In the Bag

A fashionista, I am not. I observe the changing trends in fashion from the sidelines, with the mild interest of a California sea lion. I am much more comfortable as the by-stander. I casually watch as the waist bands drift from the waist to the hips to the waist again.

But accessories are a different story, especially when it comes to handbags. Not that I have any special interest in them though. My involvement with bags is driven purely by necessity.

I still remember my first wallet. It was a big canvas and velcro square full of junior high photos of friends and a few left over allowance dollars. It didn't take long before I realized I couldn't fit the wallet in my back pocket without an obvious and embarrassing bump on my rump.  After I got my driver's license, finding the perfect purse became a serious goal.

I began with a big Esprit tote, so large I could almost fit my 80's hair plus the accessories, in it. Another favorite was the white, fake leather purse that looked like a barrel on a string.

During my gypsy years as a single, young adult, I floated between a backpack, fanny pack, passport holder under my shirt and a messenger bag. When I got married and stopped traveling, my bag changed again. With all the changes in my handbag of choice over my young years, nothing compared to the introduction of the diaper bag. And just like that, this nursery on wheels became my one and only, all-inclusive accessory.

Instead of pictures of friends, my driver's license and lipstick, I was carrying every item necessary to keep a small human alive for an extended period of time. This bag had enough pockets and compartments for bottles and formula, baby food, bibs, diapers, wipes, rash ointment, burp rags, changes of clothes, snacks for the toddler, pacifier, and extra blankets. If the zombie apocalypse happened, all I would need was a place to hide. Everything else for survival was in my diaper bag.

This phase of life lasted many years. Even when I didn't have a babe in arms- during those reprieve years between birthing children- the bag was still full of diapers for the toddler, snacks and small toys.

When we finished with diapers and crossed that golden potty-training bridge, the bag shrank a little but still developed it own unique packing list. It was full of half-opened snacks, half-empty packs of gum, lip gloss and fast food toys. As my girls grew, so did my supply of hair elastics and bobby pins for ballet class. With my boys, I introduced a healthy supply of band-aids and grew a small collection of hot wheels cars and Legos. My bag quickly became the deposit box for wrappers, tickets, rocks from hikes and anything else the kids didn't want at the moment but may need in the future.

Most recently, the contents of my purse told a new story. Standing at the counter at the DMV with my 15-year-old daughter, I pulled a special envelop from my handbag. Inside was my daughter's birth certificate, social security card and proof of residence. On a few pieces of paper was all the evidence needed to prove that she exists. Proof of the bottles, diapers, cheerios and hair elastics that filled my bag throughout her life.

When the clerk handed over her driver's permit, she smiled like the Cheshire cat, grinning with a little bit mischief and a great deal of joy. And in a flash, my little girl began to disappear just a little bit, ready to start her journey to discover her own path in life. I clutched my bag to my chest and admired her through foggy eyes.

Then she asked me to put the license in my purse, because she doesn't have her own - yet.

Where Should Love Go?

(Photo Credit: www.imfunny.net via Pinterest)

True Story #1:

My neighbor Mary told me during one of our monthly visits that she was disappointed in Jenny––another neighbor in her late fifties. Mary said she didn’t know Jenny was so vain that she would have a breast implant.

“I’m just disgusted by her decision, you know? Like, who’s she trying to impress? She’s a grandma for god’s sake!”

True Story #2:

Joy asked her neighbor across the street, Jill, if she ever left her house. Jill laughed at the question and said of course. 

With all seriousness Joy snapped, “Then why do you have a weed garden in front of your house? Didn’t you know it brings down the image of the neighborhood?”

True Story #3:

Four-year-old Justin and his family were visiting his grandma, and went to church on Sunday in his grandma’s ward.

Justin got out of his seat in the children’s Sunday School class while other kids sang merrily with the teachers. He wandered off to a corner of the classroom and started humming loudly a made-up tune. Then he climbed up the windowsill, jumped off, turned off the lights in the room, summersaulted, and knocked over the floor easel.

