Obsessions * Writes

Hello Internet!

So if you’re joining me here from Instagram (ObsessionsWrites) welcome! If you stumbled upon this some other way, welcome! If you’ve been following this blog for a minute you’ll know I mostly post book “reviews” and talk about writing on the side. Well today I wanted to take a hot second out of my day to write about writing (meta).

I was posting some instagram content (I’m trying this new thing where I procrastinate writing by posting about writing instead). I’m a big fan of instagram (still mad they’re affiliated with Facebook but that’s another article). What I wanted to get out was that, writing is hard. You see on instagram and other platforms cute little writing aesthetics (like this one)

Where it’s all cute coffee shops, adorable offices, and inspiring words. But in actuality writing looks a lot like this

It looks like a waste of time. You clean your house, scroll through your phone, watch Netflix, create Spotify playlists, play sims, snack, and your desk is probably always a mess. It’s hard. It’s frustrating. It’s a job. But you can’t stop. You can’t give up even when you try (and if you’re like me you’ve tried). If you’re like me you told yourself you’re not good enough to “make it” as a writer. That this “hobby” is a waste of time. That you’ve got more important things to do. If you’re like me you believed it. You believed it for so long that that self doubt turned into a kind of depression. Imagine the one thing you love and are passionate about is something you are terrible at. You actually give yourself a writers block with all your forced suppression. But you also can’t let them go, so you say “that’s okay” because you write for you. You don’t write for anyone else. No one else has to give you praise, you don’t need that validation, you just need to get the words out.

The worlds and characters and ideas are swirling in your head. They’re loud and exhausting but you try to ignore them because you work two jobs and have a family. You try to ignore them because it’s not practical, you can’t “make money” off of that right now and you live in a capitalistic society where if you don’t make money you can’t survive. So you tuck the words away and you bring them out sometimes (maybe for a cute little scene, a fanfic, a poem, a heartfelt birthday card) but you don’t let them run through you like they want to. You don’t let them consume you because you don’t have the luxury of allowing that. You need to work, and sleep, and socialize, and now there’s a pandemic and you have all the time in the world except you’re an essential worker and you’re constantly worried you’ll get sick, get your family sick, die, kill someone. So your stress takes over and your words quiet, the sound in your brain numbing and dull. You read, you take in the words of those better than you, more eloquent, more productive, more tenacious. But you don’t write.

Until you do.

Your words run through your veins, flowing from your brain to your fingers to the pen (or your keyboard as is the 21st century norm). Slowly the words overpower the stress and you’re writing again. But still just for you. You write about issues that are important to you (LGBT+ rights, family, love, tyranny, the afterlife). But always just for you.

Until.

One day, when you look at the words on your page and you copy and paste them into a text or an email and you say “hey I wrote this thing, it’s kind of lame, want to read it?” and your friend texts you back ten minutes later and tells you you’re amazing and you think she’s being nice (okay, you know she’s being nice) and it’s just a dumb little scene from an incomplete piece and is “just a hobby” anyway so you ignore their praise. Then you post it online and someone says “Thanks for writing this” or “I needed that!” and even though it was “stupid” and “silly” it made someone smile and that makes you smile but you shrug because it’s “just a silly hobby”.

If you’re like me you never finish a project. There’s always a plot hole, always a lack of plot, a lack of development, a lack of something. That magical something that you’ll know when you feel…. but you never feel it. Because writing isn’t practical and you’re not very good at it. There are a million writers, why should you try to contend with people who are so far above you? “Leave it to the professionals” as the adage goes. And people tell you this “self doubt” is normal, that you can’t achieve anything without trying. That failure is a writers “right of passage”. And it’s all true but it all feels so forced. But you can’t be quiet; your brain can’t still. And you’ve tried. You’ve tried to quit. But you can’t.

So. You make a new instagram blog to promote your writing. You write a blog about how hard and stupid writing is. And you post it knowing full well you’re the only one (except those few loyal friends) who will read it. And you sigh and accept the fact that you’ve wasted 23 minutes of your day that you could have been doing something like cleaning the bathroom, working at your real job, or scrolling mindlessly through Twitter working yourself into a rage about the current political climate.

