First off, my workshop went very well yesterday. That's exciting. 

If you happen to be in the Dingle area (that is, in Ireland) on Tuesday, please come by the Dingle Bookstore to hear me read from the project I'm working on. We'll be there at 7:30 and it'd be great to see you in person. 

So that's fun news.

Now for an embarrassing story.

I took my afternoon nap today, and I woke up because a gaggle of people had come into the hall outside my room at the BnB and started talking loudly. I was then reminded that no, it wasn't four in the morning and I couldn't sleep anymore, because there was a lecture from a famous Irish author, Kevin Barry, that was about to take place in the parlor room across the hall. 

I jumped up, my hair in my face and my jeans sagging, and I grabbed my bag and my keys and my phone, and I ran out of the door ... right into a red-headed dude in a striped shirt who was very obviously Kevin Goddamned Barry.

"Hello," he said, and me, still half-asleep, muttered a "hello," trying to get around him and the landlord's daughter who was fangirling him.  But then he put out his hand. "I'm Kevin."

Well, of course you're Kevin. 

"I'm Jen," I muttered. And he said, "Good to meet you," or something, or maybe he didn't, but I definitely did scuttle, and I used that word earlier, but it was indeed a scuttle, I scuttled away from him and into the parlor room.

"Cheers?" he said after me. 

And I wanted to die.

I'd signed up to have dinner with Kevin Barry and sit next to him, and I let someone else have my seat. Ted asked me why, and honestly it was because I needed a place to kick out my leg, but we know me, and if I really wanted that seat, I would have said damn be to the leg and done it anyway. 

I'm not good at talking to famous authors. I'm not good at talking to strangers. And I'm not good at talking to strange famous authors who I run into with my fat hair in my eyes and one shoe in my hand. 

Kevin was an amazing reader, and I absolutely adored his book. I wish I had the courage to tell him that. I know that I will need to get better at talking to impressive people if I'm not going to be trampled over in this world. But it just wasn't happening tonight. 

I went out with my fellow students to a pub, where we listened to Irish music play. The more I delve into Ireland, the more I feel like I'm entering my father's world. I feel close to him out here, a quarter of a world away, and it's stirring up a lot of feelings that I'm sure would make a good poem if I was a poet. I think I'm going to need a couple of years or something to suss out everything this trip means to me, but I do know I won't be forgetting it soon. 

I started scribbling things down while I listened to the music, but I bet none of it is any good.

I'll just put the first line here:

When my father was in Ireland, it never rained. 

So my reading list has begun for Stonecoast, and this week I actually had two writing retreats: one with Kaitlin, and one with Alex down in the capital so he could take his bar exam. This meant I was shuffled around to hotel rooms with nothing but books and spotty internet access all week.

It was awesome.

So while Alex took his test, I dove into Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, paired with Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.

And something clicked.

I've always had this weird, dark place sitting in the back of my head. A rural town where things happen. Little boys in overalls and little girls who can see the future. I wanted to write stories that talked about ghosts, dead grandmothers, prophecies out of the mouths of children that live in old weathered wooden houses at the end of gravel roads. I wanted to write about other worlds and boys who never grow up and men who did too much growing up. But for some reason, for some stupid reason, I thought I was supposed to write "a certain way." I was supposed to learn "how to write a short story" and "what sort of a short story people would want to buy."

So surprise when I read Bradbury, and he said no.

Don't write for fame or fortune, he warns. Don't be a liar. Don't tug at your audience and try to manipulate them. Just write for you. Write those stories that you've carried with you since you were a kid.

Bradbury talks about Mr. Electrico, a sideshow worker from the circus who told him as a child during an act "You will live forever!" The next day, little Ray found Electrico and spent the whole day with him, going around to the different backstage tents and having his own personal tour. At the end, Electrico told Ray that in a past life, the boy had been his best friend and died in the war. Bradbury writes in his book that he doesn't know if he believes in immortality or past lives, but that little boy does. And that little boy has never steered his writing wrong.

