Janel Brubaker's Blog, page 11

Birthday Musings

This week, I turn 34 years old.

According to my tradition, I’m taking my birthday off of work and giving myself a long, relaxing weekend at the coast where I will read, I will write, I will walk in the sand and the cold water, I will toss the ball for my puppy, and I will soak in as much ocean spray as I can. The ocean soothes and rejuvenates. And my novel is currently over 53,000 words, so we will see just how much more of it I can get written in the four days I’ll be at the coast.

And here’s the thing: life has been hard, really fucking hard, since 2019, but little by little, I’m doing the kind things for myself. I fall back into bad habits at times, but instead of staying there, I love myself enough to push forward once more. I can’t achieve everything all at once. I can’t break all the bad habits and toxic cycles all at once. It takes consistent effort, and while that can be – and often is – exhausting, it’s necessary to build the life I want.

Last night, I was part of my usual Sunday evening writing salon and I wrote a poem about a dream I’d had the night before. It was an absurd dream where I was suddenly in boot camp, only I had my cat Lester with me and he was a kitten again, and everything was chaos. It would have been amusing, but my ex was there. So what would have been a typical silly dream was more like a nightmare. Everything I felt about him while we were married, the gaslighting, the neglect, the constant barrage of abuse, came to the surface of this dream and I was back in the marriage that cost me – literally – everything to leave.

Through the poem, I realized how tired I was, how tired I have been lately. Work, writing, and school take up so much of my attention that it can be difficult to be aware of my mind and my body. But last night, I wrote a poem that revealed to me a truth: I am tired, and that’s okay. And truthfully, surviving abuse is exhausting. It’s easy to romanticize, but the crux of the issue is that escaping abuse is a tremendous feat, and healing from it is even more so.

I’ve written before that healing isn’t linear, and it isn’t, but neither is the ways in which we heal. Sometimes, we need a break. A moment to just breath and let the pain be painful. That’s what I gave myself last night, and today, even though I’m still tired and the dream still haunts me, I feel a bit better. Knowing I have a four day weekend to really sit in silence and let myself focus on the things my heart holds the most dear, is motivating and helps me take each step I need to take to get to the coast.

So remember, you matter. And it’s okay to not be okay, and to take the time you need to rest. Give yourself room to rest.

Post Writing Retreat Reflections

A few weeks ago, I went with friends to the coast where we spent three days jamming out words on our works in progress. I gave myself an insurmountable goal of beginning and completing the entire fourth draft of my novel, which means that, unsurprisingly, I did not meet this goal. I did, however, get about 3,000 words written, which was still a big accomplishment. It is not easy taking a novella that you think is mostly done and expanding it to be a novel-length book that still needs a lot of additions and revisions. It requires a lot of consideration over which parts of the novella need to be expanded, which parts need to be condensed or removed altogether, and what new details are required to make the new timeline work.

Upon returning home I realized that I had no idea how to make this expansion actually happen. I thought back over the retreat to when one of my friends mentioned outlining. I used to outline all of the books I was planning to write, but it never seemed to help me actually do the writing, so I stopped. I started thinking, since I already had a manuscript I was working on, one I had “completed” three previous times, then maybe doing to chapter-by-chapter out line to brainstorm what I might add to those chapters could help? I spent over two hours writing down the details that were already in each chapter, as well as what needed to be expanded to make the manuscript more well rounded and developed.

So far, this is has been immeasurably helpful. I’ve added another 4,000-5,000 words to my manuscript, and I’ve only completely revised two chapters (out of 13). If I’m able to keep myself on top of my homework, then I can use most of my lunch breaks to get the bulk of my writing done. It’s been working so far. I won’t lie, I’m kind of ready for this second masters to be over so that I can really dive into getting these novels written. My planned out writing schedule is intensive, pushing for two books published a year. It’s lofty, but it’s what I want. It’s the thing I’ve most wanted in my life: to write books. Loads of them. As many as I can in this lifetime.