When a teacher approached him, Justin ran out of the classroom, screaming down the hall with hands in the air, and breaking into the chapel where another ward was holding the sacrament meeting. Justin dashed straight up to the pulpit, pushed the obviously shocked speaker aside, and yelled, “Testimony! I say testimony!”

There were unhappy people at church that day, wondering out loud why Justin’s parents hadn’t taught him to be reverent.

***

These are true stories. But we all know there are always, at least, two sides of a story, so let’s find out the other side of each story.

The other True Story #1:

Jenny, a very quiet and private grandmother in her late fifties, had recently undergone double mastectomy due to breast cancer. What Mary heard about Jenny’s implant was the breast reconstruction.

The other True Story #2:

Jill suffers from severe allergies: pollen, dust, grass, most trees, furry animals. She’s miserable practically all year around, but especially in the spring and summer. When she’s outside long enough, she starts to get congested and that leads to a sinus headache, which turns into a migraine headache that sends her to bed in a dark room for hours.

The other True Story #3:

Justin is autistic.

Most people don’t know it because he doesn’t look any different from the other four-year-old next to him. Justin doesn’t know he’s being disruptive in class or in church. Even if he’s told he is, he doesn’t know how not to be.

In our world there are many imperfections. There are also people who choose to see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, think what they want to think, and say what they want to say. Which is fine. We all have our God-given agency. But it’s precisely because of that agency, we are capable of, with our free will and choice, making or breaking the world––sometimes with something as insignificant as a thought or a spoken sentence.

Truth is more complicated than the surface we see––the breast implant, the weed garden, the rowdy child. Truth is that we don’t need to come up with an immediate, affirmative conclusion to everything we see, because sometimes our eyes could be blinded and our hearts could be deceived.

And when our hearts are filled with untruth, where should love go?


Allison

Blog: Allison Hong-Merrill
Facebook: Allison Hong-Merrill
Twitter: @xieshou
Instagram: @jijenmerrill

"Keep it life-and-death simple." (A Lesson on Revising)

During the residency weeks in Barcelona (2014), our days were divided up by classes, workshops, and tutorials. There, and for the semester after, I had the pleasure of working with Gwyneth Lewis, a Welsh poet and memoirist with a delicious British accent and no-nonsense approach to teaching. She is the author of Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheerful Book on Depression.

Sagrada Família

These are notes from Gwyneth's class  as well as some helpful comments on my WIP at the time.

• "Trump up the action. Don't cloud it with rhetoric." 
• How much does the writer know? The narrator has access to childhood memories.
• Make it more active. 
• "What is the framework? What shape is your work going to be?" 
• The reader should know the stakes from the beginning. 
• Plan out the trajectory of your characters.
• "Try flip-flopping the first paragraph. Put the last sentence on top." 

To seek entrance to l'escola, you must take the apple from Eve. Gwyneth says the pinky is raised slightly are an indication of vanity. She says the knocker is a little joke, a smirk. You must fall before you can learn. — at Escola d'Escriptura (Ateneu Barcelonès).

• Remember to have a reflective narrator.
• "Don't defuse the punch."
• "Don't let the humor get in the way of the story." 
• Consider setting first. Think about the "wide shot". 
• In chapter titles, don't give away the plot. 
• For intense scenes, "write it like a bombshell. Don't let me know that you're leading up to something." 
• Emotion leads to thought, which leads to plot or analysis.
• Don't be mysterious for mysterious's sake.

I met these friends on the boardwalk. 

Gelato! When I dream of Spain, it's going to be me and this case eyeing each other from across a crowded room.