This idea of writing from the heart, from the innocence of childhood and magic, is obviously put into place in Neil Gaiman's book. I've been a longtime fan of Gaiman, seeing him advocate for what he wants to write and always being true to his story and characters. I admire his honesty. And I am in awe of his imagination.

In Ocean, he says he wrote a book to explain to his wife who he was. These people who had lived in his head for years now came to the surface and he wrote them all out in two weeks. Ocean was the water on Helen Keller's hand for my brain. It was the sort of book I'd always wanted to write, but didn't know how. And then I saw how Neil put it all together, and I said to myself, "Yes. This is what writing is."

Writing is sitting down and taking all of those parts of yourself you don't think will interest anyone else, but interest you. And you write them. And yes, they will interest others, because although they're old hat to you and they have haunted you for years, turns out we all have different experiences. My knowledge of ghost stories might not have been a thing that you, the reader, grew up with. Gaiman's ocean at the end of this little country lane was a familiar thing to him as a child, but is completely new to our eyes.

And in writing what we are, who we are, what is at the core of ourselves, we write in that ever elusive "voice." We aren't the next Hemingway, like Bradbury warns us not to be. We are what he calls "The New Element." We are true to ourselves, we do not lie, and so we tell one hell of a story.

Write like Bradbury. Write your Electrico. Write your ocean. It may look like a little pond, but like Gaiman says, it's so much more.

How nice should I be? How mean should I be? I'm editing my classmates' stuff, and I'm used to editing as an editor with a client I am working for. And yes, you as the editor must have a bit of teamwork in that kind of relationship with your client, but at the end of the day, you've either been given many moneys to help that client for your expertise, or you have been hired by a publisher because you know what you're doing. There's confidence in that role. Now I'm sitting not as an editor, but as a classmate, a peer. If I'm too mean, then maybe I'm being precocious. If I'm too nice, then maybe I'm not doing my assignment correctly. Without knowing the culture of the school or how MFA programs work, I might just dip into pro-mode and start giving notes on what must change before this can be published ... before I remember that's not my place in this case.

So in this program, you submit your manuscript about three months before you actually go to workshop. I've completely revised the crappy manuscript I turned in, working with other editors and writer pals to get it to a better place. Now that I look at my old draft, I am so afraid of what is to come at this workshop. I want to give one of those taboo disclaimers, where I stand up and wave my arms in the air and shout, "I know it sucks! I just worked twelve weeks making it not suck! Please God don't think I suck!" But we all know I wouldn't ever do that ...

I'm not gonna lie. I am hella awkward when I don't know anyone in a situation. And I know this is a stupid thing to worry about. I'm an adult! I am like three years away from being thirty, I have a full-time career, I have published a book and plays and have traversed some of the scariest American cities all by myself. I worked at a publishing company for three years. I freelance edit. I've started two writing groups. I teach Creative Writing. I have no bed time, damn it!

I am so scared of coming off like a faker, like a false writer, like an idiot who just finally learned what a chapbook looks like. I have this inexplicable fear of showing up and taking one look at everyone and realizing that while I know my stuff, they all got into a secret club long ago; a club to which I received no invite. I know this is stupid, but how as an adult, do I still worry about who I'm going to sit with at the lunch table?

Again, a stupid one for a grown woman. My fiance just moved up to this town. We haven't been separated since we ended our Long Distance Relationship three months ago. And now, a week, before I'm about to leave, our friend has died. I'm missing my friend's memorial game night to go to this residency, and I'm leaving behind a fiance who has just realized that mortality exists and we all are doomed to say goodbye to one another. I also will not lie: I slept in a blanket fort last night, because my friend made blanket forts, and when bad things happen, blanket forts sound like the best thing ever and you just want to sit in one and drink mounds of pop out of a Twizzler straw. The idea of leaving home right now is a tough one, but life has to carry on and we have to carry ourselves with it. Oh, happy day!

So I'm flying to Maine. I have to fit everything I need into like a suitcase. I've never been to Maine, and I've never been to these dorms or this college. I've heard I need a fan. Other than that, I do not know. What if I forget an important book? What if I forget my toothbrush? What if I forget my homework?!