October is the month that I will complete this fourth draft. Once it’s done, I’ll be sending it to my beta readers for their feedback, and then it will be time for NaNoWriMo, where I will draft 50,000 words of my sequel. December will be spent making further revisions to book one based on the feedback I receive from my beta readers, and then hopefully the manuscript will be polished and ready for publication. Because my goal is to publish this novel in February.

A life built around the creation of new worlds and putting those worlds on paper is a really good life. I think of the writers I love who did exactly that: Tolkien, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Terry Brooks, Dionne Brand, and so many others. This is the writing process in action. One thing I wish my M.F.A. had covered was how our writing process will need to be adapted to our external responsibilities. And sometimes, this adapting can occur often. What matters, though, is that we let ourselves adapt with it and continue to find ways of making time for creativity. It doesn’t have to mean writing thousands of words at once, although that can be part of it. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s process.

Sometimes, writer’s block just means we need a change in our process. And the writing retreat I went on in September helped me realize that for my own process. And so far, the outline is helping me get words put on the page.

Writing Retreats and Other Things

Today I’m leaving for the coast with three of my writing friends for a long weekend of writing, creativity, and of course, the gorgeous Pacific Ocean. This is an annual retreat that we haven’t been able to do over the last two years due to Covid, and now we’re finally starting it back up. My partner’s family has a beach house, so we’re staying there.

This is going to be a great weekend. It’s what I’m hoping will be the kickoff to my new writing schedule. Now that my debut book of poetry has been officially released (I’m still not over that!), I’ve been looking forward to what comes next. And as much as I would love to dive right in to another book of poetry, I’ve accepted that I simply don’t have the creative bandwidth for that right now. And I’ve been longing to get one novel done for years, so I think that’s where my creativity is asking me to go.

Poems can be written whenever the inspiration strikes, after all.

So my plan for this weekend (tonight, all day Friday, all day Saturday, and then some of Sunday) is to get the entire fourth draft of my novel done. I don’t know what that means other than 1) trying to get as close to 50,000 words as possible, 2) looking through the feedback from my beta readers and making the necessary changes, and 3) really making sure that the images and details of each chapter is starting to come together in a cohesive way. Some of this has been done already, but much of it still needs a lot of work.

I don’t know if I will ever make enough money as a writer to quit my day job and simply write full time. With the sheer amount of student loan debt I have, chances are I won’t. But even if not, I want my life to be full of creativity. I want to write. A LOT. My spirit and my soul need writing the way lungs need oxygen. It’s a tired metaphor, but it’s the only one I can use that even remotely grasps the urgency I feel when I fall out of my writing schedule. And to be fair, it is very hard to work full time, be in school full time, and try and write multiple books per year.

But this is how discipline is formed.
This is how the writing goals become writing milestones.
This is how the fucking books get written.

And even though I know that there is a long road ahead of me, I also know that I’ll get there. Step by step. It won’t always be glamorous or exciting, but it will be the life I’ve wanted to live since I was a kid, the life I’ve already been living. And one of the tools I intend to use to make sure I keep as close to my writing schedule as possible is weekend-long writing retreats periodically throughout the year.

It feels insurmountable, this new goal. And I might not be able to keep to it as stringently as I’ve planned, but even just having the schedule will keep writing in the forefront of my mind. And once I’ve completed my second masters (I’ve got this semester, next semester, and then next fall semester before I’m done), I’ll have that much more time to devote to my writing.

Here’s to the change of the seasons.
Here’s to autumn and her inspiration.
Here’s to the coast and her relaxation.
Here’s to the pen and all the ink I’ll use to get this novel written.

A Quick Tip

If you’re like most writers, you probably struggle at times with keeping yourself motivated, or even figuring out a writing schedule that works for you. I have a tip that worked for me, and it might help you, too.

I have a LOT of writing projects that I’m planning to work on or am already working on, and it can be overwhelming looking at them all and wondering how I’m going to get them done. So last night, I wrote out a very loose writing schedule for myself. I looked at what my goals are, and I scheduled out what I want my writing timeline to look like from month to month. I included drafting, revision, editing, and promotion/marketing so that I could see from a macro level what my year would like look in 2023.