My truth is that writing is hard. It feels like a chore. It feels like I’m wasting my time because there’s “no payout” and it’s something that’s just for me. But that’s fucking bullshit. Because it doesn’t matter if it’s just for me. You are allowed to have things that are just for you. Your own “hobbies” and your own “wastes of time” that are solely purposeless. We do not have to be constantly producing to be important. We can spend 23 minutes of our day free writing onto a blog no one reads. We can spend time creating cute aesthetics in Adobe Spark which we’re too cheap to pay for. And we can finish our Goddamn novels and share our cute little scenes with the world. We can share our heartbreak, our love, our joy, our opinions, our beliefs. We don’t have to be the worlds best writer to be important. If we are enjoying what we are doing that is one person whose life is different because of it, and that is enough. We can write and we can create and we can share and it is not a waste of time and it is not stupid. No matter what we tell ourselves.

So I say all that to say: I am a writer. (Whether I believe it or not).

And also please follow me on Instagram (shameless!).

I’m Scared Too: A Letter To The Protestors

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Coronavirus (Covid-19, SARS-COV2, Captain Trips whatever you want to call it). I’ve been thinking a lot about how we used to be; how society functioned and how it treated its people; how we are going (hopefully) to learn from this and create better societies, and a better world. And now I’ve been thinking a lot about the protestors all across the country who want to open the world; who want to take their bodies and their lives in their hands and re-open society earlier than we are prepared to do. My thoughts are still disorganized, like many of yours I’m sure, but I wanted to say to the protestors and to the people who haven’t left their home in two months:

I’m scared too. 

I understand wanting to live your life. As a busy person (normally I work two jobs and don’t have much time for anything else) I understand missing that chaos. I understand wanting to go to work. I understand wanting to follow your American Dream’s. I understand wanting the right to your own life, liberties, and pursuit of happiness. I truly believe in a persons right to their own body, to their own choices. I believe if a person wants to smoke and drink themselves to death that’s their human right. I understand wanting to go get your morning coffee, or go to your salon and get a touch up, or go to the beach and do literally nothing but enjoy the sun and the sky in camaraderie with your fellow man. I. Understand.

And I’m scared too.

Sometimes I think we’ll never “go outside” again. We’ll never know what it’s like to wake up, annoyed and bummed that it’s “Monday” and we have to go to work, back to the daily grind. Sometimes I worry we’ll never sit down on Friday night at a bar or club with our friends and enjoy a drink where we complain about our lives, or celebrate on how blessed we are. Sometimes I worry our kids will all become agoraphobic germaphobes.

I’m scared too.

I understand wanting to throw yourself into “normal” and “wish for the best”. I understand seeing the world wide percentages and going “it’s not as bad as they say”. I understand thinking that the media does a great job of using scare tactics to fear monger. I understand that politicians will use this time to get more favor. I understand being stuck in your ways and your “I’ve lived through x, y, and z” mentality. I understand going to bed at night thinking this is madness.

And I’m scared too.

I worry about the people who don’t have health insurance, who are sick and suffering silently because they cannot get tested or cannot go to the doctor without incurring insane medical debt. I worry about the people trapped in their home with an abusive person, or their own traitorous brain. I worry about the kids who only got to eat at school and now that meal is taken away. I worry about the essential workers, going to work without proper supplies and risking infection every day. I worry about the people who have recovered but might get sick with one of the new side-effects/complications.

I’m scared too.

No matter how scared we are that the economy will collapse, that we’ll lose our jobs (permanently), that our government is too broken to find a solution, that we’ll never see “normal” again… no matter how free you want to be, it is important that we remember we are not doing this for ourselves. We are doing this to protect our society. We are protecting not just the weak and vulnerable any more; with each day that passes we are learning that we are protecting our parents, our colleagues, our friends, our youth. We have got to understand that no matter how scared we are we must always put human lives above our own hubris. The day we fail to put human lives first, is the day we fail as a species; and maybe that day already happened and I am too hopeful or naive to see it. We have got to band together, stay safe, and figure this out together. When we dissent it becomes chaos and we will not survive as a society if we cannot compromise and work together.

And I’m scared too.

It’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to not know what is going to happen, to struggle with the panic of this uncertainty. To feel powerless and helpless. But we will figure this out, and we will get through this together. Because we are the human race. We are dumb, pigheaded, and thoughtless. We have selfish tendencies and big egos. But we are also good, and smart, and determined. Humans will always do their best to get in their own way; but we always overcome, because that’s who we are. So please, take a minute to think. Think about someone besides yourself; understand why we are doing this, why the whole world stopped.

We will open society again, it’s inevitable. We will enjoy the sun and the beach. We will hang out with our friends and our family and we will experience joy and we will no longer be afraid.

“Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“What To Say Next” – Julie Buxbaum

KIT: I don’t know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. It feels like no one here gets what I’m going through. How could they?  I don’t even understand.
 
