How convenient to learn about my subconscious in a literal way. Like when Ember does X, I can see that it's because of Y, and then see how that translates to my real life. (What I do with this information is unclear so far. But I guess being aware of problems is the first step.)

On the other hand, this means that if something is a genuine blindspot for Ember, odds are it's a genuine blindspot for me. Which means I can be three years into a rewrite and one year into Aaron saying, "Okay but what's Ember's growth arc?" and still not understand what he's asking.

I mean, yes, I want a dynamic character; I don't want to my main character to be static. But I thought her character growth could be, like, going from a dancer to a dancer and a fighter. She learns some new skills. She learns how she feels about different characters. Maybe she even questions some beliefs she's always held.

But I reread this one scene last week. It's a scene near the beginning where Ember is filled with a deep rage that makes her bones vibrate and changes the entire purpose of her life. I felt good about the passage when I wrote it. It rang true. It felt strong enough for the situation. I let that rage be the virtue—yeah, virtue—that drives Ember forward and carries her through completing the climax.

But when I reread this scene last week, it made me feel kind of cold and sick. That's not...heroic. That feels...gross.

That kind of rage feels like something a character needs to grow away from. I can't write a story where the main character's anger isn't addressed, where we don't come to that time-honored conclusion alongside her that revenge doesn't heal you*.

I didn't realize that that's what was happening, because Ember didn't realize that that's what was happening. She felt good about her anger. She was using it as a tool, which...you can do. But there are consequences. It doesn't just work like that without doing some damage. Anger and arrogance don't just magically deliver you correct answers and victory. That's not a true story.

Now, part of what's happening is that the story is a trilogy—Ember will have matured a lot by the end of Book 3—but I think she needs to come around at least a little bit in Book 1. It's wild to me that I couldn't see that something was wrong until now.

But, as Aaron said, "This is one of the inherent dangers of self-inserts."

To which I replied what I still say now, "I didn't mean to do it."

~Stephanie

* The story doesn't overtly tout anger as a virtue or imply that revenge heals you—and the story does have other true, positive messages—but it doesn't overtly debunk those ideas either. I think I'd like to debunk them on purpose.

The YA Author Who Hates YA?

I'm confused.

This is about to be one of those posts where I'm not sure what I need to say, so I ramble until we figure it out together.

Sort of like the exact opposite of a good essay. Or a good novel.

Some of y'all know I'm trying to write a young adult fantasy novel. One of my editors, Chersti, reminded me that the best continuing education I can do is read current YA fantasy novels: see what's out there, what young adults are enjoying, how the characters and stories feel.

In the spring of 2021, I read An Ember in the Ashes and The Wicked Prince. I didn't particularly enjoy either (though I liked Wicked Prince more), for several reasons:

1) I read them quickly, mostly "to have read them," rather than to enjoy them. (I've recently learned that that's a very ENFJ thing to do.)

2) I was haunted by the fear that they'd somehow invalidate the Fire Faery Story, that they'd be too similar, or much better.

3) They were written in present tense, which I hate.

4) The characters and stories felt thin and pale.

5) I felt like I was too close to the book-writing process to enjoy them as literature, like a freshly graduated magician watching someone do tricks at a kid's birthday party. I saw all the fishing line hanging from the authors' props, all the ways they'd choreographed situations to tell the reader what the characters looked like, how old they were, what different world-building terms meant, what the characters' "story goals" were. Everything felt clumsy and contrived.

This weekend, I started reading The Stardust Thief. It is blessedly past tense, but that's my favorite thing about it so far. I'm still nearly paralyzed by the fear that something about this book will hurt the process of my own novel. I still see fishing line everywhere.

And what's worse is that the author is doing tons of things that I did or wanted to do in the Fire Faery Story, but was told "you can't do that" (e.g., italicized flashbacks in the middle of a chapter). It makes me angry and indignant. If this author can break "the rules," why can't I? Why was I hamstrung into writing something that felt forced and soulless when CLEARLY doing what I wanted to do would not have been the authorial suicide I was led to believe? I may be flattering myself, but I do not think Abdullah is doing it significantly "better" than I was.

As far as I can tell, reading current YA isn't working for me. I hate it. I hate the process, I hate the stories, I hate the characters, I hate the conflicts. (At least part of this isn't YA's fault; my current state of mind is partly to blame.) I hate that current YA feels different from the YA I knew and loved as a kid. What's changed? Is it really me, or are "kids these days" wanting something different than what I grew up reading?