Here’s why this helps: taking general goals and applying them to a concrete timeline allows me to see where I might be overestimating my abilities, my free time, etc. This is why making the schedule took so much time, because as motivating as it is to say, “I’m going to write and publish six books a year!” it also isn’t very realistic considering that I work full time and am a full time student. So I adjusted the schedule, chose specific months for drafting brand new manuscripts, and devoted the rest of the year to revision, publishing, and promotion.

April and July are part of Camp NaNoWriMo. April will be a very rough draft of, at least, 20,000 words. July will be an expansion of those 20,000 words; I’ll add 30,000, getting a rough draft of about 50,000 words to work with other the rest of the year. Then, NaNoWriMo in November will be the drafting of another book. Keeping to this means that I will draft two new books every year, as well as revise and publish two books every year.

My goal is to be prolific. My goal is to write, write, write, write, write. I have so many characters and stories up in my imagination that simply need to escape onto the page. This will, I hope, help me to keep focused while also remembering things like promotions and advertising, because all the writing in the world won’t get people to buy my work if I don’t promote it. This timeline I created included an initial monthly advertising budget; it’s currently very small, but as I continue to sell more books, I’ll be able to invest larger sums into my ads.

I don’t know where this journey will take me. All the best laid plans can be undone at a moment’s notice, but my hope is that, over the next five years, I will write, publish, and earn money as an author and a poet. I will continue to traditionally publish my poetry, while my fiction will (at least for now) be self-published.

Maybe this timeline can help inspire you, too!

Tomorrow Is The Day!

Tomorrow is PUBLISHING DAY for my debut book of poetry, Even the Air, Too Heavy!

I can’t even believe this, ya’ll. I don’t know how much more I can say that I haven’t already, but I keep thinking back to the young woman I was in the aftermath of my second miscarriage, and I never would have expected that eight years later, I would have a book coming out about my miscarriages. I never would have thought that I would successfully take two of the most traumatizing experiences I have ever faced and turned them into art, into poetry, into words my body birthed.

Moreover, I never would have anticipated that, in the one month of pre-orders, I would have sold 21 copies of my book! Because as important as the actual writing is, I think every writer creates with the hope that their work will sell. 21 books sold in one month is simply more than I can even process.

And how many more will I sell this weekend at the book launch? How many will I sell at the upcoming readings? I just…I cannot even fathom that this is my life, even though I have worked my ass off to get here. Sometimes we need to acknowledge how much bullshit it’s taken for us to get to where we are, accomplishing goals and dreams and making amazing things a reality in our lives. And holy fuck, looking back over the last eight years – and especially since 2019 – there has been a heaping load of bullshit I’ve had to go up against.

Yet here I am, all the same.

This week, and this weekend, are for celebration.

Writing About Abuse

Survivors of domestic violence and other forms of abuse must be careful with how often they subject themselves to traumatic content. Sometimes we can sit down and write about abuse without much issue. Other times, working on one poem/piece of writing can be enough to cause a mental and emotional spiral.

As my debut book of poetry is about to be released (ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT), I find myself looking forward to what I want my next book of poetry to be about, and naturally my emotionally abusive marriage is what comes to mind. I’ve written many poems about my ex-husband (probably a good hundred or more), and while it’s nice, as a writer, to have a lot of poems already drafted that I can work with, it takes a lot of emotional energy to revise them. I left him in 2019, and even in the three years it’s been, the trauma still feels urgent and close. Revising these poems is going to be a massive undertaking.

And with my book coming out this week, there’s a definite sense of moving forward and dedicating myself to my next poetry project as quickly as possible. But I’m seeing now that might not be possible, and even if it is, it might not be the best approach. It took a good two and a half years of writing to complete my debut book of poetry, and that came years after my second miscarriage.

I think, as writers, we’re often pressuring ourselves to “get the writing done,” and while it is good to have a writing schedule, it’s also healthy to take the time we need to look after our mental and emotional health. Not only will this make the writing process that much more sustainable, but it will lead to even better writing. When wounds are still fresh, they can give us some really raw and honest content, but revising that content can be particularly difficult. Allowing space, allowing for moments where we’re not writing anything, are important.