• In non-fiction, consider "is this interesting to me because it's my family or will the anonymous reader find it interesting too?" 
• "Make sure you get the choreography clear for the reader."
• "Keep it life-and-death simple." 
• "Very effective, but prune words."
• "Pacing--The intro to [this chapter] is uncharacteristically slow, so we're alerted to [what's] coming. For maximum impact, be more casual on the approach--so that the reader, like you at the time, has no idea what's coming. That will make it more lifelike."
• "Assume you have a secular audience and explain some of the Mormon terminology." 

Casa Batlló.

I challenge you to attempt a few of the applicable notes. 

Happy writing! 

Rena 

renasprose.com

Twitter and Instagram: @renasprose

Only a Child: Bursting the Bubble

By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I was seven the day I tasted my first bubble.

I was the sole occupant of the street in front of my house, a 50-yard stretch of asphalt dead-ending at a little copse of trees. I stood, purple bubble bottle and yellow wand in hand, absorbing the glaring summer sunlight that had sent everyone else indoors but that I seemed to photosynthesize into smiles and pumping arms.

I repeatedly pulled the wand from the bottle, dripping refracted light, a sheet like a prism's blink stretched across it eye.

Sometimes I would purse my lips and blow the bubbles myself, but more often I would let the air do it for me, arm outstretched, whirling and watching bubbles stream from the wand, bursting into existence in sparks and glints of color as the wind gave them life.

I stood and watched, the blood rushing in my ears and the world swirling around me. Magical! Floating spheres of light and reflections. The elixir of life, holding precious a tiny breath of air.

I had the sudden urge to taste the bubble. I ran down the street craning my neck, stretching my tongue to reach it, but the wind tasted it before I did, blowing it out of my reach and eating it up.

So I tried again. And again. I ran up the street, down the sidewalk, across neighbors’ yards, into bushes, everywhere the bubbles went, trying to catch one with my lips.

And all the time I had the little jar of bubble solution clenched in one cautious hand. It never crossed my mind to taste from the source, from the bottle or the wand; those weren’t magical. There’s nothing ethereally enticing about a sticky, purple plastic bottle or a yellow, dripping wand. The magic was in the air around me, in the bubbles caught in the current of the wind.

The magic was there right up until a bubble danced to my lips and burst on my tongue. In the split-second between contact and taste I was shocked at having achieved my quest.

The shock was short-lived, however, as the filmy, acrid feel of the bubble filled my mouth. It didn’t taste like I thought magic ought to. I wiped my tongue on my shirt, spat into the grass, glared at the purple bottle in my fist, ran inside to repeatedly flush my mouth out with water.

I felt foolish for the first time, like a child. Only a child would run around for long hours in the burning sun, chasing impossible, disgusting bubbles. Only a child wouldn’t realize that the bubbles in the air were no different than the bubbles-to-be in the bottle. Only a child.

A Discovery of Imperfection

My life is messy.

I avoid cleaning even though I know shouldn’t. I want clear counters, clean floors, and neatly folded laundry, but when I do engage in chores, I turn perfectionist. I line up everything in organized stacks, following a never ending cycle of tangents and distractions that bring cleanliness to unseen cracks but leave the spaghetti-stained pans in the sink.

It’s exhausting, and it never stays.

It spills over, tips over, runs over until I’m standing on a black-marked floor staring at another pile of dishes, and wishing I could get in my bed without throwing the unfolded clothes on the floor.

I’m left in this maddening place of imperfection. Even the characters I pull and prod through the ups and downs of a story can’t make of themselves anymore perfection than I can give them. They’re hopelessly, terribly flawed—ink stains on my thoughts and fingertips.

I crave continuity and cohesiveness—the right words coming together in the perfect form to create something so beautiful there’s nothing left to say. I want it in my stories. I want it in my life. The inner parts of my heart are craving a home I once knew that was perfect and a life I once walked where my skills and abilities flourished under the tutelage of a Father who is God.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

Maybe the absolutes I face in the cries of politics, fads, and opinions are actually all of us clinging to things we hope are permanent, unchanging truths. We want rightness. We want the answers. We used to have them. Our little embryo-like spirits were once nourished in a place of light, truth and love. The reflection of that is still inside us, hungry for a confidence we once had.

