Yesterday I was at Writer Unboxed, sharing some thoughts on juggling. (Sort of.) I’d love if you hopped over and gave it a read.

In the end, I couldn’t make this line fit into the post, but I wanted to share it here:

Writing is unlike many professions in many ways. But it is exactly like most professions in this one very important way: You will get better the longer and harder you try.

There is nothing weird or shameful about that.

…

As a society, we tend to give birthday cards, send holiday greetings, and mail gifts or notes when we travel. But what about the rest of the year? The little celebrations, or the unexpected times of difficulty? What about my favorite occasion: no reason at all?

In college, I constantly left random notes for people in my hall. I tried to highlight things they had done that made me smile, or tell something cheerful if I knew they were down. This was doubly true when I became an RA.

This is a bit harder to do in “real life” (i.e., after you’ve graduated). Okay, not harder, but perhaps considered weirder. Fortunately I don’t mind being a little unconventional.

To that end, Michael’s has these dollar bins that I love. There are always stationery sets (8 cards and matching envelopes) in varying designs, and I try to pick up a couple nice-looking, all-purpose ones to have on hand.

Also, a friend recently gave me a box of a hundred or so postcards, each depicting a different old book cover. (They mostly look the same.) I like to match the titles to the reason or person I’m sending them for. “Vile Bodies” as a get well card, “The Odyssey” as congratulations on a new job.

Like I said, I don’t mind being a little weird.

…

Football. I cannot believe how much I’ve come to love this game. Flag, fantasy, and pro. I’ll have to write a post/column on it sometime. For now, I’ll just say that even though the Texans lost by basically giving our opponents 17 out of their 20 points today — grumble grumble — overall it was a good football year for me and my teams. And from now until August, I’ll be running on dreams of an even bigger, brighter next year.

In this post I talked about my childhood nickname, Chatterbox, and how my dad tried to train me to tell a story succinctly.

In this post I talked about the repetitive strain injury I get in my wrists, and the dictation software (a.k.a. Dragon) that Andy bought me to help relieve/avoid the pain.

A week before Christmas, I attended a work holiday party with Andy. I was nervous for a variety of reasons. (We would be the youngest couple there, people were going to ask about my writing, etc.) But one person managed to put me completely at ease: Andy’s boss’s wife. I’ll call her C.

Only a few years older than us, C made the best first impression of anyone I’ve met in a long, long time. Born and raised in Spain, educated in America, the daughter of a pilot, and an avid reader, she was worldly, warm, and well-spoken. When I told her that I write “books for teens,” she said, “Oh, you mean Young Adult?” I think my girl crush started right then and there. We talked at length about books, culture, and travel, and by the end of the night I pretty much wanted to be C when I grew up.

(This is all related and going somewhere, I promise.)

Part of what I admired in C was her eloquence. She didn’t hurry to speak, she didn’t add unnecessary thoughts, she didn’t stumble over her words. I’m kind of the opposite. I speak before I think, my jokes and anecdotes come out all jumbled, and sometimes I even forget what I’m trying to say in the middle of saying it. Because it’s fueled by enthusiasm, sometimes it can come off as cute. But I’m 26 now and (unfortunately) only getting older. Cute won’t work forever.

Part of what my dad was trying to get me to do — besides just not annoying him — was to arrange my thoughts ahead of time. Figure out how to say what I wanted to say in an interesting and effective manner. That was probably too much to ask of someone who still played with Polly Pockets, but it’s a skill I would very much like to have — or at least develop — now.

Enter the Dragon.

Dictating e-mails, blog posts and comments, etc. isn’t so weird. I just kind of pretend that I’m talking to whoever is on the receiving end, as opposed to my shiny MacBook. But stories are, well, a different story. I don’t naturally think out loud. Or rather, when I do, my thoughts come out rather clunky and rambling. Not exactly the words you want applied to your manuscript.

But maybe this is a good thing. Maybe using my Dragon more will not only prevent my RSI, but also teach me to think before I speak. To be able to edit my words in my head as well as on the page. Maybe I too can seem as worldly, warm, and well-spoken as C.

Or maybe I’ll just look like a crazy person talking to myself. Only time will tell.

This is how I spent my holidays:

Now it’s time to ring in a new year. I might write a more detailed year-in-review post later, I might not. Bottom line: 2011 was a leap of faith, and then the freefall. In 2012 I hope to fly.

1.