One of the things I’ve been working on is balancing my time. Releasing a book means promoting it, attending the book launch and other events, planning public readings, submitting more work to be published, looking for awards to apply to, etc. It takes a lot of time. I’m also in the first week of fall semester, I have a lot of books to read, and I have a condo to keep clean. It’s simply unrealistic to think I can get it all done every single day.

Balancing my time has to include giving myself days off, days when I don’t write. And these days off can be a few times a week, a whole week at a time, or even months. Like, since probably June/July, after I completed the third draft of what will be my debut novel, I got some wonderful feedback, but it meant even more heavy revision and expansion, and I wasn’t ready for that. So I took all of August off and, instead of writing in my novel, I rewatched all of Game of Thrones in preparation for The House of the Dragon. And even though I have some major issues with Game of Thrones, it was really fun to rewatch the series. It also reminded me of the things I don’t want to do/have in my series: misogyny, racism, a white savior, “mad” women, plot points that are built up to be incredibly important that then fall completely flat, unraveling all character development for the sake of a plot point, emotional trauma porn, etc.

So, this is just a reminder: you can’t actually get writing done if you’re neglecting your own wellbeing to do it. Your work will still be there once you’ve rested.

One Week Until Publishing Day!

Less than one week: 6 days, to be precise.

What even is my life? It’s been my lifelong dream to write and publish a book-length work of some kind. Before my M.F.A., I thought that would be fiction or nonfiction, since the bulk of my writing has been in those two genres. But then grad school came a long and made me question what genres I wanted to write in. Basically all of 2020 and 2021 were entirely poetry. No short stories. No essays. Aside from blog posts and book reviews, everything I wrote was poetry.

And now my debut book of poetry is about to be released. I’m tearing up just thinking about the journey that took me here; the moments of loss and doubt and fear, the scarring, the hatred, the love, the rebuilding of what I had torn down. I think of the people who were in my life at the start of this journey: those still here and those who aren’t anymore, the friends who’ve come and gone, the husband I divorced, the lovers I walked away from.

And now I’m preparing for a book launch, I’m setting up local readings, I’m searching the internet for contests and awards I can submit my book to. And I actually sold books during the preorders. 21 of them! And now book stores are going to carry my book on their shelves.

This isn’t vanity or bragging.
It’s reverence and gratitude.

And while I’m scheduling readings and promoting my book and doing everything I can to keep this track of success going, I’m also still working on what is going to be my first novel. It’s a book of fantasy, the first in a series of probably four or five books. I haven’t quite decided how I want to handle the publishing of those books. I might query them to agents and other publishers. I might go through and independent press. I might self-publish. I honestly don’t know yet. Book one needs another few rounds of revision and edits.

But still, it’s the moving forward, the always present urgency of words that keeps me looking down at the page with a pen in my hand.

I will finish this novel.
I will finish this series of books.
I will write many more books of poetry. So many more. My heart bleeds and beats with poetry.
My life is dedicated to this pulse, this rhythm, this thing that is so much like breathing for me.

If you want to order a copy of my book, do so here: Even the Air, Too Heavy.

First Book Order

Last week I made my first book order for my debut book of poetry, Even the Air, Too Heavy.

This whole process has been absolutely surreal. I’m in awe. I can’t believe that I’m less than one month away from my book being released! Like, how did I even get here? How, along this amazing journey, has it all actually culminated into a completed book of poems that’s now being published by an amazing press here in Portland?

It’s amazing to think about. The journey, the steps. I don’t really believe in fate, but I do believe that the choices we make absolutely impacts the course of our lives. My two miscarriges led me back to college. My associates degree led me to get a bachelors. The bachelors led me into a job and an MFA program. The MFA and the job gave me the financial independence to leave my ex. The MFA is also where I wrote this book. And now, a year after graduating with my MFA, my book is about to come into the world.