I decided that maybe it would be better to reread some YA that I loved as a teenager. I Googled "YA fantasy books 2007–2014" and started skimming some titles. I remembered a lot of them. And you know what feeling welled up in me as I read probably 80% the titles I recognized?

Disdain.

WHAT?!

YA fantasy was my drug of CHOICE back in the day. YA fantasy is THE ONLY type of story I have ever wanted to write, or ever tried to write.

And yet, if memory is serving me as I scroll through titles, I disliked the majority of YA fantasy even as a young adult myself (looking at you, Wicked Lovely, Divergent, Maximum Ride, Dark Angel, Across the Universe, etc.)

I tried to think of the YA fantasy books that I remember loving: Inkheart, the Mortal Instruments trilogy, the Twilight saga (yes, I would be happy to have a conversation about that with you, thanks for asking), the Hunger Games trilogy, the Inheritance cycle (ONLY the first two) the Uglies series, the Farsala trilogy.

But like...that's it. Those are IT. Those are the sum total of the YA fantasy books that evoke good feelings off the top of my head.

That...is not a lot of books. That doesn't feel like a wide enough sample for me to have branded myself as a lover of YA fantasy for MY ENTIRE LIFE.

What does this mean?!

I just glanced over at my bookshelves and saw non-YA fantasy titles that I loved as a teenager: Homeless Bird, Angel on the Square, Homecoming, The Thief Lord, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, On to Oregon. Very few of those conform to the "rules" I'm told I need to follow if I'm going to be successful as a YA writer. In fact, by today's standards, many of those probably wouldn't fit into the YA genre at all.

So I'm left with lots of overwhelming questions, in no particular order:

1) Did I actually love "YA fantasy" as a kid, or did I just like well-written books?

2) Are kids these days THAT fundamentally different from kids who were fourteen in 2008?

3) If I follow my gut/heart and write the way I want, will my story actually flop, or will it just appeal to a narrower slice of the demographic (which might be the same thing to publishers)?

I'm so confused. I'm confused about what made me like certain books as a teen, and what to do with all these modern rules and standards and exceptions that make a YA fantasy book marketable. If Chelsea Abdullah can splice loosely-related italicized flashbacks into the middle of chapters in The Stardust Thief (published 2022), why the hell can't I? And if Angel on the Square (published 2001) had a time skip of four years, can I really not have a one-year time skip in my book?

I know writing books is both an art and a science, but I'm having trouble knowing when to break the rules and when to keep them. When is it wise to be the artist, and when is it wise to the the scientist?

I also know that this is probably what all first-time aspiring authors go through. I know this is what good editors will help me navigate. I know life is full of calculated risks. I know there's no way to know what will work until I just do it.

But it's really frustrating and confusing. I can do hard things, but this isn't just a hard thing, it's a...I don't even know what it is. I think that's what makes it so hard. It's not like trying to do a maze in the dark, it's like walking around in the dark not knowing if it's a maze, or someone's house, or the middle of a forest, or a different planet, or if everyone else has night vision, or if you're actually dead or—

It's just a lot.

~Stephanie

Jocosity and Other Words

I had a life-changing moment this morning. Or really, I guess it started on Tuesday.

A few weeks ago, my boss and I were talking, and she mentioned that Shakespeare's vocabulary is estimated to have been about 29,000 words. I just fell down a rabbit hole of statistics concerning Shakespeare's and modern Americans' vocabularies, but long story short: Shakespeare puts us all to shame.

That's been bumming me out lately. I consider myself to be well-educated, and I LOVE words. However, I encounter words I don't know pretty often, and I just sort of move on. I can usually guess what they mean from context, or my ignorance doesn't affect me—that I can tell.

I've wanted to develop my working vocabulary, but I haven't known what to do. Do I just get a Word-a-Day calendar and hope something sticks?

As I read my most recent Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), I decided I would make a note of words I didn't know. I'd look them up and record them in a Note on my phone. I'd think about them during the day and recite their definitions so I could keep them in my head.

One of the words I've collected is "jocosely: playfully." This morning when I was doing a writing assignment for work, I paused and tried to think of a word. "Jocosity" came to mind. I wondered if that was a real form of "jocosely," and when I looked it up, it was. It meant exactly what I thought it meant, and it worked in the sentence I was writing. (Don't worry; I was doing an exercise that had me mimicking Jane Austen's style, not writing for YA at large.)

My jaw dropped a little.

It's working.

