On NaNoWriMo And Being A Real Writer

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about NaNoWriMo and how much I love it and how sometimes it can be a bad thing. There are several thoughts running concurrently in my head, so it’s hard to tell which one is the primary narrative—the more accurate version of the truth, if you will. That’s the thing about telling the truth. Two separate, conflicting accounts can tell the story from divergent angles without compromising accuracy. I remember reading about this teacher who held up a book for the class and asked them what color it was. On their side it was one color, on his side, another. That stuck with me.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how there are too many writers, too many people trying to get published. I could joke about how I feel personally affronted by this, but I do get discouraged when I consider the thousands of people I’m competing against for an agent’s attention. I used to think that because I understood grammar and punctuation, I would be an immediate shoe-in; I would float above the detritus, a diamond in the rough. My book would be snatched up; within months there would be promises of riches, the light of future book deals so bright the sun itself would look dim. [Insert more nauseating poetry here.] Realizing the path to publication was not that straightforward was no easy feat.

I didn’t just learn this in myself, in my failed attempts to get published, while people talked over me to my parents asking if I had a backup plan for when writing failed. I saw it in my friends, the ones whose novels I had critiqued and loved, who didn’t get picked up by agents for any number of reasons unknown to me. In the fray, it seems that horrible books get published while good ones languish; I try hard not to be pessimistic; I try hard not to begrudge anyone their joy.

I have read literary agents’ complaints in reference to NaNoWriMo. They are swamped, they say. When November ends, hundreds of writers query them with unedited manuscripts, a veritable deluge. I have been told, don’t query during December, you are more likely to be rejected. It is sad that there is a month devoted to ignorant hope.

One day, months ago, my sister and I were talking about how, when people produce an art form, the kind that is meant to be experienced by others, they can think that means they have the right to be published or signed to an album or displayed in a gallery. It’s difficult for writers to understand and accept the simple truth that just because you wrote a book, doesn’t mean you ought to be published. It’s hard to do that kind of work, with little-to-no promise of greater success, harder still to accept that completing the work doesn’t come with some greater, automatic and far-reaching reward.

I’ve seen the argument, particularly from literary agents, that NaNoWriMo is not some shining star. It encourages wannabe writers; it says, “You, too, can write a book. We’re all writers here.” The truth is that there is a difference between writing a book and writing a good book, and it’s often the case that those who have written bad books are also blind to this fact. NaNoWriMo gives free license to droves of writers who will never make it; who could not possibly all make it; there are too many, and not everyone has the natural talent, or the skill to learn—there is no use lying about it and saying it is otherwise. Maybe I am one of that number. Consider the times I have sung the praises of NaNoWriMo. Real writers should be able to write outside of November, I have heard.

For a long time I held it as a firm belief that NaNoWriMo is what jumpstarted and sustained my book-finishing abilities. I had never completed a full book before: that statement is true, depending on how you look at it. Before November 2013, my drafts were truncated and juvenile—one barely surpassed 40,000 words. They failed to finish a complete the thought. Both ended, not when I had reached any sort of natural conclusion, but simply when I had run out of words and didn’t know where else to go with the story. They lapsed into cliffhangers and were never polished to a high shine.

November 2013 was a reset button. It taught me a lesson I so desperately needed—you are not required to edit as you go along, and your draft can be as messy as you need. I learned about momentum, and how you can change the plot and the characters and the setting mid draft, if you so choose, because you are going to edit later anyway.

For the first time I managed to edit a manuscript and query agents. I got two requests for a full, one for a partial, none of which is saying a lot, and they all ended in rejection, but it was a taste of what could happen. I was only eighteen, and already I felt my face pointed in the right direction, NaNoWriMo at my side, a guiding hand on my shoulder.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling I had when I sat down to query, after years and years of wishing, how I sensed the enormity of my dreams. Before then, being published had been a nebulous concept with no real anchor to reality, something that I had hoped and prayed would eventually (somehow, who knows how) happen. The whole experience, start to finish, also switched my perspective from viewing publishing as something that would be handed to me to something that I would have to fight for, in the face of rejection, with no real promise of success.