I’m so excited and grateful and full of basically nothing but absolute joy. This is the first step on the road to continued creativity. I will have a second book, and a third, and a tenth, and on and on. I am creative. I am talented. I am strong. I am tender. I am gentle.

I am so many things. I can’t wait to see how much more poetry I can release into the world.

There’s about a week left to pre-order a copy of my book! Check it out here.

Processing Anger

Well, in true no-longer-achingly-busy fashion, now that the summer semester is over, my brain is taken up its free space and decided to fixate on things that I have been trying to forget.

One thing I’m still learning about myself is that, in order to avoid a lot of emotional wounds, I like to keep myself busy. But when the extra busyness of the semester is over, I struggle to ignore the things that I haven’t made the time to process. These are almost always the things I need to process most, as well as the things that are the hardest for me to think about and look over. But I can’t keep myself hyper-busy forever.

Before I begin: I have an appointment with my doctor this week to get myself back on antidepressants, and now that my health insurance is back up, I’ll be looking for a therapist to help me talk through the issues I’m about to address. So I have plans in action to get myself the help I need. And if there’s one thing I could say to ya’ll, one thing for you to take away from this post, it’s that it’s more than okay to ask for help.

So here’s the deal…

I’m angry.
I’m angry most of the time.
I don’t like being angry and I wish I wasn’t/didn’t have to feel angry, but anger is also a normal and healthy reaction to the things I’ve been through.

I’ve finally reached a point where I simply cannot keep pushing through without starting a massive deconstruction of my Christian upbringing. And I have been doing a lot of deconstruction, but in the theological and ideological sense, not in the personal sense. There are so many things I’ve endured in churches in my past, things that continue to haunt and hurt. I need healing, and I need a release from these things. I can’t bury them anymore.

And on top of that, I have been completely taken advantage of (yet again), and the enforcement of my boundaries led to another fallout. And ya’ll, I really am proud of the ways I handled this situation. But it doesn’t make the emotional pain any easier to bear. As the fallout was in the process of taking place, my partner pointed out that this person – whom I’ve known since 2015 – was being enormously emotionally abusive and projecting their insecurities from a past relationship onto me. And there were a lot of things that led up to this fallout, but suffice to say that it was horrible to experience. They sent me drunk texts, manipulative texts, guilt trips, put words in my mouth, and all over the course of just a couple of weeks, when I had already asked them to give me space.

PSA: drunk words are sober thoughts, as a friend of mine told me the other day.
And people who are comfortable ignoring your boundaries on a repeated basis – never once acknowledging that they were – are people who care solely about what they can get from you. That’s not friendship or love, it’s selfishness.

And today, I’m angry.

I’m angry because I was fighting hard to save that friendship.
I’m angry because I was only asking for space so that we could build a mutually healthy and respectful friendship that didn’t revolve around toxicity.
I’m angry because I wanted things to improve, but not at the expense of my own wellbeing.
I’m angry because I didn’t and don’t owe anyone my emotional or mental safety just to make them feel better.
I’m angry because I could see the breakdowns as they were happening, and I tried to communicate them, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t listen.
I’m angry because I shouldn’t have to keep my own needs shut off or hidden just to maintain friendships.

But this is also part of what I need to heal. Because I have always been one who gives until I am empty. I have always been one who struggles with boundaries. I have always been one who works hard, even when my energy isn’t being met in a relationship.

And I have to stop doing that, even when it means losing people I care about. Because ultimately, they don’t care about me, if they’re willing to treat me that way.

So today is for anger and making plans for therapy and getting back on medication, and sitting with the anger.

End of Summer Semester

This is the last week of my second semester of my Master of Arts in Literature. It has been…quite the semester. It was a good semester overall, but it was not without its moments of anger and pain. It’s interesting how different my graduate experiences have been in comparison to my undergraduate experiences. Maybe I was just really lucky in the community college and university I attended for my undergraduate degrees, but I honestly feel like grad school has been kind of a bait-and-switch situation. The positive, safe experiences I had in undergrad are not and have not been the experience I’ve had in grad school so far.

