Monthly Archives: May 2012

Road Trip Wednesday: What Book Conferences Would You Love To Attend?

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{Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway’s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody’s unique take on the topic.}

This Week’s Topic: What book and/or writing conference would you love to go to?

A little over a week ago, I got to attend the DFW Writer’s Conference*, which was on the top of my MUST-GO list last year. I had a wonderful time meeting my friends, listening to inspirational speakers, and pitching to agents. 

Aside from that writer’s conference, though, my “dream conferences” to attend actually cater more toward my book-nerd-fangirl heart: BEA, ALA, and a variety of conventions, including World Fantasy con, Dragon*Con, ComicCon, YALLfest. Eventually, over the course of the next five years, I’ll be able to get to all of these conventions!

What about YOU? Any book conferences I should know about to add to my MUST-GO list?

(*I really wish I had the chance to go to my local SCBWI’s conference this year, but they held their annual conference on the same weekend as DFW Con’s. Next year!)

[I'm celebrating my blog's Birthday Month! Hop over HERE to read the deets, and fill out the comment form to enter for a chance to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble e-gift card. Remember, any additional comments on any post this month will earn you extra entries!]

Call Me Rock God

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I’m sure you’ve seen the “Rock God” iPhone commercial. If not, you can refresh your memory by clicking HERE.

I’ve loved that commercial ever since Apple launched it. It shows in simple digestible snippets how a dream becomes a reality. The boy doesn’t question his path. With smooth confidence, he buys a guitar, learns to play it, and eventually, rocks out with friends. And, he doesn’t wait for others to recognize that he’s a musician–he claims it for himself.

So, I’m under no illusion that he is far from sounding like a Rock God. But, I still watch the commercial and come away with the belief that yes, this boy creating this horrible racket, is indeed a musician. He is the Rock God he claims to be. Why? Because he lives his dream. Even before he had a guitar to call his own, let alone a band to play with, he had the Rock God mindset that drove him to find a guitar and learn how to play it.

I spent the weekend at DFW Writer’s Conference, and NYT bestselling author, James Rollins (the keynote speaker) shared the difference between getting published and not getting published: writing down his goal. 

After he wrote down his goal, he spent Every Single Day pursuing that goal. Even if it was a twenty-minute research session for his novel in progress or a full day of writing, every day was focused on making progress toward his goal. No one doubts that he is a successful author now, but I would argue that he thought of himself as an author before he was even published, before he found his agent. Probably the only thing that carried him through writing his first novel was the belief that he is an author.  A self-fulfilling prophecy, wouldn’t you say?

I attended several classes with James Rollins, and every time he spoke, I loved him more and more. I admired his ability to balance being a veterinarian (he can spay/neuter a cat in under 30 seconds!) and completing his novels.

(And, hearing about his journey inspired me to continue on my own. I’ll be hosting a giveaway of his children’s novel, Jake Ransom and the Skull King’s Shadow starting next week.)

I recognized some self-limiting beliefs this past week, and actually, this past month, that I need to change: mainly, that I can’t do this writing thing and should just give up, and I’m a fraud to call myself an author.

Thanks to James Rollins, I can claim that I’m an author. And, now I need to get to work! ;)

Any self-limiting beliefs you’ve been clinging to? Let them go! Tell me your “Call Me ___” or “I am ___” in the comments below! If you’d like, I can be an accountability buddy…I throw a mean badger if you stray from your path ;)

[I'm celebrating my blog's Birthday Month! Hop over HERE to read the deets, and fill out the comment form to enter for a chance to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble e-gift card. Remember, any additional comments on any post this month will earn you extra entries!]

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The Kindness Project: Finding Validation Through Kindness

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{About the Kindness Project–Too often kindness is relegated to a random act performed only when we’re feeling good.  But an even greater kindness (to ourselves and others) occurs when we reach out even when we aren’t feeling entirely whole . It’s not easy, and no one is perfect. But we’ve decided it’s not impossible to brighten the world one smile, one kind word, one blog post at a time. To that end, a few of us writers have established The Kindness Project, starting with a series of inspirational posts.}

I haven’t seen one of my favorite regular customers in a long time. I think it’s been over a year now. The last time I saw her, we hugged for a long minute on my sales floor, at the end of which I whispered in her ear, “I’ll pray for you,” to which she whispered back, “Thank you.”

She left my store that day to fight an enemy from within–breast cancer. She was the main reason why I walked in  Race for the Cure last year, and I have yet to tell her.

Some days, not often, I wonder what my life would have been like if I had chosen to stay on a pre-med track in college. If I didn’t succumb to the sweet siren call of being an English literature major. I wonder what I’d be doing if I’d finished my application to The Radcliffe Publishing course (now simply called the Columbia Publishing course) hosted in Columbia University.

It’s funny how I seem to ask these questions and entertain these thoughts when I’m feeling especially sorry for myself. When I’m feeling the most insecure about my life decisions. When I’m feeling kind of like a loser because for all my schooling, all my nerdiness, I only amounted to a store manager of a specialty retail store. Like my job title has any bearing on my worth. (Does that mean I’d feel more important if I became a doctor like I’d originally planned?)

Of course, if I I’d taken those paths, I may not have met my now husband. I wouldn’t have married him on a beach on Maui. We wouldn’t be living our version of This Old House. And, I wouldn’t have become a store manager who made friends with one of her customers and became someone she can cry on during a bleak moment in her life.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not spouting empowered, “If you believe, you’ll achieve” vibes every moment of my life. Being a store manager is hard work, plain and simple. It drains your mind, body, and soul. I never see my family during times families usually meet (like holidays). But, I have learned what it means to exercise kindness; to act on my sympathy; and to go beyond “feeling bad” about XYZ to actually doing something about XYZ. I don’t need an “I’m a Missionary” or “I’m a Doctor” badge to reach outside myself and make someone else’s day a little bit brighter.

