I took the first part of a painting class and as everyone was putting up their paintings, I ghosted out. Seriously, I snatched my painting off the easel and ran out, while these other people who had time and talent to take two hours out of their afternoon made friends and connections as they looked at each other’s works in progress.
Brave?
Not one bit.
Apparently, I have a lot of work left to do.
At first I pretended to myself that the reason I rushed off was because the painting was such a mess—chaotic colors—dry brushes—clashes and strokes that made no sense—and then I admitted about one mile onto the Crooked Road that it was because I was such a clashing, chaotic mess. Not the painting. Me.
I was such a mess that I called Shaun and told him what I’d done.
“Are you going to go back next Tuesday?” he asked.
“Of course not. I ghosted out.” My hands tightened around the steering wheel. “I told them how my sweet mom said I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body and I wanted to prove her wrong. I was so vulnerable. Nobody else was so vulnerable. They were real artists. Rocky Mann was there!”
“He’s a potter.”
“He’s real.”
“You’re also real.”
“An art teacher was there! And another potter and—”
And then because the wireless coverage on our island sucks, I lost the connection.
When I got home and dealt with all my own editing and writing deadlines and family (dogs and cats and human) needs, and wrote stories for my local news blog, and went to a meeting, I let myself look at the painting again.
It was still an unholy mess. And I broke all the rules. It was supposed to be about color and light and looking at plants through that. My plant became some sort of geyser. A bird head in rough form snuck in. A woman, small with hands lifted to the sky stood at the bottom center.
I don’t know how she got there.
And I don’t know how I got here either. But I’m going to try to channel a little more fierce next week. Maybe go back. Maybe not turn myself into a ghost or other transparent things.
Anyway, I hope that you get where you want to be this week or next. I hope you turn yourself solid. No more ghosts.
Here is that work in progress. Or possibly “work that’s about to be painted over.” 🙂
Agh.
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
He was walking next to me, one step ahead, turning to face me, pausing so I could keep up. “You’re going to a bar? Off campus? With people who aren’t students?”
“I am.”
When I was in college, I got to get out of my college bubble because I dispatched as part of my work-study. I was poor, so I had work-study, grants, aid, and a small loan. Being a security dispatcher meant that I talked to and hung out with people who weren’t students, professors or staff. My college was pretty great. But honestly? Between that dispatching job and interning for Janet T. Millsfor two summers when she was the Androscoggin County District Attorney? It’s where I learned the most about the world and people.
The other student stopped, turned to face me and said, face full of raised eyebrows and slack lips. “Why?”
“Your face is a question mark,” I told him.
“You are devastatingly weird,” he huffed and walked on. A second later, he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Why not?” I liked the people at work and at my internship.
“Because it’s unsafe,” he said. “You don’t—They are older than you.”
“Not all of them.”
“They aren’t students.”
I stopped now, right on the edge of the campus where the student housing ended and the Lewiston apartment buildings began. “So, students are safe, but regular people aren’t?”
He didn’t have a real answer. I went out to that bar because I was always doing things back then that made me uncomfortable, that made me learn, and I watched a coworker sing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” with a skinny, pale guy on the fiberglass karaoke floor in a bar that smelled like 90s cops’ thick deodorant, chewing tobacco, and beer. Half the bar was cops and people from the DA’s office, though not the DA, and the other half were people that the cops had arrested before, that I’d seen in the courthouse. They all mingled together. Or at least they did that night.
The guy my coworker was singing with had a criminal record and a frame that barely held up his skin; brown hair leaked past the ridge of his t-shirt. She sang a song she hated, but she knew her voice sounded good when she crooned out Streisand, even when she had too many.
“Thank you,” she said to the totally inebriated guy and to the drunk audience. She thanked the guy out of professional courtesy not because he sang well. He didn’t.
“Welcome,” he replied so loudly that it came over the microphone and we all laughed. He took a bow.
He didn’t leave her side when she walked back to our table. He ordered two margaritas and paid.
“I might sleep with him later,” she told me, leaning in, all alcohol breath.
He said to her, still so loudly, “You’re beautiful singer.”
“Thank you.” She flipped through the book of karaoke songs and the guy was off to the john. She looked at me. “You never go up there and sing.”
“Can’t do it,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Too scared.”
“Of singing?”
“Of sucking.”
On the way back, he-who-was-not-afraid-of-sucking clapped along and took the microphone away from a man serenading some fishnet wearing girl with a country song I didn’t recognize. He strained to wiggle his hips to the rhythm while he sang. He couldn’t. He tried some pseudo sexy pelvic thrusts.
