I made a decision the other day that isn't life-altering, but yet, somehow, really is (for me) in a way. I made it in a moment of strong emotion and careful decision, and even now I am not regretting it. It will remove me somewhat from a situation I have been slipping in over and over, a situation both hopeless and heartbreaking. And I will be sad for a while at missing what I will be missing, but I also am glad that I am capable of doing what needs to be done when I feel I cannot trust how I react sometimes.

I found some articles on making decisions (some of which cover logically versus emotionally):

http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/emotion_decision.htm

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/201006/reason-and-emotion-note-plato-darwin-and-damasio

http://blog.iqmatrix.com/effective-decisions

I can never get back the respect of the person whose opinion has changed of me and that makes me, incredibly sad...especially when I think of the first day we met and how she couldn't possibly have known yet what an idiot I was going to turn out to be. But it is only what I deserve, especially considering everything that has happened.

Meanwhile, I am doing my very best to keep my feelings and thoughts to myself and hoping that even though I cannot change what has happened, even if this person never wants anything ever to do with me again, I will do my very best from now on to separate my heart from my mouth.

The Unlikely Hero Of Room 13 B is just so amazing! I haven't finished it yet, but I feel very confident it will remain amazing! :)

KIRKUS REVIEW

What would it feel like to wake up normal? It’s a question most people would never have cause to ask—and the one 14-year-old Adam Spencer Ross longs to have answered.

Life is already complicated enough for Adam, but when Robyn Plummer joins the Young Adult OCD Support Group in room 13B, Adam falls fast and hard. Having long assumed the role of protector to those he loves, Adam immediately knows that he must do everything he can to save her. The trouble is, Robyn isn’t the one who needs saving. Adam’s desperate need to protect everyone he loves—his broken mother, a younger half brother with OCD tendencies, and the entire motley crew of Room 13B—nearly costs him everything. Adam’s first-person account of his struggle to cope with the debilitating symptoms of OCD while navigating the complexities of everyday teen life is achingly authentic. Much like Adam, readers will have to remind themselves to breathe as he performs his ever worsening OCD rituals. Yet Toten does a masterful job bringing Adam to life without ever allowing him to become a one-dimensional poster boy for a teen suffering from mental illness.


Readers be warned: Like Augustus Waters before him, Adam Spencer Ross will renew your faith in real-life superheroes and shatter your heart in equal measure. (Fiction. 12 & up)

Sometimes, the more I look at a word the more it changes. Or the more it can lose its power. In this case...it's both. I am just barely old enough to have heard, as a little girl,people still use the word "spinster." It was mostly uttered by those from my grandmother's generation and I don't even remember if I knew what it meant at the time. The tone, alone, though, perfectly conveyed that it was not something a woman should aspire to be in life.

Old maid never sounded that bad to me because I always thought of the card game instead..even if "old maid" was used in the same tone, with the same slightly snide implication that ending up one was a fate worse than death...and a cross between something pitiable and something hideous. 

My copy of the newly published and widely reviewed Spinster came in today and I'm looking forward to reading it, even if the front cover seems just a tad too trendy. I prefer the title page because it shouts out less (to me) that it's okay to be a spinster as long as you definitely do not look like one.

This quote from Pure Wow kind of says what I'm thinking:


Some readers may roll their eyes as Bolick recounts yet another dude who was dying to marry her (we get it: indifference is irresistible). But overall her writing is impeccable and her message fresh.

So, in my insomniac state that keeps me from focusing enough to read a book, but not from focusing enough to think and think about one little word, I am staring at the word "spinster" and the more I look at the word itself (not the picture of the girl on the front who probably never has had trouble getting asked out on a date) the more it looks kind of cute and harmless and totally non-bothersome.

Because, really, if people (including one's own parents) have trouble with someone not being married (and this "someone" is usually a woman and, by the way, how come men get cool words like "bachelor"?) that's their problem, not the problem of the person not married.

Sometimes I worry that my Saturday nights as an adult (staying home with books and music and tea) are pretty much the same as they were in middle school and high school.

And, then, that makes me worry that I'm the same girl I was then...which would be horrible, because not changing at all in almost thirty years would show a complete lack of personal growth on my part.

These are two articles I found on personality changes, one of which is more broad in scope:

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/


and the other directly aimed at high school and whether we really do change from who we were as teens. This one really interests me because it addresses why our musical tastes are often strongest when it comes to what we listened to in our youth:

"Our self-image from those years, in other words, is especially adhesive. So, too, are our preferences. “There’s no reason why, at the age of 60, I should still be listening to the Allman Brothers,” Steinberg says. “Yet no matter how old you are, the music you listen to for the rest of your life is probably what you listened to when you were an adolescent.” Only extremely recent advances in neuroscience have begun to help explain why."

 http://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/

I'm sipping wine (a really good one that I'm sipping for taste and not relief) and wondering how on earth I managed to write over 600 pages double-spaced of fiction about nothing I have ever experienced in real life. I don't know if it's any good or not (it's good in spots, I kind of think, but the wine is really relaxing me so I may not be able to judge well) but I hate to throw it away because I've been writing it for three years now and the actual story itself means a lot to me.

I based some of it on truth (one of the characters is based a bit on someone I knew years ago and who meant the world to me before an irreparable rift changed things forever) but most of it is just things I imagined in my heart and mind. It's about getting past heart break and figuring how to tell the difference between what is real or what is not. 

It's also about how much crap we're willing to put up with from someone we deeply love and would even die for, someone who originally was 'runner up' to the love of the central character's life, but eventually becomes much more...the main love interest is someone I totally made up in my head, though when I reread it I kind of worry I somehow wove Blanche Dubois into her character... obviously, not as well as Tennessee Williams, and definitely not intentionally. But I do remember I was really in a Vivien Leigh phase and watching every production of A Streetcar Named Desire a lot when I first started writing.

Besides worrying about the actual writing I also wonder if you really can write about what you don't know, about things you've never done or experienced. I found some interesting articles online that offer some good advice and thoughts...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/dont-write-what-you-know/308576/

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/why-you-should-write-about-what-you-dont-know

I even found (amidst a lot of rather, shall we say, coarse advice) some words on whether you can write love scenes without experience:

...To which I reply: If a writer had to experience something in order to write it, we wouldn’t have science fiction, fantasy, or most romantic comedies. Or most romances in general, really.