I know this is a small, silly thing, but it filled me with a happy hopefulness I haven't felt in a while. It's always exciting and a little unbelievable when I manage to make objective progress on myself. It's like lifting heavier at the gym. You don't feel any stronger, but suddenly you just are.

New Words So Far :)
1) Stentorian: strong, powerful
2) Unctuous: excessively flattering
3) Chary: cautiously or suspiciously reluctant
4) Jocosely: playfully
5) Numinous: having a strong spiritual quality

~Stephanie

Today I Woke Up Fifteen

Do you ever wake up feeling like a different version of yourself? This might just be me. I'm not sure.

I don't mean waking up and "not feeling your best self," or feeling sick. I mean that this morning, I woke up and I was fifteen. I can't explain it better. The story ideas I was working on at age fifteen, the music I was listening to at age fifteen. The inside of my mind was from twelve years ago. It was simple and comfortable and happy. It was darker in several ways, lighter in others. I felt younger. I felt...freer. I needed to write.

I think it has something to do with the weather or time of year. The cusp of autumn. That "back to school" feeling. That "new season" feeling. The Fire Fairy Story historically has a lot to do with autumn and back to school.

It made me want to wear long sleeves and write stories again. It made me want to write in a way that I couldn't ignore. In fact, my breakfast is burning as I type this. Let me go grab that.

There is no point to this post; I just had to write.

You know what I wrote a little bit of last week? The Mirror*. It came out of nowhere, just like this feeling.

I think it's going away. That's okay. It was interesting while it lasted.

~Stephanie

*The Mirror is one of the three stories I know I plan to write. It'll probably have to be renamed since The Fire Fairy Story is looking like it'll be called Mirrors and Smoke.

A Warning About What's Coming

I don't want to write this series of posts for a lot of reasons.

1) It feels self-centered. Actually, there's no "feel" about it. This series is about to be completely Me-themed.

2) It feels...uncomfortable. I'm shying away from the word "vulnerable."

3) It's Enneagram-driven, and I'm afraid a lot of people are getting rather burned out on the Enneagram.

4) I don't want to be another trend-follower with Enneagram stuff. Apparently it's blowing up on Instagram now too, but I promise I didn't know that because I deleted the Instagram app three months ago (more on that later maybe).

5) I'm afraid no one wants to read a bunch of posts of me just processing stuff.

6) It's freaking ADVENT. How can I start a series about myself at Christmas time? How gross and irreverent.

I have decided to write this series anyway for several reasons as well.

1) If it is "vulnerable," then that's what I need to try to do.

2) This blog is literally called "Becoming Me," so if the post content is about becoming myself, then it's appropriate. If people don't want to read it, they don't have to.

3) I process things through words, so if I'm ever going to work through this stuff, this is how it's going to happen. It might as well be "public."

4) The thoughts are coming to me now. I can write them now and post them now, or I can write them now and post them in a month once it's no longer as close or relevant to me.

5) Honestly, judge away if you want. I'm an Eight. I'm used to it. In fact, I expect it ;)

I'm going to use Sleeping At Last's song "Eight" and the corresponding podcast as an outline for this series. I'm going to unpack the lyrics as they relate to me. I'm thinking it might be helpful or cathartic for me? It may also be interesting for anyone who wants to know things I don't ever talk about.

(I'm sweating as I type this XD)

Here we go. Starting on the next post.

~Stephanie

How's NaNo Going?

- NaNo = NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month = Write 50,000 words in November.

- My NaNo diet has two extremes: 1) I eat 3,000 calories of candy corn, 2) the only thing I eat all day is a can of tuna.

- It's Monday, November 11, 7:15pm as I'm drafting this. I can't even tell you how much I don't want to crank out 1,667 words right now. In fact, I'm avoiding it so hard that I'm blogging here instead.

- There is clean laundry from four days ago that I haven't folded.

- Sometimes I try to write on the couch while Gabe plays video games with his headphones one, but I get distracted by the flashing lights and pictures, so I put on a baseball cap and pull it really far down so that I can't see.

- My Google search history is getting very “serial killer” lately. In the past couple of days, I’ve looked up “face burn scar,” “how long take die of burning,” “punch head unconscious,” and “do mermaids lay eggs” (which is actually thanks to Disney+/The Little Mermaid, not NaNo).