When you consider the number of abortive drafts I have stashed away, it’s safe to say that for the longest time, I never got anywhere with my writing. I would start an idea and usually get a page or so in, sometimes closer to thirty, twice to eighty, all of this handwritten. For one story in particular, I stacked my blank notebooks, one hundred pages each, and dreamed of filling five. I had large handwriting.

I have a box in storage at my parents’ house, a relic of my pre-computer years, crammed with writing—loose paper, notebooks, folders, detritus from a mind I no longer recognize as having been mine. I remember so little of my writing in those days, so little of the act itself. The box was big enough to hold at least one of me, at my present size, so heavy I couldn’t lift it. Long before I moved out, it had begun to break under the weight of its contents. How that box even came into my possession is a question I can no longer answer; it was a fixed point in my childhood, a towering Ozymandius. Once I hid it in my closet.

November 2013, and the subsequent Novembers, were new awakenings, fixed points around which my life revolved. There is no way of knowing, but most times I suspect my writing would not be how it is today had it not thrived around that structure. I no longer need it as my own personal crutch; this month I finished a draft independent of November; I am free. But I am still caught in the question, that was the true question—NaNoWriMo the distraction, the red herring, the straw man. Good writers can thrive in November; they can thrive anywhere; they are dandelions growing upwards through concrete. But what of me?

Who is to say I am separate from the populace at large, the writers who will never make it, for lack of talent, or lack of research, or lack of luck? I have spent so long trying to learn humility as a writer; I get up and I fight pride and I go to bed. To be one of those people (poor her, she wanted it so bad, but she was never published—she was never good enough, who can bear to tell her?) is a rancid thought. I exist to write; I know that now. I will write whether I am printed or not.

What about me? I love NaNoWriMo; I expect I always will. My relationship with it has been a constantly shifting entity. First I learned confidence, then I pushed myself too hard and for the wrong reasons. And then last year, finally, I felt like I returned to the true meaning of Christmas NaNoWriMo. But always writing has been a form of self expression for me, a way to process and synthesize my experiences into something better. Without steady writing, in one form or another, there is a solid chance I would go insane. So far, NaNoWriMo has been my preferred tool for finishing drafts, the timeline and the sense of community vital to my experience.

If you’re only writing to make money, readers can tell—publishers can tell. You have to be comfortable with writing for yourself, first and foremost, and if you’re not there yet, that’s okay. Take your time. Write during NaNoWriMo, or write when it’s most comfortable for you. Publishing is not some great reward, the final stop at the end of a long and arduous journey. It is not even a measure of success or failure. It is a happy byproduct of writing. Even if your books never make it to shelves, you are a still a writer, and what you are doing is still valuable. In your rush to put words on paper, for your own sake, don’t forget that.

Why I Don't Want to Self-Publish // Part Two

When I wrote Part One of why I don’t want to self-publish, I hadn’t planned for it to be a two-part post, but I ended up with more material than I could cover in one. I also hadn’t been planning to take another hiatus, and I’m sorry if you’ve been waiting forever to read part two. Thank you for being patient!

First, let me just remind you that the reasons why I don’t want to self-publish can be useful information, but only if you also realize that not all self-publishing platforms are created equal, and that it’s okay to disagree with me. One day I might change my mind and decide to self publish. You never know. So these are just my observations from where I stand.

Someone with no knowledge of self-publishing will likely assume that there’s only one method, or that all platforms are the same. I know I did. In my last post I focused mainly on the logistics of self-publishing—namely, the money—and the dangers of rushing a book that isn’t ready. But now I want to talk about the different options available.

For starters, there are services that offer you varying levels of control, where ultimately the ball is in your court. Case in point: with CreateSpace you can pay for editing services, cover design, and promotion, if that’s what you want. Those resources are optional—you tailor your package. Same with KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). You create the product. You control the pricing. For the most part, you have final say. Probably these platforms will offer you the quintessential self-publishing experience. There are downsides, though. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard authors lamenting Amazon’s various hiccups, from failing to track sales to messing up formatting (please don’t ban me, Amazon). There are algorithms on Amazon designed to keep you from publishing plagiarized material, but I have seen a couple cases where they have gone haywire and wreaked havoc on an author’s career. That alone is probably what stresses me out the most.