So we rail and shout, dismiss and hurt each other in a search for perfection. We wrangle all the parts of us and others into categories and try to fill ourselves with self-righteousness to counteract the panic we feel when we step back and see how unfair and crazy this place we are in really is. We want to make it right. We know in our hearts that it can be.

Why did our Perfect Father send us here? How can He continue to send more children to us: imperfect parents with our hands already too full of heath food pamphlets and warning labels? What was the reason for all this?

The line is always drawn straight between fear and love. We can’t have them both at once.

And if God didn’t send us here to bathe in our fears, to wallow in the avalanche of insecurities, then the other side has to be He sent us here to find love.

Nothing stays, my children grow. The people I love die. The friends I make move. I move. I leave behind bits of my heart, scattered among faces and people and days I cannot count as anything but glimpses of heaven, even when the loosing, and growing, and moving hurts so badly I think it will swallow me.

I see then God has not sent me here to live in perfection. I had that once. I know it already. He has not sent me here to sink into despair and lose myself either. Feeling sorrow, pain, loneliness, and anger in all their hideous, soul-wrenching beauty is how I come to understand love.

It’s how I find an inexhaustible spring of love inside myself—an endless capacity for compassion, empathy, and understanding. It’s how I am weaved into your story and you into mine.

My hope falls into place around that single thought. Peace returns to the things I care most about. I find courage in reloading a dishwasher and sweeping a floor one more time. Courage in the idea that I can put something back again, and again, and again if I need too. It can always be cleaned, repaired or replaced.

I can always repent.

The parts of my heart I leave behind are never wasted.

And if I create an imperfect book, I can find the courage to keep writing despite that. It’s okay to give what I have in the hope that it helps one person find a bit more love.

Leave it all in God’s hands, where broken things are made perfect again.

How to Help When your Best Friend Loses a Loved One

 Funerals are Tough. Viewings are Tough. Burials are Tough…

But they are also sweet, comforting, peaceful, even joyful events in our lives.  The people we know and love surround us and make them so.

 

When our friends are going through hard times, we want to HELP! But it isn’t always easy to know how to give comfort, relief, support and love.  I don’t have all the answers, but our family just returned from a funeral of a most beloved and missed and cherished magical grandpa, father, and father-in-law.  And we were surrounded by people who were experts in giving comfort, relief, support, and love. Let me share some ideas we can all remember when someone is faced with this kind of loss.

 

1.  If at all possible, attend the funeral.  Go to the viewings. Be present. Even if your only interaction with the family will be a quick hello and a short hug, it will be remembered. Your presence is a show of love and support.  It is not a burden on the family to have to talk to “one more person."

I was so touched by a man who has known our family for decades. He attended each viewing and the funeral. Then the following day the family drove four more hours for the burial and an additional viewing and as I walked in the door, I saw this family friend.  His attendance still brings tears of gratitude to my eyes.

2.  If you know any of the people well enough to know their likes, dislikes, or comfort food, now is the time to show that with gestures that demonstrate you know them and remember.  Anything however small will be grasped and held and loved in memory for years to come.

One neighbor regularly uses the family’s favorite bread recipe. It was taught by our grandpa’s mother and is a cherished taste in and of itself.  This neighbor brought by a few loaves just a day after we heard the news.  Then when she noticed how quickly it was sliced up and served around, she came by a few days later with several more loaves.  We still talk about her kindness.

3.  There will be a lot involved in the funeral process and often families will want to show some kind of personal representation of their deceased family member.  If you are close enough, offer to help with this part of the day.  Make copies of pictures, put them in frames. Offer table cloths, centerpieces, show up early to help set it all up.

Someone (a few someones) did just that, and I love them for it.

4.  Offer to be or find home security during the funeral and viewing hours. Sadly, these hours are posted in local newspapers and therefore create targets for burglars.