- During NaNo, I pay closer attention to how I read. I am one of those people who sees a chunk of description tucked between paragraphs of dialogue and immediately skip the description, only reading the dialogue. As a writer, I'm offended at my own self. However, as a reader, it's making me write less useless description. I find that even with skipping descriptions, I never feel like I'm wandering around in the dark. My mind supplies what it need to "see" the story. You say "sparse bedroom" and I'm fine; I don't need to know the color of the walls or how many pieces of furniture are in there or any number of other details I'm tempted to bludgeon my readers with. (Of course, for the sake of #WordCount, I may leave some in for now XD)

- I was so preoccupied today (Saturday, November 16) that I started making lunch, including frying meat and making rice, only to notice that it was actually only 10:26am.

- Last Saturday I retrieved the "original" (fourth draft, but still VERY close to the original original) Fire Fairy Story from my room at my parents' house. Reading it now, 30,000+ words into my latest rewrite, feels weird. It feels kind of like reading the book (the original version of the FF story) after seeing the movie (the years-removed version I'm currently writing). I keep face-palming like, "Oh. THAT'S why he/she/they did that. That makes way more sense than the contrived, garbage explanation I've shoe-horned in now." There's something really beautiful and transparent and helpful about the early version that I believe will help me write the final version one day.

- Last Saturday I also went to bed the angriest I've been in a long time.

"What's wrong?" Gabe asked.

"It's my characters," I said, trying not to swear or cry. "I don't know WHY he said that. It literally makes no sense. I can't connect the dots. What's his problem?!"

"Can I help?"

"I don't know. Here's what happened. They were playing Counsel [a Furierite game] and Coal revealed something really harmful about Flare. Out of NOWHERE. Why would he do that?! And then Ember revealed something about him to get even, and he just denied it and got away with it."

Gabe thought for a few moments. "It sounds like he really hates that game."

"Oh," I said softly, anger melting. "You're right. He would hate that game. It's making a mockery of everything he stands for." Tears of relief prickled my nose. "Thank you."

Writers out there: Get you a Gabe.

~ Stephanie

P.S. 35,301 words.

The Fire Fairy Story

It came on rather suddenly.

I was sitting on the couch, reading Mistborn (for the first time, and I'm still not done, and if you spoil anything about it for me, I will seriously not be your friend anymore), and it hit me, the same way it always used to:

I had to write.

I've said this other places before, but writing inspiration feels kind of like wetting your pants: sudden, urgent, and embarrassing, because I stop being able to human until I either 1) write, or 2) lose the inspiration, which is sad.

Luckily, when the inspiration hit, I was at home with Gabe, and he is excellent at not butting in on things. I got up, got my laptop, and started writing The Fire Fairy Story.

What is The Fire Fairy Story?
The Short Answer:
A story based on my friends and I that I started writing when I was twelve.

The Longer Answer:
It was July 6, 2006. Jesse had a sleepover birthday party and invited me, my sister Sarah, Ellie, a girl named Zoie, and a girl named H...Hailey? Haley? Hayley? I don't know how to spell it, but you get the idea.

We were all AVID imaginers and pretenders. Almost all we did when we got together was play pretend, whether that was with dollhouse or our actual bodies, most often the latter. This birthday party was no different.

I believe it started with the sparklers. As we played with them in Jesse's front yard, we began play fighting with them.

"When I say 'duck,' you duck, okay?"

"Okay."

*dance around, wave sparkler—*

"DUCK!"

*playmate ducks dramatically as the yeller whips her sparkler over the space previously occupied by the ducker*

Pretty soon, play fighting with sparklers led to being creatures who could produce fireballs with their hands. The creatures were fire fairies.

Four of us were also dancers, and really enjoyed playing—try not to judge us too hard—slaves, orphans, and spies. Without any effort at all, The Fire Fairy Story, which incorporated all of those elements, was born.

We served an evil Fire Lord. We were forced to dance for him. Jesse's older brother became a character who was the Fire Lord's most trusted spy.

We each came up with a fire fairy name for ourselves. Mine was Ember. (A dance class friend, Karlye, is the one who introduced me to "Ember" as a potential name.)

We needed a name for the fire fairies' city. We asked Jesse's mom what the French word for "fire" was. She said she wasn't sure, but that it might be furier (FYOR-ee-air). It turns out it's not; it's feu (fooh, kind of with the "oo" in "cook"), but the city is named Furier to this day.

I had a mood ring from The Greensboro Science Center gift shop that I wore ALL THE TIME. From this piece of jewelry came the idea of fire fairy eyes: they change color with the fairy's mood.