“Carrie is afraid of singing,” Jessie announced.
my art that I’m always so afraid to share.
He eyeballed me and his hand clung to the curve of Jessie’s back. “Carrie looks like she’s afraid of a lot of things.” He leaned forward so all I could smell was him; beer sour, tobacco stained-breath. “You are afraid of your own damn voice, aren’t you?”
I was. Jessie wasn’t. He obviously wasn’t. But I was and I still kind of am, but I’m working on it.
Every week, I’m trying to learn that it’s not the end of the world to get a small detail wrong and that you can correct that detail and that it’s way more important to focus on the act of speaking, writing, singing, reporting, doing. It’s way more important to enjoy and be a part of the process.
But it’s so hard sometimes.
How about you? Are you finding ways to be brave, to put your voice out there, to sing and not worried that you might not sound awesome? I hope so. I hope you do.
Also, I made a QR code for my art place. How cool is that?
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
I’m not sure why I’m so haunted by this group of characters and why I get so much more anxious about these books than my others, but I really do.
Thank you so much for reading it. Your reading allows me to keep writing. So thank you. Thank you a million trillion times over.
This year was quite a year for me to get out there. It started as a love story for my husband and my little girl and my town and became something beyond any of us and especially beyond me. Fiction is so much fun that way. I hope you check it out. And thank you so much for your support. Being a writer means everything to me.
Xo
Carrie
It’s the second book in the Bar Harbor Rose Mystery series is called THE PEOPLE WHO KILL.
Sometimes it seems like everyone wants someone to die . . . .
After dealing with a serial killer and a long Maine winter, Rosie Jones is ready for a little bit of calm in her adopted coastal Maine town. Then Ernie Emerson, a ladies man and newly married cop, is bludgeoned to death outside a summer estate in what many think was a robbery gone wrong.
But Rosie soon realizes that a lot of people, including the fired town manager, had some pretty powerful reasons to want Ernie dead.
The death of Ernie brings a whole lot of repercussions for Rosie. She might be losing her reporting job. There’s all kinds of tension with her still-not-divorced, sort-of-boyfriend, Seamus Kelley, and her snooping is potentially making her the killer’s next target.
Hoping to solve the crime before she gets hurt any more, Rosie starts to put the pieces together. But that’s not that easy when nobody, including Seamus, wants her to do law enforcement’s job and solve the murder of one of their own.
My next book? It’s in July and it’s calledTHOSE WHO SURVIVED and it’s a YA murder mystery.
New Carrie Jones Young Adult Mystery
Share this if you want and also because it would be super nice of you!
Hey! Welcome to episode 14 of LOVING THE STRANGE where we talk about the strange, weird things people love and why.
And this week’s episode is all about aliens, creatures/beings from another planet and the people who believe in them . . . or not.
Sadly, we talk about probes, enemas, and whether we should just go full on pothead for the podcast and so much more. I hope you’ll check it out! And like and subscribe or sign up for the blog posts so you never miss our weirdness.
Thank you all so much for listening! This wouldn’t be fun if you weren’t here.
The extra shout-outs go to our high level patrons who also read Carrie’s books in progress and get some art in the mail sometimes.
The Most Important Thing You Have In Your Writing Career Is You
We know! We know! You were probably hoping for a cool app, or the perfect book about plot beats, but nope. It’s you.
You can’t write if you don’t exist. You write best when you’re doing pretty fine.
So here are the ways to actually invest in yourself.
Stay healthy for your brain
It’s pretty hard to write when you feel like crap because when your brain is all broken. As Harvard Healthbeat says, “First it is important to remember that you need a healthy body to have a healthy brain.”
How do you do that? According to Harvard:
Step 1: Eat a plant-based diet
Step 2: Exercise regularly
Step 3: Get enough sleep
Step 4: Manage your stress
Step 5: Nurture social contacts
Step 6: Continue to challenge your brain
Stay happy or at least okay. Relationships matter.
Your relationships with other people are really important. They help you evolve. There’s a thing called the dependency paradox.
As Kyle Benson writes,
“Our partners powerfully affect our ability to thrive in life. They influence how we feel about ourselves, what we believe we are capable of, and they ultimately impact our attempts to achieve our dreams.
“Even Mr. Self-Actualization (Abraham Maslow) himself argued that without bonds of love and affection with others, we cannot go on to achieve our full potential as human beings.