Now, if you have your heart set on a more high quality book, say a hardcover with a snazzy dust jacket, you have options like LuLu. With those, you are creating and buying a product, which you will then have to sell on platforms like Amazon, but these services will not always be print on demand, which means you will have to purchase back stock and store it yourself. Don’t forget that means you need to incorporate shipping into the price of your book.

All that being said, I have never self-published. My research has led me to decide that, at least for now, I don’t want to take this route. But we’re talking about your career too, so I encourage you to do your own research and make your own decision.

Before I launch into the evils of vanity publishing houses, another method of self-publishing, let me give some context, for those of you who don’t know a whole lot about the industry. There are five major publishing houses: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette Livre, in no particular order. (I remember when there were six, before Penguin and Random House merged.) These houses are commonly referred to as the Big Five. (Is it just me, or does this sound like the prologue of a fantasy novel where the major publishing houses are embroiled in a centuries old war? Nope, just me? Okay.)

The Big Five have imprints—they’re all part of the same entity, these imprints, but they specialize in publishing certain genres. I imagine you could compare this set up to a Portuguese man o’ war, only less dangerous. For instance, Tor is a science fiction/fantasy imprint. Greenwillow publishes middle grade novels, and has a higher number of teenage authors, at least from what I’ve seen, so they were my dream imprint when I was sixteen and angsty. Katherine Teigen is the imprint that published Divergent. Alfred A. Knopf published Eragon. If you’re curious about the imprint for a specific book, look at the copyright page. Usually there will be a line near the bottom that tells you the imprint and the publishing house.

But then you have small publishing houses—also referred to as small presses or independent (indie) presses. These are not affiliated with the Big Five. These are houses like Algonquin, which published Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us. Cash flow defines the separation between the Big Five and small presses.

Both big houses and small presses pay you an advance for your novel, varying in size from four digits (say, if you’re a new romance or ya author) to seven digits (if you’re established and wildly popular, like Marie Lu or Steven King). Then, the houses give you a percentage of the royalties (money made off book sales) based on what your contract specifies, once your advance pays out. But that’s a completely different conversation. However, I would caution you about trying to navigate small presses on your own.

So then you have vanity houses. Vanity houses masquerade as indie presses, and this is your big fat warning not to publish through them. From the outside, they can seem legitimate, especially if you don’t know a whole lot about the biz. (Which is another reason why having an agent is so important—they know the difference and can help you avoid a multitude of pitfalls.)

Usually they will claim to be selective about which submissions they choose. They might offer cover designers and affiliated editing services, and you will have to pay for these. Likely you will be required to cover the cost of printing your book, although models do vary, and while they may offer you promotion services, don’t expect them to make good on their word. They will rarely pay you an advance, although you might have to sign a contract, and since you probably don’t have legal expertise in this field, you might end up signing something nasty and career damaging. (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I would recommend you educate yourself on your rights.

Go online. Google vanity publishing houses. Find ones that have gone under—they are numerous, and if you dig, you are going to find a pattern. It’s not uncommon for a con artist to start a vanity house, bilk desperate customers out of their money, go bankrupt, and move to another state where they start a vanity house under a different name. Look up testimonials of writers who have published through these venues. It’s not uncommon to hear of royalty checks bouncing, or not being sent at all, even though copies of the book continue to sell. To be fair, sometimes small presses (*cough* Dorchester *cough*) will pull this trick, but with less frequency.

“If they’re so awful, Liz, why do they still exist? Surely you don’t know what you’re talking about.” I’ll admit, there are probably some vanity houses out there that will do right by you. In all my research, I have yet to find one. This is what happens: say you’ve tried the agent route with no success, or you’re too apprehensive about the idea of the Rejection Onslaught to even query agents, so you decide to submit directly to publishing houses. Only most reputable publishing houses won’t accept unsolicited submissions. Some of the smaller ones will, true, but you’re not likely to get as good an advance as an un-agented writer.