At work, we often observe that the best and worst part of our job is the customer. There are days when they can make you feel worthless, less than the dirt stuck to the bottom of their shoe. But then there are those that cling to you like a friend and make you feel like you matter. Like your presence in their life, however infinitesimally short, meant something to them.

I know it’s ridiculously self-serving of me to even think about this, but knowing that I matter to someone for even a brief moment makes me feel like I made the right life choices after all. That it validated that one moment back in 1999 when I dropped the “Biology major” from my double major course load, and decided to pursue only English. I can still see my course advisor’s face and still remember him telling me that I wouldn’t amount to much with an English degree. I’d like to think that the people I’ve helped in my work would beg to differ. And, to me, that’s enough.

Recently, I watched This Means War, and in it one of the characters says that there are no mistakes. Every choice, every regret, makes us who we are today. We just need to accept where we are and move on from there. Or, as Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots going forward. Only backward.”

I used to wonder, “I need to find another job.” Over the past couple of years, I’ve learned to tell myself, “I’m here for a reason, and I’m exactly where I need to be.”

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Posting today for The Kindness Project:

Be sure to check them out :D We post the second Wednesday of every month. Want to join us? Grab our button and spread a little kindness.

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[I'm celebrating my blog's Birthday Month! Hop over HERE to read the deets, and fill out the comment form to enter for a chance to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble e-gift card. Remember, any additional comments on any post this month will earn you extra entries!]

SciFridays: Stories–The Bridges To Real World Experiences

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“That upon which we focus our attention is what we manifest in the third dimension…

I stumbled upon this blog post over at The Struggling Writer and was so intrigued by the video that I had to share. This is an engaging keynote speech by Levar Burton that explores the idea that stories are bridges to real world experiences; that imagination is the key to the unlocking of experience.

He shares his deep love with science fiction literature, a genre that dares to ask “What if?” Science fiction literature invites us and engages us in imagining a world that we ourselves would like to see, to inhabit, to explore.

He uses his own life as an example. As a child, he read a lot of science fiction books, but it was rare for him to see people like him in those pages, any heroes of color. Of course there were exceptions, but it was not the norm, especially in the ’60s.

Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, then, was hugely influential to him, and became one of his greatest life changing moments. Because what Gene’s vision said was:

“by the virtue of Nichelle Nichols sitting on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, there was going to be a place for me in that imagined future.”

(Considering his role as Lt. Geordi LaForge in Star Trek: The Next Generation, this reality manifested for him in more ways than one.)

…the stories that we tell each other inform us of who we are, why we’re here and where we’re going.”

He also goes on to say that he likes to think that there was a child back in those days who saw Captain Kirk speak into a handheld device to communicate to his team, and eventually created one of the most ubiquitously used device in our society–the cellular phone. (Now, if that same geek can please develop a teleportation device, I would truly be grateful.)

My favorite moment is around minute 2:50, where he talks about the link between that which we imagine and that which we create. He posits:

“The stories that we tell each other and have told each other throughout the history of development of civilization are integrally important, inextricably linked with how we continue to invent the world in which we live.”

“Human beings are manifesting machines. We are that child watching episodes of Star Trek, seeing those images, using our imaginations, coming up with a piece of technology that actually serves humanity going forward. Imaginations are our continuing link into ourselves in order to make contact with ourselves that we might share the beauty of ourselves through culture with the rest of the world.”

I enjoyed that our perspectives on science fiction literature align. I mentioned in a previous post, SciFridays: The Green Float Concept that science fiction literature is an ally to innovation because it asks “What if” and lends itself to “Why not?” 

I feel the need to quote Einstein again, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

What are your thoughts? Have you had an encounter with the written word that resonated with you as strongly?

[I'm celebrating my blog's Birthday Month! Hop over HERE to read the deets, and fill out the comment form to enter for a chance to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble e-gift card. Remember, any additional comments on any post this month will earn you extra entries!]

Road Trip Wednesday: What In Real Life People Can You Talk To About YA?

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Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway’s contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered.

This Week’s Topic:

What IRL people can you talk to about YA?

I haven’t met many of my current YA book buddies, since most of of them live in my computer, and I have yet to determine whether or not they’re just cleverly disguised Twitterbots. However, I did have the pleasure of meeting and lunching with several YA writers IRL at my local SCBWI’s annual conference, and since then, have had quarterly business lunches with a few of them to catch up on…business. ;) So, I do have an occasional outlet to talk books.

I’m also grateful that I have a bunch of book nerds in my family. So even though they may not be up to the specific goings-on of Young Adult literature, we can always talk about stories in general and what great stories we have read recently, and why it worked for us, and what didn’t work. And, these stories can range from every genre of literature to the latest movie or television series. I know that I’ve been over-the-moon enamored of the CBS series, Person of Interest, simply because of the intriguing storyline that show offers every. Single. Week.

(Oh, and my siblings and I have been SO EXCITED that Legend of Korra finally started airing after years of following news of its release!  Don’t know what I’m talking about? Then, we probably shouldn’t be friends. Just click over HERE, and soak in all the Avatar-goodness!)

Maybe you don’t get to talk YA with people IRL (heck, maybe it’s not even your genre, so why would you?), but do YOU have anyone you can gush to about stories? What story has captured your interest lately?

[I'm celebrating my blog's Birthday Month! Hop over HERE to read the deets, and fill out the comment form to enter for a chance to win a $20 Amazon or Barnes and Noble e-gift card. Remember, any additional comments on any post this month will earn you extra entries!]