“Once we choose a partner, there is no question about whether dependency exists or not. It always does.
“Countless studies show that once we become intimately attached to another human being, the two of us form one physiological being.
“Our partner regulates our blood pressure, our heart rate, our breathing, and the level of hormones in our blood. The emphasis of independence in adult relationships does not hold water from a biological perspective.”
Kyle Benson
There’s a link to Kyle’s post in our notes and it’s just so good, but the part that really rings true for writers and other creatives is this:
“When a partner is supportive, we are more willing to explore and our self-esteem and confidence gets a boost, which allows us to go after our deepest desires. This not only improves the quality of our lives, but it also deepens and enhances our satisfaction within the relationship and our physical health.
“But as many of us know, sometimes our exploration leads to failure, rejection, and painful experiences. When these bad events happen, our biological programming creates anxiety that leads us to seek proximity (physically and/or psychologically) with the person we love.
“If they are supportive during this stage, our stress will go down and we cope with our problems faster, which ultimately leads us to overcome the problem and continue to go after our deepest desires.”
Kyle Benson again
So find those supportive partners and get rid of the rest!
Get some skills!
Carrie resisted the urge to put a z on the end of the word skills in our podcast notes, but here’s the thing: The more you learn, the less you settle. The more you learn, the more capable you become.
Learning and skills come from classes, from reading, and from experience. Mix it up. Learn in different ways.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
There you go. You write best when your brain works, when you’re happy, when you have skills and are learning about how to make the best stories possible. So invest in yourself, people. Take care of your health, your relationships and learn.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
You can go through your life just barking at thing, but you want to expand your brain and your repertoire and really immerse yourself in what makes you and your body happy.
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
FREE BOOK? YES! I AM SERIOUS.
Click here to subscribe to my weekly newsletter and get a free pdf of my book!
Seriously. The best books are like wedgies. You can’t ignore them. They get right up inside you and into places they aren’t supposed to go.
And sometimes it’s hard to get them out.
This week Carrie talked to a lot of her writers about how if you don’t long to write your scenes, your readers probably aren’t going to long to read those scenes either.
And recently the New York Times talked to Steve Martin (actor, writer, comedian) about books. He’s allegedly addicted to audiobooks, which is cool.
He said, “I’m also a sucker for the magic of opening paragraphs. I’ll never understand what the sorcery is in literature and movies that engages you immediately and makes it impossible to look away.”
A wedgie engages you immediately.
And a book can do that too, sometimes. But sometimes it’s not like a wedgie; it’s more like a bad 8-hour Zoom meeting about land use ordinances and setback requirements in a town you’ll never visit.
So how do you keep your book from being boring?
You wedgify it. Yes, we made up that word.
HOW DO YOU WEDGIFY A BOOK?
You go all in. Make the conflict as big as possible.
You have dynamic scenes where things happen. Not just the character’s meandering thoughts about Zoom meetings.
You make us care. Wedgies matter because your bum matters.
WRITING TIP OF THE POD
Go all in with your stories. Make the conflict (internal or external) huge, presidential huge. But more than that, make us care about who the conflict is happening to.
DOG TIP FOR LIFE
Commitment is not a dirty word.
We talk about this in our random thought and how David Brooks (the writer) has some issues regarding privilege and class as we all do, but here is something interesting that he wrote in his book, which uses two mountains as a metaphor for our journey and aspirations in life.
Moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inculcate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments — temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation. When your life is defined by fervent commitments, you are on the second mountain.
David Brooks
That second mountain? It’s not just happiness. It’s joy. It’s as David Schools paraphrases it, “a journey to a moral life.”
And what are those commitments? It’s not just marriage so do not panic! It’s also family, vocation, faith/philosophy, and community.
Schools says:
“Full exploration of material, experiential, and intellectual aims leave you hungry for more, restless from comparison, and lonely in your deepest substrate. It’s exhausting. The self is unable to remain in a state of permanent satisfaction.
“This is what Brooks came to find in his own journey. What then is left? You decide to “settle” for that dirty word. Commitment. Only commitments matter. Paradoxically, they are actually what make you feel most alive and here’s why:
“You love what you sacrifice for. When you give yourself away to someone or something, you find a sense of purpose that isn’t focused on the rat wheels of personal development or self-improvement. Instead, you find an exhilarating freedom that connects with other people on a deeper level.”
David Schools
That’s a pretty big dog tip for life right there. And for you writers listening out there, it is the commitments we have to our book and that our characters have to each other that make the meaningful wedgies.