Then you hear about vanity houses, and maybe they look like a great deal, and maybe you submit to one, and they offer you a publishing contract. All your dreams are about to come true, right? No. It’s not an honor. It’s a scam, and you’re the dupe. Let me be very blunt with you. Vanity publishers exist to make money off your desperation. Look, I understand what it’s like to want so badly to be published that you feel sick. Believe me, I’ve been there. Numerous times. It can drive you so crazy you let yourself get sucked into a bad deal like Full Fathom Five, because you just have to, have to, have to get published RIGHT NOW.

You’ve been rejected so much, and then you apply to this vanity house, with its official looking website and its submission guidelines, and of course you get accepted, because of course they aren’t going to turn away willing money, but you think you’ve finally made it past the gatekeepers and proved yourself.

I don’t recommend self publishing. I don’t. But if you are going to self-publish, I beg you: do not get tangled up with a vanity publishing house. There may be issues with other platforms, and you might have a harder time making money than you’d like, but all those hassles pale in comparison.

Be careful when you’re self-publishing. With a reputable literary agent, at least you have someone in your corner. When you’re going solo, you are your own body guard. Suddenly you are required to be extensively knowledgable in multiple fields—you are the one who needs to be able to spot the difference between a good deal and a scam. There are so many people out there who do not care about your dreams, even if they pretend that they do. They recognize your desperation and see it as a way to make money at your expense, regardless of your suffering. You deserve better than that.

But if, after reading these post, you decide to go ahead and self publish anyway, I wish you the absolute best of luck.

What Happened to Elisa Lam? // Part Two

If you’ve stuck with me up to this point, awesome. You rock. And you should know that here’s where stuff gets a little weird. Not that it wasn’t weird before. Perhaps you are familiar with a movie called Dark Water. It features a mother named Cecilia (reminiscent of the Hotel Cecil) and her daughter, living in a seedy apartment building where various spooky events take place. The water runs black and tastes foul, and a body is later found in one of the water tanks. An elevator even malfunctions. “Wow,” you must be thinking, “someone was inspired by Elisa Lam!” Those were my thoughts, until I realized that Dark Water came out EIGHT YEARS BEFORE Elisa Lam was found dead in 2013. So maybe the better question would be, “Was someone inspired by Dark Water?” Or maybe it’s just that life imitates art.

If that wasn’t weird enough for you, here’s another strange coincidence. Around the time all this was happening, there was a TB outbreak in Los Angeles, and the particular TB test doctors were using was call the Lam-Elisa. While there are theories regarding this, they require more mental gymnastics than I am willing to go into, and regardless, no evidence of TB was found in Lam’s lungs.

There are a few more salient points of interest worth touching on before we get into a full-blown discussion: The Cecil Hotel, which at that point had already been renamed the Stay on Main Hotel in a desperate attempt to rebrand, was so notorious for suicides that it was known to LA residents as The Suicide.

When Lam’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the hotel, it was dismissed. However, the coroner waffled on the cause of death, initially calling it an unknown death, and then calling it an accidental drowning. It took four months for the autopsy to be released. My question on this one, with my limited autopsical knowledge (totally a word), is whether it was possible to tell from the water—or lack there of—in her lungs, whether she had died inside the tank or outside.

Several people have been murdered at the Cecil Hotel. On top of that, Richard Ramirez (the Night Stalker), and the Austrian serial killer, Jack Unterweger, were permanent residents there at separate times, leading some to believe that the hotel is haunted or cursed.

Additionally, it has been reported, though not verified, that the Cecil Hotel was one of the last places the Black Dahlia was seen alive.

Now let’s do some hypothesizing.

Operating under the assumption that this was a murder, let’s break down the details. Say she got on someone’s bad side, maybe one of the people in the hostel room who complained about her behavior, maybe one of the hotel staff, someone with ready access to all the rooms in the building. A hotel seems like a pretty decent place to kill someone, a convenient way to frame someone else.