DAVID: In the 622 days I’ve attended Mapleview High, Kit Lowell is the first person to sit at my lunch table. I mean, I’ve never once sat with someone until now. “So your dad is dead,” I say to Kit, because this is a fact I’ve recently learned about her.

When an unlikely friendship is sparked between relatively popular Kit Lowell and socially isolated David Drucker, everyone is surprised, most of all Kit and David.  Kit appreciates David’s blunt honesty—in fact, she finds it bizarrely refreshing. David welcomes Kit’s attention and her inquisitive nature. When she asks for his help figuring out the how and why of her dad’s tragic car accident, David is all in. But neither of them can predict what they’ll find. Can their friendship survive the truth?

I really loved this book. I love that there is a book with Autism representation. This book deals with death in a really unique way. It was very dramatic as well and the story weaved itself in a really unique way.

It was an interesting loner/popular cliche troupe but it was executed in a really unique way. I have read a couple of Julie Buxbaum’s books (you can check out “Tell Me Three Things” here) and I really enjoy her writing style. Looking forward to finding and reading more of her work.

Happy Reading.

“Two Can Keep A Secret” – Karen McManus

“Echo Ridge is small-town America. Ellery’s never been there, but she’s heard all about it. Her aunt went missing there at age seventeen. And only five years ago, a homecoming queen put the town on the map when she was killed. Now Ellery has to move there to live with a grandmother she barely knows.

The town is picture-perfect, but it’s hiding secrets. And before school even begins for Ellery, someone’s declared open season on homecoming, promising to make it as dangerous as it was five years ago. Then, almost as if to prove it, another girl goes missing.

Ellery knows all about secrets. Her mother has them; her grandmother does too. And the longer she’s in Echo Ridge, the clearer it becomes that everyone there is hiding something. The thing is, secrets are dangerous–and most people aren’t good at keeping them. Which is why in Echo Ridge, it’s safest to keep your secrets to yourself.” – From McManus’ website.

I really enjoy the way that McManus writes. She’s suspenseful without being overdramatic. Her use of imagery and story telling really blends together in a way that makes the story pop and the characters seem fuller. I had a bit of a mystery novel kick for a while and McManus fits well into the mystery/horror/suspense genre.

I think if you like mystery/suspense you’d enjoy her work. It’s focused and doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary twists and turns and useless plot like some mystery novels can.

Happy reading.

“Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch” – Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett

When the Anti-Christ is brought to Earth to bring upon Armageddon humanity has just eleven years before the End Times. Crowley and Aziraphale (Earth-Based representatives of Hell and Heaven respectively) take it upon themselves to influence the Anti-Christ (Adam’s) upbringing in the hopes of stopping the apocalypse before it can begin. With other elements in play the book follows the events leading up to doomsday in a brilliantly constructed novel full of wit, emotion, cleverness, friendship, and loyalty.

This book is brilliant. This book is everything. Honestly. I am a bit of a sucker for angels and demons (you may recall from literally anything I have ever said. Ever.). Reading Crowley and Aziraphale work against each other together is something I could read forever. I love everything about this book. It’s one of those books I don’t even want to SAY anything because you have to experience it, dear reader, freshly and without pre-formed opinions.

I will say that this book has all of the elements that matter: friendship, love, good vs. evil (angels vs. demons), humor, witches, the Brits, humanity, The End Times.

If you haven’t yet read this book I highly suggest doing so. I suggest IMMEDIATELY watching “Good Omens” on Amazon Prime. It is EXACTLY like the book and it is what I am confident in saying is a paragon of “book to show” adaptation.

I have so much more I want to talk about so for the first time maybe ever but definitely in a long time SPOILERS AHEAD. Because I just have to keep talking about this book. Turn back, go read, and come back to me when you’ve finished.

SPOILERS:

Okay so from the SECOND that you meet Crowley and Aziraphale (hereinafter known as the Ineffable Husbands) I. Fell. In. Love. Crowley with his beautiful “wicked” ways, Aziraphale with his righteous but sneaky “heavenly” ways. THE FACT THAT CROWLEY LITERALLY SAVED A DOVE BECAUSE AZIRAPHALE FELT BADLY ABOUT IT DYING. CAN THEY NOT. Their entire 6,000 year relationship is literally everything I live for.

I love Adam, I love how he’s just a kid, and how he’s just like “I love my town, and I want a Dog named Dog that I can play with and I want my friends and I to do whatever and just be a kid and have a laugh”. Like, he’s so endearing. I love that even when he starts to realize he’s powerful he’s still just kind of like “I’m only doing this so I can run Tadfield and just have a great life.” Like there’s no real malice in him, and I love that he’s somehow inherently good even though he’s literally born of and destined to be evil.