I started penning (well, penciling, with an orange mechanical pencil that had a blue eraser) The Fire Fairy Story, with TONS of help from these girls. Evenings, get-togethers, phone calls, any available moment.

I finished the story one night when I was the only kid who had tagged along with her parents to church band practice. I sat in the row of rough church chairs, feet on the back of the chair in front of me, and madly wrote the last scene. My eyes widened.

It was the first—and still only—story I'd ever finished.

What's Happened Since:
For the four best friends (me, Sarah, Ellie, Jesse), The FF Story became part of our identity. We know the world of Jeolotoe and its vocabulary in a way that can only take root in children.

October 2006: Sarah, Ellie, Jesse, and I fashioned fire fairy costumes out of Goodwill findings and poster-board wings and went as fire fairies to a fall festival.

2006–2007: I wrote three or four sequels/books of the series.

April 2007: My family went to Disney World for the first time and I got Ember engraved in a leather bracelet that I wore for years.

2008ish: My youth group did a series on making your dreams happen, so I slowly typed up The Fire Fairy Story (it ended up being maybe 60 pages) and gave it to a friend's mom who was in publishing. All she would say was that "it was very good," though in a tone that told me it was absolutely not and I had a long road ahead of me.

2009–2010: I left the story largely alone, though periodically rewrote it, reread it, started it again, changed things.

October 2011: We had a Fire Fairy Reunion (pictured below). We did another Goodwill trip for costumes and had a sleepover where we choreographed a dance, reminisced, and read over parts of the story (some in notebooks, some in thick, typed stacks held together with alligator clips).

November 2011: I "won" NaNoWriMo (wrote 50,000 words in the month of November) with The Fire Fairy Story.

2012–2019: I kept rewriting the story, rereading it, starting it again, changing things. There are probably 12–15 versions of Book 1 floating around in various notebooks, on various hard drives. This story will not leave me alone.

Today:
It sounds ridiculous, but I don't know how to explain the level of influence The FF Story has had on my life. I don't want to speak for the others, but my identity is inextricably bound to this story. When I posted my wedding photos just three years ago on another blog, I captioned the ones of Ellie and Jesse with "childhood best friend and fire fairy."

Ember isn't "me," but she's a deep part of me. If someone yelled "Ember!" across the room, I would turn. She's the bolder, braver, brasher part of me—and the me I might have stopped at if it weren't for Jesus and glowing up. (Recently took the Enneagram test for her, and she's an Eight too and that makes so much sense given her history.)

The Fire Fairy Story has never left me alone. For some reason, I guess I need to write this story.

So, I'm at it again*. I wrote 20k words in two weeks a little while ago. Then I read it over and was mildly appalled. It's not good. I'm not being down on myself, it's genuinely not there yet. But instead of feeling discouraged like I usually do, I'm feeling okay. So I only keep about 2,000 words of what I just wrote. (There are probably 200k words of the story I've written over the years that I'm not going to use.) If God wants me to write this story, it'll get written. If he doesn't, then I don't want to write it anyway.

Fun Facts For Ya:
A new neighborhood that my family eventually moved into matched the map of the world of Jeolotoe with forests, bodies of water, and appropriate houses/buildings in the exact places as the map drawn in my little red notebook of years before.

Two of the fire fairies' unconventional and unpredictable love stories have happened exactly as written in the story.

~Stephanie

* again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again again.

{unedited}

[Aside from this paragraph I'm typing right now, this post is, in fact, unedited from October 10th. I've re-read it and there are lots of things I would add/change/expand, but in the interest of keeping the title accurate, I'm not. I do plan to expand later.]

I don't know why I never saw it before. But maybe that's why I could never write it before?

The Fire Fairy Story is full of Christian imagery. Light. A master who is not perfect. Slavery.

The concept of perfection, of perfect being the only way to life.

We serve a God who knows we cannot be perfect, we cannot even get close. And instead of condemning us to death, he died in our place, as the only perfect being.

Christians are freed from the slavery of perfection. We have grace.

The Fire Fairy Story is what our lives without Christ are like. Fear. Slaving for a master (sin) we cannot satisfy, that may bring us pride or temporary happiness, but will only ever, EVER lead to death.

As Christians we serve this incredibly gracious and forgiving master, one who sees our IMPERFECTIONS and says "I love you anyway and I will help you."

God does not enslave us. He is recklessly committed to our true freedom. He is tearing down walls, lighting up shadows FOR US.