Having never murdered anyone myself, I can only guess at this, but I’m of the persuasion that the first rule of killing someone is making sure you don’t get caught. The best way to do this is to hide the body where it will never be found (please don’t arrest me). Given her increasingly odd actions leading up to her death, if she was murdered, I’d say it was premeditated, and that she might have gotten the sense that someone had it in for her.

Again, this is all conjecture. Bear with me. So if you’re planning to kill someone, and you’re trying to think of how to hide the body, I’m going to throw out a wild guess and say the hotel water tank is maybe one of the worst places to choose. Fun fact: Bodies rot, and they rot faster in water. In case you didn’t know, rotting bodies smell really bad; it’s kind of hard to miss. If you’re putting a body in water that people will be drinking, someone is going to notice.

It doesn’t strike me as smart, or all that feasible, to haul a body up to the roof, either up fire escapes or past two alarmed doors, climb a ten-foot ladder, and then drop her into the water. Lam may have been a fairly small woman, but if you think any of what I have just described is easy, then you don’t understand the concept of dead weight. A climb like that could have been disastrous, if not fatal, for the murderer. Arguably, it would have also been conspicuous. There are easier, safer, and more obvious ways to dispose of a body, or so I’m told.

On the other hand, the coroner found that Lam had a prolapsed rectum, with bleeding, although he did say that this could have happened in the natural course of decomposition. While a rape kit was done on Lam’s body, it’s been reported that it was never processed, because they felt there was no reason to believe she had been murdered.

It’s hard to tell how much hotel management’s decisions reflect on their culpability in the entire case. Here’s what we do know. Guests were still allowed to check in, even on the day the body was found, and were required to sign a form waiving their rights to prosecute if they became ill from drinking the water. The hotel was only required to provide bottled water for drinking, and several residents claim they were never informed about the body. To top it off, those who had already paid for their rooms before Lam was found were told they would not receive a refund.

To me, it seems unlikely that she did this herself. It’s an easy, tidy explanation to say this was caused by drugs or mental illness. With labels like that on hand, we can look nightmares like this in the face, sound in the knowledge that they will never happen to us. But Elisa Lam was never just a case file. She was a bright young woman with a rich inner thought life. She lived with a mental disorder that many people struggle with—it was an illness, not a plot device. She can’t speak up for herself now, but we owe it to her not to immediately assume that she was just another druggie or crazy person. If the evidence leads to these conclusions, then fine, at least there will be answers, but we need to at least look.

And even though murder is also an unlikely theory, that’s the one I tend to lean toward. Is it possible that someone killed her and kept her in their room until after the police had searched the place, before depositing her in the water? I can make conjectures all night, but really, the question that I keep coming back to is that, if she wasn’t murdered, and she wasn’t high, and she wasn’t off her meds, what really happened to Elisa Lam?

What Happened to Elisa Lam? // Part One

Probably many of you have heard of Elisa Lam and what happened to her, although you might not know her by name. On January 26, 2013, the Canadian university student checked into the Cecil Hotel. This date sticks out for me, and for whatever reason makes the case feel more real, because on that day I was attending my friend’s funeral. It’s weird knowing exactly what I was doing when these events took place.

Originally Lam checked into a hostel type room, but was moved by hotel management to her own private quarters after others complained about her strange behavior. Many of you have probably seen the elevator clip, the last known footage of Elisa Lam before her disappearance and eventual death, but in case you haven’t, you can find it here.

She was reported missing by her parents, but wasn’t found until three weeks later, after residents had been complaining that the water pressure was intermittently low, sometimes only a trickle, and that the water was black and foul tasting.

Reports after this point are conflicting. Some say that the employee who went up to the roof to check on the complaints about the water immediately noticed that the hatch on top of one of the tanks was open. In this narrative, he found Elisa Lam right away, floating face up. Other reports claim that the hatch was closed. For me, this opens up a whole new line of questions. If the tank was open as the employee claims, when the police searched the roof with a sniffer dog after she was reported missing, a) why did they fail to notice that this tank was open, and b) why did the police K-9 not pick up on the scent? (I could suggest that, perhaps, her body was not in the tank the entire time, but there is little evidence for this, and little further cause for speculation on that front.) Regardless, whether or not the tank was open, what they found inside was the naked body of Elisa Lam, with her clothes floating beside her. Her cell phone was never recovered.