Honesty, again: I plan to glomp onto the nicest, most patient upperclassman I can find and just tail them for the entire ten days. In the unfortunate event I cannot find a willing upperclassman, what will become of me? I will miss a bus. I will miss a class. I will miss food. I will miss the really cool hangout where everyone gets to know each other. I will get lost in Portland and no one will ever find me again!

I've heard that the Stonecoast residency is "like coming home." From the people I've met, they're so very nice.

I've been thinking a lot about my friend. I met them --- and yes, I am using them out of respect, not out of improper grammar --- on Facebook before I moved away to undergraduate. I was so nervous, not knowing what awaited me in Chicago and this university where fancy things happened and fancy strangers attended. So I reached out, to the people on Facebook who were also going to be freshmen in the fall. This was 2006, so there was actually a spot to write which dorm you were in, and so I searched people who would be living down the hall from me.

My friend was one of these people.

Looking back on our very first conversation via chat, because we live in the world of technological ghosts, I see that we were both very nervous about leaving home and going into the great perhaps. I barely knew the person who would become my friend. They were nothing but a stranger on Facebook, and I couldn't think of a scenario where college was an actual day-to-day, real-life thing I would excel at.

Now, eight years later, my friend and I had our last conversation a week ago, before they were taken. Our last conversation, funnily enough, was about that first year of college and who we'd roomed with. We reminisced on the hard parts, but also the good parts. We didn't know it would be our last conversation.

But that conversation was full of good memories. Although we'd been nervous about moving to the city and taking on the world, we'd done it. We both found happiness. We both grew into strong adults. We both had been brave enough to take that step into adventure and friendship.

Now I feel that anxiety again, starting a new chapter and a new program. I've met people on Facebook in preparation, and I feel as if I'm about to make a whole new bunch of friends. I can't imagine my day-to-day life being in a place far away that I've never seen in a program I've never experienced.

But eight years from now, I'll look back on this list of worries, and I'll laugh. Because new adventures are always frightening, but they're always worth it.

To all of you starting your MFA Programs, may the odds be in our favor.

 I started writing one of my books in 1999. While other books have been completed, I am still revising this particular manuscript even today.

You have probably been in a similar position with something you’ve written or are still writing or will always be writing. You have your friends go from being excited about your magnum opus to being sad because they think you’re stuck like a crazy person in a padded room. “You think maybe you can send it off now? No? Okay.”

But hey, how long did it take to write Gone with the Wind? A long time; ten years to be exact. So maybe sometimes it takes a while to get something right.

But hey, how long can you wait until the earth has passed on and your book is no longer relevant? So maybe you need to just give up or get it out there.

The thing about writing is that there’s no one sitting there telling you when it’s ready. There’s no real deadline except for the one you set for yourself. So you can keep pushing it back. You keep learning, so your manuscript can keep growing, right?

When is it time to let go? That’s what we’re going to focus on today. In answering this question, maybe you should first answer these questions:

Why am I still writing this book?
Do you still get something out of writing this book? There is definitely a script or two that I just gave up on because it didn’t matter to me or the world anymore. One of these was a play that was a thinly-veiled metaphor for the 2008 Election (and also my pining after a young man who broke up with me a month prior to me writing said play). But a year ago, I went and looked back at this poor play and decided never to work on it again. Why? Well, because I can barely remember what that heartbreaker looks like, and the 2008 Election was in 2008. So I’m not really getting anything out of it, and neither would the world. It’s best to let it lie and let go.

However, the best manuscripts are timeless, to both ourselves and the world. Genres and hot-topics come and go, but we will always enjoy reading something like Lovely Bones or The Color Purple. Pieces about the universal human condition have a little longer shelf life. But don't ride on that one comforting fact; if the reason you're still writing this book is because you're scared, you need to let it flutter its wings and fly.