This summer in my MA program, I took a Monsters Lit class and an LGBTQIA2S+ Lit class. In the latter, I had a teacher who used incredibly outdated language when referring to trans people (it’s now considered a slur), and while he was receptive to me pointing out his use of outdated language, he clearly resented my opinion that a teacher who is teaching a literature course about a marginalized group of people should do their own due diligence and make sure that they’re not using harmful language in their course descriptions. The apology he offered was essentially, “I’m sorry that I’m old,” and then veered towards nothing more than a justification of why he used the slur. I tried to explain to him that this word has been outdated for decades now, and as a teacher, it is his responsibility to ensure that he’s creating a classroom environment where students feel safe to learn – especially those students who belong to a marginalized group of people. He ignored that bit and simply kept on justifying.

I actually ended up reporting him to the Dean because I was fuming mad, and for more reasons than the use of the slur. For weeks, his class discussion questions had revolved around horrifically harmful ideologies regarding sexuality and queer identity (one of the first weeks, he asked if we thought teaching LGBTQIA2S+ literature was a form of grooming), and at no point did he ever clarify why he was asking these questions. And as I ended up explaining to him, by asking questions like that, he was literally inviting homophobia into the classroom, thereby completely negating any safety queer students were entitled to and expected to have.

It’s one thing if a student, unprompted, says something homophobic. Teacher’s can’t control what gets said in a classroom conversation, nor can they anticipate how many students will be homophobic. But by asking this question outright at the beginning of the semester, he was setting the tone for the rest of class by establishing a platform of safety for those who genuinely did hold homophobic views. Thankfully, no one in the class said anything homophobic to that extent, but the fact remains that he still invited that kind of discourse into the classroom conversation.

When I pointed this out to him, his response was, “If we know we have an enemy, shouldn’t we try to understand what they think so that we can fight them with more knowledge?” This was the point that I reported him to the Dean because I realized that absolutely none of what I was saying mattered to him. And as I explained to the Dean, it’s a literature course, and I joined it expecting to be taught about queer literature, not to be an unwitting pawn in a teacher’s personal game of chess. And while I absolutely am an activist, and while I will absolutely stand up and fight homophobia wherever I encounter it, including in the classroom, I am the one who still gets to decide when and where I invest my energy. As a student, I have a reasonable right to expect certain things from a classroom environment, and one of those things is that I, as a bisexual woman, will have a safe space to learn about and discuss the subject of the class.

But because the teacher felt emboldened to literally invite not only conflict, but bigotry and hatred into the classroom as part of our learning process, my ability to learn and focus on the literature itself was absolutely severed. And there was one student who, due to the nature of one of the questions asked, ended up vocalizing a perspective on straight, cis people playing queer and trans roles that was not only ignorant, but completely unrelated to the literature we’d read that week. And when I pointed out the flaws and the harm in the ideologies she was perpetuating, the teacher accused me of focusing on my feelings rather than on the literature. Even though I responding to the question he asked.

All of that to say this: even people within our own community can carry internalized homophobia and harmful views. Ultimately, I stood up for myself and for any other potentially queer students in that class. And while I wouldn’t classify the teacher as my enemy, I will say that he’s doing a lot of the homophobes’ work for them, and that, more than anything, was what upset me the most.

But aside from that, I’m also undergoing a personal change in my aesthetic. I haven’t had my own personal style since I was a teenager. Even as a young adult, what I wore can’t really be called a “style.” It was just bottoms and tops I liked and/or felt comfortable in. But now, that’s changing. I’m embracing the metal head/alternative/goth look. The specific style is called “corporate goth,” and I am loving every single thing I choose. My hair is full on shag now, and I love it so much, I can’t even articulate it. I’m learning how to do my makeup in a darker, more alternative way. And I’m using my clothes to express my age as well as my more goth vibe, and never before in my life have I felt more like myself.

With more piercings, more tattoos, and more clothing accessories, I think I’ll get some really awesome outfits going. You can see some pictures on the right hand side of the page from my Instagram. Anyway, it’s a change I’ve wanted for a long time, and I’m loving how it’s going and how it makes me feel.