There are some things that need to be noted about Elisa Lam. She suffered from bipolar disorder, although her last documented relapse took place a year before. (It is also worth noting that, contrary to popular belief, bipolar is a mood disorder. It does not cause hallucinations. Unless she was misdiagnosed, or had another latent disorder, her behavior leading up to her death would not have been a result of her mental illness.) Toxicology shows that she was taking her medication at the time of her death. While there was an insignificant amount of alcohol in her blood, there were no traces of hallucinogens. It has been posited that, while the footage was eerie and the circumstances around her passing were chilling, this was all the unfortunate result of a psychotic break—a tragedy, but not a mystery. However, there is at least one detail that goes against that. Namely, the elevator footage.

When viewing the footage, you can make a couple guesses about what’s happening based on her behavior. From her body language, which is at times frantic and childlike, it seems clear that she is afraid and that she is hiding from someone. At one point, she is seen talking in an animated way, though whether she is speaking to herself, to something only she can see, or to a person standing off screen, remains unknown. It is natural to see the footage as evidence of a psychotic episode, especially paired with the knowledge of her strange behavior leading up to her disappearance. But here’s what I’d like to point out. Multiple times in that footage, she presses buttons for several floors and then steps away from the elevator doors, which then fail to close. Only when she runs away do the doors finally slide shut. So we know the elevator was working, it just wasn’t working for her.

One commonly-noted aspect to the elevator footage, is the fact that there are pieces of the video missing, amounting to roughly a minute. People have suggested that the police might have edited parts out to protect the identities of innocent people who happened to walk by and appear on camera. Another possibility is that there are details that the police have held back, as they frequently do in investigations, in the event that this was a murder.

Now lets move to the roof and the water tank where she was found. In order to get to the roof, she would have had to get past two locked and alarmed doors. No alarms were reported around that time. Another way to get to the roof would have been climbing up from a window, but considering her erratic behavior on the Youtube video, it’s unclear if that would have been possible. Several sources have also referenced fire escapes, which might have gotten her to the roof. Regardless, she navigated her way to the base of one of the cisterns, and somehow managed to climb the ten feet to the top even though there was no ladder on the roof when her body was found. After that she would have had to climb inside and then remove her clothes. Certain sources have also mentioned that, in order to retrieve her body, firefighters had to cut apart the tank. People have guessed that this might indicate the opening at the top of the cistern wasn’t wide enough to fit a person through, raising further questions as to how she got inside in the first place, although that might not necessarily be the case. If she was in the water for a full three weeks, getting her out would not have been an easy feat.

This leads me to another question, a point on which I have been unable to satisfy myself. Discussing the case with Victoria at Starbucks, and later with Abby as well, we raised the question as to why, if Lam had been floating in the water for three weeks, customers were only just starting to complain about water pressure. For that matter, why was her body affecting water pressure at all, at that point?

The more a body decomposes, the more gases the bacteria inside produce, the more it floats. If the water system was gravity fed, her body would have affected the water flow only until it floated to the surface, so it doesn’t make sense that they were receiving customer complaints about water pressure three weeks in. At that point she would no longer have been blocking a gravity fed system. Additionally, it doesn’t make sense to have a pump fed water system on the roof of a fifteen story building, when gravity would be doing all the work for you, but maybe I just don’t understand big building design. Since we’re unable to tell what sort of system they were using—pump or gravity—it’s hard to determine if a decomposing body could have caused these issues.

It makes a difference, whether all four water tanks feed separately to different sections of the hotel, or if all four thousand gallons of water are fed into a single water main. Victoria mentioned that pumps are designed for specific water viscosity and suspended solids, that the simple fact of Lam’s decomposition could have been burning out the pump engines. Without schematics or further details, it’s hard to tell if the body decomp would have affected water pressure under the circumstances, or if there were other factors at play.