Is it worth it?
Do you love this book enough to keep going? If you’ve grown a lot as a writer over the years, you may have to start over from scratch. Are you willing to do that to make it the best it can be? Or is it best to just let it be what it is? I know this is an issue for a lot of graduate students who grow exponentially after starting their studies. Honestly, I have no answer. I've revised many an old manuscript if I love it enough, but that brings us back to the question at hand. Is it worth it?

Is the clock ticking?
Ah, the shelf life again. If you were writing a vampire novel, your ship has sailed by this point. Breaking Dawn II premiered two years ago, and how many successful vampire movies have there been since? Even the dystopian schooner is breaking off in the distance. We’re now looking at alternative historical novels. So are you running out of time? Is the pot boiling over and the chicken over cooking? Is the insert another colloquialism here? If so, then maybe it’s just time to let it breathe and have agents see it before the agents don’t want to see it anymore?

Why haven’t you sent it off yet?
Nothing is ever going to be perfect. Your manuscript is never going to be what you want it to be. Are you holding your manuscript hostage because it has holes and issues you need to fix … or are you just scared? If you’re just scared, get over it and just send it out!

If you still believe in a project, don’t give up on it. But make sure that you’re willing to put in those ten years to make it what it should be. And if you lose interest, it’s totally okay to let go. Sometimes we have projects that just need to die. Sometimes projects are nothing more than stepping stones to better projects.

What’s the longest time you’ve spent on a manuscript? When do you think it’s time to quit? When do you think it’s time to send?

This week has been rough.

I wish I had the courage to write from my heart when it came to the shootings in California. But I can't. I can't find the words. All I can do is copy and paste this essay that I wrote a couple of years ago, about female heroes in literature. I guess that's the way I can start to express my fear and repulsion. Because we are writers. Some of us are women writers. And we have a duty to change the tides with our words.

Let's start here:

July, 2012.

This is a blog entry I’ve wanted to write for a very long time. I know that I wrote a bit about it before, talking about the Jonas Exercise and discussing how completely floored I was at Jennifer Lawrence and Suzanne Collins’ work on The Hunger Games. To recap, the Jonas Exercise is taking a male character and seeing if a gender-bend would fly narratively for that story.

However, there's more to say. And I just haven’t gotten around to collecting the words to say it.

I guess I would like to start off by telling another personal anecdote: the day I realized I was a girl, and that meant I counted for less of a character.

I was playing with my brother and cousin at my grandmother’s home when we started picking out what parts we were going to act out for our Disney game. They had a plethora to pick from: Beast, Lumiere, Aladdin, Jafar, Triton, Sebastian, Simba …

I had the princesses. That was it.

And while I loved the princesses, I also loved the current RPG we were acting out in the living room, and that was The Lion King. I quickly had my pick of two characters: Nala or Sarabi. The girlfriend or the matronly mom lion.

I wanted neither.

This led to an argument with my cousin as to who was going to play Goliath in our next game: Gargoyles. My cousin pointed out I was fit to only play Demona, the lone gargolye chick on the show. After already being shunned to playing Nala, I did not want to play Demona. I wanted to play the awesome main character. But my cousin was having none of it.

This led to us deciding to play Power Rangers instead. I wanted to play the White Ranger, and my cousin again pointed out I could only pick from the Pink or Yellow Ranger. And if you know anything about the Power Rangers, you know that both of those characters are terrible. Pinkie is a flippant airhead and Yellow doesn’t have any sort of personality whatsoever.

Suffice to say, I punched my cousin in the face and play time was cut short.

I’ve learned many things since then, one of them being not to punch people in the face. I’ve also learned that what I was experiencing is still something I’ve experienced in the past year. Although things are better now for our female characters, they aren’t better by much. They gave us voluptuous potato sacks with the brains of a galvanized frog, and recently they are kind enough to give us perky or rebelliously pretty potato sacks with the brains of a galvanized frog. And don’t get me wrong, I would take Rapunzel over Jasmine or Ariel any day, but I would also like an actual human being. Or a not-princess.