The Fishbowl, we called it. It was supposed to be a study room. Just a conference table and a whiteboard, enclosed by a glass wall. Hardly anyone used it during the day, though there were always textbooks and papers strewn across the table. (Or the floor.) But at night, two, four, six, sometimes a dozen of us would jam in, mouths full of dirty jokes and vending machine snacks. Unlike the lounges, the Fishbowl had a door, so you could keep the noise in, not disturb those who had gone to bed. After all, you know how loud studying can be.

2.

I got the letter on Valentine’s Day. “Thank you for your interest, but…” I had to move. The next year, I would not be allowed to live in the dorm that I thought of as my home. Numb, I walked into my room, looked around, dropped my backpack, and left again. I couldn’t stay there. Not as a sophomore, and not for the next few hours. So I walked. Out the door. Down the icy street. Up a steep hill of broken sidewalks. For half an hour, I wandered, weeping openly, with Avril Lavigne blasting through my iPod. My nose ran. My ears turned pink from the cold. I was homeless. I was heartbroken. I was the queen of melodrama.

3.

Every Sunday night, six of us gathered from all corners of campus and met at the intersection of Morewood and Forbes. These were my closest friends, people I’d met on the first day of college, and would hug goodbye on the last. A lot of things had changed between us over the years, but this had not. This was a ritual. This was our thing.

It was a 15 minute walk down to Fuel and Fuddle for half-price food, past the museums and the Pitt gift shop. It was a 30-40 minute wait to get seated, standing outside with the frat boys and the smokers. Then it was 60 minutes of drinks and conversation, reliving the best and worst of our college careers.

After the bill was paid, it was another 15 minutes back to the dorms, 5 minutes of lingering and chatting on the street, and then 2 minutes to get upstairs to the fifth floor, where I often found my freshman residents creating their own bests and worsts. Usually I would sit with them for a while, before finally showering and going to bed. With their voices filtering through my door, I closed my eyes and fell asleep, smiling.

Dear Me,

So, it’s your birthday. You’re 26 today. Congratulations.

Me, Age Adorable.

What, you wanted more? Sorry, dude. This isn’t a milestone. You can already smoke (didn’t want to anyway), can already drink (didn’t want to anyway), can already rent a car without paying a premium, and already had your insurance rates reduced (25 = lame). No new perks, plus now you’re closer to 30 than 20. Scary, huh?

Here’s the thing: I know what you wanted. You wanted to be an established author. Heck, you wanted that for your 18th birthday. And your 20th. And pretty much every birthday since you wrote that terrible synopsis and 15 pages for the Scholastic “first novel” competition in high school. You wanted to be the Taylor Swift of books.

But you’re not. Do you want to know why? Because you weren’t willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

Now before you run off to a corner to cry, listen: I don’t say that to be mean. I don’t say that to belittle or discourage you. You do work hard. You are talented. You will make it.

But Taylor Swift? She’s one in a million. She put music before everything. She gave up a normal life in order to pursue her dream. You didn’t.

Me, Age Ridiculous.

And that’s okay. It’s okay that you went to high school, and worried about grades, and got a college degree, and then a job. It’s okay that you watch a few TV shows, and have a boyfriend and a dog, and take time to travel. It’s okay that sometimes you do the laundry when you’re stuck on a sentence, or that you get nervous/embarrassed when people ask what you do and you have to explain that you’re an unpublished, unagented writer. It’s okay that you like to nap.

Because here’s what this birthday DOES mean:

It means that, at 26, you’ve been writing seriously for almost a decade. In that time, you “finished” your first ever novel (which needs a lot of revision). You experimented with a web series that nearly got published and is now available as an ebook. And soon you’ll be querying your first YA manuscript, which is definitely the best thing you’ve ever written. You’ve been blogging for several years, have made many good online friends, and even went viral once. You’ve gotten work experience, life experience, love experience. You’ve done things on your own terms, and you won’t have any regrets.

(Not that T Swizzle regrets her choices. I’m sure she’s quite happy with her sparkly clothes, bajillion awards, and famous, fodder-for-lyrics boyfriends.)

Rarely do things work out so neatly as JK Rowling’s 1-story-per-school-year structure, but I do feel like each November since middle school, you’ve managed to reflect and to learn something important. If there’s anything I want you to learn from this, your 26th year, it’s to throw your plans out the window. Don’t try to predict what will happen, or put your life on a schedule. Just work hard, have fun, and be kind. If you do that, everything will follow in its own way and its own time.

Love,
You