Stay tuned for Part Two! What do you think about this case, coffee beans? What are some of your questions?

Dark Days

For those of you wondering about why I disappeared all of a sudden, right after coming back from my last hiatus, let me explain. Long story short, I’ve been dealing with a stalker situation since mid-January. For a while, it was kind of all I could do to leave my house in the morning, because suddenly I couldn’t be sure that nothing bad was going to happen to me. Not that there was any certainty before. At any moment, wherever you are, a sinkhole could open up beneath you, a falling brick could land on your head—life is tenuous. But there’s that illusion of certainty, you know? Losing that illusion takes up a lot of mental energy. 

The little part of my brain that cares about what everyone thinks of me (hello there) has been pestering me, saying, “Oh no, you can’t tell people you had a STALKER, they will assume it was your fault, and also, you literally PUBLISHED ON YOUR BLOG that you go to Starbucks every day. What did you expect?”

Well, I mean, not that.

This is something I will probably talk about at greater length in the future, when I have my thoughts more collected and my opinions more defined, because while I joke about it, it’s true, my first instinct is to look for the fault in myself. What did I do to bring this down on me? It’s what I’ve been taught over the years.

He first approached me at Starbucks, but I get the sense that he had been following me for a while longer. Somehow he figured out where I work, asked my coworkers for my work schedule, and on at least one occasion, tried to follow me home. So that was stressful. I could joke about how I only went to the police after he got upset and stopped tipping me large sums of money, but not everyone understands that I use humor as a coping mechanism. And anyway, I used all that tip money to buy two stun guns.

Once the police were appraised of the situation and gave him the old, “Now remember, you can’t stalk people” talking to, my life got a great deal more peaceful. I’ve run into him one more time since then, and I only had half a panic attack, so that was good. I think he pretty much understands that he could get into a lot of trouble if he doesn’t leave me alone—and also that if I go missing, he’s the first person they’ll visit.

During the worst parts, numerous people advised me to quit going to Starbucks every day. Maybe you’ll read this and think, “Wow, she was sad about the thought of giving up Starbucks, talk about first world problems.” And you would be right in recognizing that I have been so remarkably blessed in my life. But my Starbucks routine was about more than simply pouring out my daily coffee libations to the two-tailed siren. What bothered me about the whole debacle is that I had worked so hard to carve out a space for myself. For me the whole thing symbolized my push for freedom and independence. I was enjoying a fledgling social life. I had overcome my fear of going places by myself. I felt like I was waking up (but, like, not just because I was drinking more coffee). Since I accepted Starbucks into my heart, I have finished one book and drafted another, which is more consecutive writing than I have done in years. I didn’t want to give that up because some man decided to go all predatory, even though everyone was telling me it was an unacceptable risk.

I took necessary precautions. Among other things, I made up a secret code to use with my sister, in case I needed to call her but he was around (which I ended up having to use), and I checked in with her four times a day so she would know if something had happened. I mapped out multiple routes to the police station. I bought an inordinate amount of pepper spray. I even set up Home Alone style booby traps inside my apartment. All this time, I kept writing, every day, even when I felt like I was having a 24/7 panic attack. And guess what? This last Saturday I finished the first/second draft hybrid of another novel, which predictably, features a serial killer. I’ll probably share a snippet with you soon, but this post is long enough as it is. Suffice it to say that my fears of never having fun writing a book ever again were unfounded, because despite all the stress, or perhaps as a result of it, this book was a haven for me.

But enough about that. Let’s talk about my new kitten!

 

Meet Hlao-roo. So far this sentient piece of dryer lint has a) taught me the true meaning of sleep deprivation, b) failed to catch a single spider, and c) managed to get stuck at the top of the staircase. I think we’re off to a fine start.

And last but not least, I can’t end this post without mentioning that my sister has a blog now! Of course I fully expect to incite a blogging feud between the two of us, but shhh, don’t tell her.