And we were so close, weren’t we? We saw Emma Watson's Hermione. And with Katniss Everdeen, a promising premise to Snow White and the Huntsman, a (gasp) single heroine in Frozen, and an unlikely beauty in Brave, we were on our way. So what went wrong? Why are we still not there?

Maybe because we’re trying to make a strong girl character, and not just a strong character. I believe the two largest problems is this feeling of writers patronizingly making up for the lack of awesome girlness, as if Hollywood is saying “See? We can be hip! We have an awesome girl heroine!” And that heroine, if a hero, would look like a dim-witted selfish prat (Merida), a still sexy but troubled and alone and very marketable princess with a sweet theme song (Elsa), a girl who is supposed to be saving the world but instead is constantly bombarded by a love triangle (Katniss), or a character that makes no decisions for himself (Snow White).

The second largest problem is the idea that women are seen as a completely different species than men. Freud never could figure out what women wanted, and as a woman, I don’t think it’s that difficult to figure out.

So Hollywood. So writers. So book publishers. This is what I want.

I want a character who is not afraid to speak her mind, because she wants what she wants and she doesn’t care what anyone has to say about it.

I want a character who makes her choices and thus brings the plot upon herself, not a Kristen Stewart who bumbles around behind Thor and has things happen to her. Or a Katniss who gets stuck in a bunker and told what to do. I want her to hold the reins and make mistakes and cleverly work through the snags.

I want a character who won’t self-destruct or fall off a cliff without their male counterpart. Bella.

I want a character who has better things to worry about than who likes her or who she likes.

I want a character who isn’t wanted or pursued by anyone.

I want a character who doesn't sacrifice herself for the betterment of a dude or a civilization, like she's some kind of Mayan virgin. In other words ...

I want a character who does not end up married or dead.

I want a character who works hard on her own to earn what she wants.

I want a character who isn’t pretty. Maybe she’s too skinny, maybe she’s too fat. Maybe she has an ugly voice. Maybe she’s too tall.

I want a character who doesn’t wear makeup and doesn’t have perfect hair, even after all hell breaks loose.

I want a character who has never been told she has to grow up and marry anyone.

I want a character who is never addressed with a jeering “because you’re a gi-irl!” from a male character. Even if it's considered motivation for her to prove him wrong.

I want a character who is attempting to honor her mother’s love and her father’s strength. And when one of them fails her, I want her to stand up to the challenge.

I want a character who doesn’t know how it’s going to end up, but she keeps a strong face. Or maybe she breaks down.

I want a character who doesn’t have to shoot an arrow twice as well as a boy in order to prove her worth.

I want a character who isn’t a walking stereotype of a tomboy if she's not feminine.

I want a character who is not a decoration, a mother, a witch, or a spitfire.

I want a character who doesn't constantly think of her femininity. It will of course come up, but no one walks around all day thinking, "Boy, how woman am I? I'm pretty dang woman right now. Oh look, a man!"

And I guess, what I really want is a character boys would want to play on the playground.

But here are a few things you should also know about girls:

Sometimes we do fall down and cry, and that’s okay.

Sometimes we do fall in love, and sometimes we don’t. But if we do, we will fight tooth and nail for that man and ourselves. And that strength doesn’t come out of girlish fancy or stupidity. It comes from love.

Sometimes we want to be pretty, but a good amount of the time, we don’t feel like we are. And other times, we don’t care.

Sometimes we forget we are girls, and we just regard ourselves as people.

Sometimes we are afraid of how the world sees us, and sometimes we have to be brave to walk down the street.

Sometimes we are not quirky nor are we fashionable, we are not ditzy nor are we geeky. Sometimes we are just who we are.

Sometimes we are scared, but sometimes we are steadfast. We always keep moving.

Sometimes we think about things that aren’t boys or being a mother or going against the status quo.

Sometimes we just want to be firemen and astronauts, and it isn't until someone says we can't be that we realize there's a lot of hurdles ahead of us and two girl characters in The Lion King.

Sometimes we aren’t spunky or strong-willed; we’re just mean.

But most of all, we are always human beings.

So please write like we are just that: human beings.