I love Anathema, she is definitely in my top list of Witches that I love. How she just blindly (well, not so blindly I guess) follows Agnes’ predictions. I love her determination and her utzpa.

Newton kills me. He’s literally one of my favorite characters. I just think he’s tops. Him and the entire Witch Finder Army.

I think this book is actually perfect writing. I don’t know that I have ever read a book as quickly and as thoroughly and as obsessively. I highly recommend reading the book. Watching the program, and reading the script book (which I have purchased and will be reading in the very near future).

“The Hate U Give” – Angie Thomas

“Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.” – From Thomas’ website.

This book is perfect. It is so heartfelt and relevant. The characters are flawed and real and raw. The story is emotional, heartbreaking, and tangible. I am so glad that this book exists to call attention to all of the racism that is so easily ignored. We are so desensitized to it all and we cannot allow ourselves to be that way.

Starr’s inner battle becomes an external movement and it shakes up a community. We, as a human race, need to let it shake up our communities as well. We are still in a position where situations like Khalil are happening daily. The injustice is intolerable, and I am so glad Thomas is writing about it, bringing attention back to it, and not letting it become the norm.

The entire message of the book is so beautiful, full of love and acceptance and family and forgiveness. I cried I don’t even know how much over how simply beautiful this book was and how helpless the very real life situations feel. But what you learn from Starr is that it’s not helpless; we can always stand up, use our voices, and make a difference.

“Fake Out” – Eden Finley

Maddox leaves his hometown to move to New York City. After the pressure to marry his high school girlfriend overwhelms him he lies and blurts out that he’s gay. He flees to New York and doesn’t look back. Now, five years later, his ex his getting married and he finds himself invited. And dateless. The problem wouldn’t be too much except now he’s on a time crunch to find a “boyfriend” and fast.

Damon, an ex baseball player and aspiring sports agent, gets roped into being Maddox’s fake boyfriend (at his sisters behest) because Maddox might have some pull with a client he can set Damon up with.

48 Hours is all the time they have to spend together to pull off this lie. Should be easy… right?

Okay, now, this book might look cheesy but let me tell you it is also cheesy. I loved it though\, honestly. I’m a sucker for a good “Fake boyfriends” book. I love the “friends to lovers” troupe. I love “oh we just have to spend a weekend together no big deal” troupe. Honestly I’m a sucker for romantic books.

This book was just as perfect as I imagined it to be based on the cover image, title, and synopsis. I feel like if you’re expecting Charolette Bronte you should be steppin’. But if you’re expecting a gorgeously athletic sexually confused male and a brooding also athletic sexually stable man to spend time together and fall in love and have a wild ride doing it, then yes this is a book for you.

This book is a standalone though it is considered part of the “Fake Boyfriends” series. I haven’t read any of the others yet, I’m still too in love with Damon and Maddox.

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” – Jesmyn Ward

Following a family in Mississippi as they navigate a new stage in their lives, bouncing from points of view, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a tale of family, loss, and hope.

This book was recommended to me by a friend; it’s not normally my usual type of book (I’ve been breaking out lately, it’s fun). It was somber and deep. The racism was striking and upsetting. The supernatural elements were clever and the different voices were really well done. The book felt very raw and vulnerable. The fact that so much hatred exists in todays age is heartbreaking, which is why this book feels so real.

What I loved most though is the hope of it. Despite how subdued and dark the book was, there’s an undercurrent of hope, always pushing at the seams to the very last note of the book. I loved that. The book was very well written.

I would definitely recommend checking out this book.

“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” – Yuval Noah Harari

In Sapiens Harari explores humanity from the Neanderthals to modernity; breaking down evolution into stages essentially. The book is broken up by stages: Cognitive Revolution, Agricultural Revolution, Unification of Humankind, and Scientific Revolution. Integrating hypothesis with theories on evolutional biology Harari has produced a philosophical textbook.

This book is not in my normal lineup, if you’ve been following me you’ll notice how it doesn’t quite line up with “The Selection” or “To All The Boys…” I honestly read it because Chris Evans said it was a good book. I was hesitant to read a suggestion from a celebrity after I read another book suggested by a different celebrity that I didn’t like at all (I’m so sorry). But I picked it up with faith and read. It was interesting. It was written in a very compelling way; and I liked the concepts in it. It was written in language that could be absorbed by someone who is in fact not an evolutionary biologist but it wasn’t put into such layman terms that it was dull.