I always thought the Fire Fair Story didn't have a clear Christian moral. I always thought there wasn't a way for it to glorify God. That is one reason I never felt right about writing it. (Of course, had I been able to push through the writer's block in my own strength, I absolutely would've ignored this feeling and written it anyway. But for some reason I've never been able.)

As I texted Melissa, I told her that I was a little embarrassed that I was still on this fire fairy thing, thirteen years after its conception. Why could I not let this story go?

She said that it must be a story that needs to be told, and maybe the reason I've never been able to in the past is because I needed something first that I hadn't gotten yet or didn't know yet.

I cannot help but wonder if this is "it." God needed to have an absolute GRIP on my heart and mind first. I needed HIM first. Before anything else. First and most and biggest.

Maybe God DOES want me to tell this story, he just needed me to know why. And I've never listened before.

~Stephanie

Bonus Post: Two Rules for NaNoWriMo

I have an extreme/addictive/all-or-nothing personality. It's a blessing and a curse.

Blessing: When I love things, I love them. I can derive a level of joy from stuffed animals/words/fandoms/dancing/etc. that borders on concerning.

Curse: When I do things, my instinct is to do them 100% (or 0%).

Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to "doing lots of research" or something constructive like that. It translates to "If I get into the occult, I'll likely become a witch,"* "If I drink alcohol, I'll likely become an alcoholic," and "If I do NaNoWriMo, I'll likely shirk all other duties."

What is NaNoWriMo? It's short for National Novel Writing Month. Every year, millions of hopeful authors commit to writing 50,000 words in thirty days, from November 1 to November 30. I did this and "won" my senior year of high school (2011). I haven't tried since.

Until now. As I type this, it's lunch break on November 1 and I've written about 200 words of The Fire Fairy Story.** Given my personality, I know that it's important for me to set boundaries for myself that will help me win (*fingers crossed*) NaNo in a healthy, God-honoring way.

1) No writing until I've had genuine, non-rushed quiet time with God.
What does he want my day to look like? How can he fill me with the fruits of the spirit? How can I honor him? Can I take the time to pray and listen? Can I view the day as an opportunity to give him my best, or only as an opportunity to write 1,667 words?

In a way, this rule feels slightly...creepy, pedantic, and prosperity-gospel-ish. Am I using quiet time and my relationship with God to write a "good" novel? I know that my work is better when I'm rooted in God, so is my quest for relationship with him actually selfish? If I thought that remaining close to God would make me write worse, would I still desire it?

I'm wrestling with this. I am definitely concerned that I'm just leveraging my relationship with God. 

However, in the end, spending time with God can only ever bring true good. If "good" is a bad novel or writer's block, I have committed myself to soldiering on with quiet time anyway. At the end of the month, if I don't have 50,000 words, I will at least have a stronger relationship with my heavenly father.

2) No writing during 9–5.
I work from home, so it would be very easy and very tempting to sneak in some writing during the day. Some days I don't even have a full eight hours of work; I could do six perfectly honorably and write for the other two. But how likely am I to be able to make that call responsibly, knowing my personality? By taking daytime writing off the table, I'm helping myself to work at my job "as unto the Lord." Plus, who knows, maybe giving myself a smaller writing window will concentrate the inspiration?

Anyway, I don't know how this month is going to go. I can genuinely see it goings lots of ways.

- I write 50,000 words. They're great, and I'm happier, healthier, and closer to God than I've ever been.
- I crank out 50,000 words and they're total crap. I never read them over or use them in whatever version of The FF Story ends up being final. My relationship with God is resentful and I've developed a check-the-box mentality.
- My relationship with God takes over my life. I don't write nearly 50,000 words, but I don't care because I'm so on fire for Christ.
- My relationship with God is healthy and strong. I only write about 30,000 words because I'm an adult now and I have things to do besides one hour of homework and write write write write.
- Some combination of the above.

I'm super nervous. I hate to fail, which is why I usually only try if I'm sure I'll succeed. I do not know if I will succeed with NaNo this year. But apparently I'm trying, because I'm putting it out on the internet, and if there's one thing I hate more than fizzling out privately, it's fizzling out publicly.

Whether I succeed or fail, it's official: I AM trying NaNoWriMo this year.

~Stephanie

* I believe that God is stronger than my sinful nature and that I have been saved by grace, so on some level, this isn't a huge fear of mine. I know I would come back to the truth (God) and I know that God is for me. Still, the way I'd pursue occult knowledge and power would feel dangerous, wrong, and gross to me.

** Post scheduled for Monday, November 11th.