SHOUT OUT!
SHOUT OUT!
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.
Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
I have a quick, pre-recorded Teachable class designed to make you a killer scene writer in just one day. It’s fun. It’s fast. And you get to become a better writer for just $25, which is an amazing deal.
LET’S HANG OUT!
HEY! DO YOU WANT TO SPEND MORE TIME TOGETHER?
MAYBE TAKE A COURSE, CHILL ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUY ART OR A BOOK, OR LISTEN TO OUR PODCAST?
The other night Shaun and I imbibed some alcohol and I declared that to not have a who-gives-a-swear-word attitude is to be compliant.
This made Shaun really happy.
I said it because I was talking about authors and politics and being afraid to say what you think because you are afraid of backlash. I’ve been listening to a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers who all preach putting your authentic self out there so that your group of supporters are supporting the real you, not some fake, shadow version that’s trying to appeal to everyone.
Shaun said “Google authors who struggled and said, ‘F-it, did a 360, and found success.”
This was hard to do, actually. There was no nice search results for that. But one thing it brought up was the infamous book called, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*&k.”
“Chances are you know somebody in your life who, at one time or another, did not give a f- and went on to accomplish amazing feats. Perhaps there was a time in your life where you simply did not give a f- and excelled to some extraordinary heights. I know for myself, quitting my day job in finance after only six weeks and telling my boss that I was going to start selling dating advice online ranks pretty high up there in my own “didn’t give a f-” hall of fame. Same with deciding to sell most of my possessions and move to South America. F-s given? None. Just went and did it.”
There’s a lot of stupid minutiae that we go around giving too many f’s about daily, isn’t there? And that? It drains are energy for the things that are important to care about.
Manson goes on and says, “Indeed, the ability to reserve our f-s for only the most f-worthy of situations would surely make life a hell of a lot easier. Failure would be less terrifying. Rejection less painful. Unpleasant necessities more pleasant and the unsavory s-word sandwiches a little bit more savory. I mean, if we could only give a few less f-s, or a few more consciously-directed f-s, then life would feel pretty f-ing easy.”
There are a lot of super famous authors who struggled for a bit before hitting success. Toni Morrison. Stephen King. Raymond Chandler. Margaret Atwood. Frank McCourt. Madeleine L’Engle, a much lauded children’s book author, almost stopped writing after getting a rejection on her fortieth birthday.
She is quoted as saying, “I had to write … If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing,” she claimed.
Her book, A Wrinkle in Time was rejected twenty-six times and then was a smash hit, winning the John Newbury Medal.
She stopped giving a f about it being a waste of time, feeling guilty that she wasn’t financially contributing, and did it.
Or think of someone who isn’t a writer-writer. Jay-Z tried to get a record deal from everyone in 1995. No company would sign him. He didn’t let their lack of vision or support define him. No. Instead, he didn’t give a f- about what they said and made his own record company. Then the same thing happened as he tried to make a distribution deal. He also allegedly stabbed someone at a record release party, so that might be taking the not giving a f a little too far, but seriously? The guy has done so much and become such an influence.
Still though, no stabbing.
So, how about you? What’s holding you back? What are you wasting your energy on?
Writing Tip of the Pod
What would you write if you did not give a f- about whatever is holding you back?
Dog Tip for Life
Embrace who you are and don’t give a f- about what other dogs think of you. They don’t know your story. You get to be you.
SHOUT OUT
The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Night Owl” by Broke For Free.
On one of my Patreon sites I read and print chapters of unpublished YA novels. THE LAST GODS and SAINT and now ALMOST DEAD. This is a monthly membership site (Hear the book chapters – $1/month, read them $3-month, plus goodies!). Sometimes I send people art! Art is fun.
On this, my second site, WRITE BETTER NOW, you can do a one-time purchase of a writing class or get two of my books in eBook form or just support our podcast or the dogs. It’s all part of the WRITING CLASS OF AWESOME.
It’s a super fun place to hang out, learn, read, and see my weirdness in its true form.
Hey! It’s Be Brave Friday, the day when I try to be brave myself and when I hope that you are trying too. Remember, being brave makes us stronger even as it makes us more vulnerable.
For me, being brave is often showing my art, but this week, podcaster, Sara Crawford introduced me as “writer, podcaster, and painter.” And that? It basically made my heart lift up into the air, winged and joyous.
So, be brave. You’ve got this. Bring that joy to your heart.