One of my favorite takeaways from the novel (is actually the quote on Harari’s website) “Homo sapiens rules the world because it is the only animal that can believe in things that exist purely in its own imagination, such as gods, states, money and human rights.” This stuck with me, more than anything else in the book. Humans are amazing and complex creatures, we can create and imagine and all because our brain says it’s so. We look at the sky and see a blinking light and we say “hey what if that’s a UFO” or we say to each other “this dollar bill means something because I said so”. Honestly the entire section explain how money evolved was one of the best sections. I’ve always been so frustrated by currency (why does a tiny sliver of cotton and linen with a dead president on it mean so much to people?!) and the way Harari broke it down (still makes little sense to me) but it helped so much! Of course a farmer would say “here take these shells instead because you can’t possibly carry 80,000 pounds of rice with you when you leave here but I want this land and that’s what these shells are worth. Promise.” It makes sense that we wouldn’t be able to barter forever (here’s a chicken/thanks here’s those new shoes you needed). We have gotten too big for that at this point. We can express so much love just because we think we should (and conversely of course that can be so much hate because we think we should). It goes back to one of the things I love most about humanity: Free Will. I am a big, big advocate for Free Will (I have a hard time painting Lucifer as a bad guy for example) and I love that sapiens can do that. I love that you can decide to do whatever you want; even if that means that sometimes people chose the negative paths, because you get to choose. That’s the beauty of all of this, on a universal scale yes, but within yourself too. You can make so many choices every day and it’s a miracle to me, Free Will.

As much fact as this book had (and I did literally zero research so maybe it’s all malarky) it also was riddled with philosophy and that’s what stuck with me. I love philosophy. I love humankind and exploring why we do the things we do, who we are, where we came from, what’s going to become of us. I want to be immortal so that I can see our future (and because dying is scary). We have such a capacity for good or evil and there’s no limits to us. It’s empowering and terrifying.

I didn’t realize how much I liked this book honestly until I started writing about it. I kept talking about it to people while I was reading it, mentioning things (like this one breed of monkey who has developed lying. They’ll give off a certain call for if there is a land predator and another one if there is a sky predator, and this one breed has developed the ability to give the wrong call so that they can scare off others and steal their food. It’s amazing, and also tragic), and going on about things I was learning; but writing it all down is making me realize how much I enjoyed it.

Read it and let me know what you think! Let’s chat!

“A Wrinkle In Time” – Madeleine L’Engle

So I had never read this book. Most people who are into nerdy shit (space, supernatural, super heroes, good/evil) have read this book. Apparently, it’s a gateway book.

Well here I am, thirty years and change, finally reading a children’s book. And why, might you ask did I read a children’s book when I have thirty and change years on my vessel? Because of the damn Tesseract. Now, you might not know this but I am a huge, huge fan of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), and if you are caught up at all on that saga you know that the Tesseract is a very important Thing(tm) (no spoilers don’t worry). So when I was perusing the library with my nephew and sister and my sister goes “no wonder y’all are into nerdy shit” and shows me the description on the dust jacket of “A Wrinkle In Time” which has the word TESSERACT in curly script I said “wait, what.” and we then proceeded to have a twenty minute conversation about how I’ve never read or seen or in any way known anything about “A Wrinkle In Time”. At the conclusion of the conversation I checked the book out from the library.

So. Reading it took all of four hours (it’s short and made for children so it’s a nice quick read). While I love me a sci-fi space, anti-communism disguised as good versus evil plot, I just didn’t love this book. I liked it. I thought it was good. I love that the answer (as usual) is love. I just didn’t have that sense of wonder that I was kind of hoping to have… I don’t think that things were explained well? I think it was a lot of “this happened. then this happened. now this is happening.” I just didn’t feel a lot of connection to the characters or the plot. I tried to keep reminding myself that it was made for children and that the protagonist was a child (like when a solution seemed really logical and she didn’t get it I had to remind myself she was 12) and that helped.  At the end I didn’t really care that it ended? I see that there are more books in the series (five in all) and I read their wiki pages because there was enough curiosity in me to see what happened but have no desire to read the actual books which is a real shame because some of the elements of the other books sound awesome (alter egos, telekinesis, nephilim, druids, Samhain…)

I think this book is a good gateway book but there are definitely better books out there. I know it’s a beloved classic and all and I’m glad to finally say I read it, and I really wish I had read it as a kid.

Happy reading.