5.  Be aware that funerals are expensive times. If you have extra, give, give, give.

We were so so very blessed by many anonymous people who shared more than they had to give. Their offers to my sweet mother-in-law are too sacred and special to go into any more detail.

6.  Share your positive and loving memories with the family. Make them laugh, smile, grin.  Talk about the positive influence they and their deceased family member has had on your life. Share memories you have they may not have ever heard before. Consider writing a letter expressing all the reasons you are grateful for them and their loved ones.

7.  When attending a viewing and greeting grieving family, it is OK to cry, but try to focus on the positive reasons to cry.  Do NOT talk about how difficult life will be from here on out.  Unless you feel you should, don’t ask, “How are you?” That is not an easy question to answer when the pain is still fresh in your heart.

8.  Remember the value of food.  It is a basic need after all and even though it is the first thing most people think of to help, it is TRULY NEEDED.

We had around 30 people to feed in our home at any given time and people brought over delicious home cooked meals to feed us all every night for more than a week.  Not only that, but throughout the day, people dropped by with lunches, snacks, their favorite desserts, fruit and veggie trays. etc. I have never seen so much food. And we loved it and we ate it, and we gathered around it together as a big extended family and created precious memories. It was “just food”, but it was so indescribably the perfect thing to do for us.

9.  When all the rush dies down, when everyone else’s lives return to normal, remember that those who have a loved one in heaven are changed forever and sometimes even normal life is painful because it seems too normal.  Think of ways to show love and care even throughout a whole year after:  Notes to express love, drop by lunch, filling in needs whatever they may be, inclusion in social gatherings…Remember the deceased person's birthday. Remember the anniversary of their death.

10.  Have extra patience and understanding.  Give LOTS of benefit of the doubt. Choose to not be offended by anything. Don’t back away or give up.  Be present, loving, kind and patient…..for a long time.

A flower in my hair

Today, I'm going to do it.

It's Sunday and I'm getting dressed for church. I will be wearing a bright (I kid you not) pink dress I bought last year from the Philippines (where I grew up the first 15 years of my life). Whenever I wear it, I feel like I am back in the tropics again.

It needs just one little accessory: a flower tucked behind my ear.

But I can't work up the courage to do it. I worry I'm going to look silly.

***

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to get to tag along to Puerto Rico when my husband attended a veterinary conference. For nearly a week, we stayed at this very nice resort. As I recall, it was in the middle of the winter in Utah, and Puerto Rico thawed me out to the core.

You stay a while in the tropics, one begins to lose one's inhibitions. Something to do with the hotter temperature, I guess. I stopped blow drying my hair and let it go frizzy. I stopped for coconut impulsively outside the resort. I found a pretty pink flower clip and tucked it behind my ear, as I sipped the coconut juice.

On the plane ride home, my tropic high began to fade. I felt silly, wearing a flower in my hair. I cried as the plane descended, because I felt the magic of the tropics wearing off. Worse, I discovered I lost the clip somewhere between the plane and baggage claim.

It was okay. Somehow, wearing an accessory like a tropical flower behind your ear feels out of place in the desert landscape of Utah.

***

I found this hibiscus ('gumamela' in the Philippines) flower at a party store called Zurcher's. It's actually a napkin holder. I cut the long stem that you'd wrap around a napkin and hold it up to my hair. The flower matches my dress perfectly.

It's time to go. With trembling fingers, I attach the flower on my hair with a hairpin.

There. Very tropical. Very me. I tell myself it's okay. Most people will see the half of my head without the flower and it won't be very noticeable. As we are getting out of the car at the church parking lot, my son (who had shopped at Zurcher's with me) asks, "Mom, is that a napkin holder?"

"Er, yes," I reply, red-faced.

I feel that somehow I am committing a sin by wearing something unorthodox to church. I resist the urge to take it off. I make it through two meetings. A couple of ladies compliment me.

My friend Debbie taps me on the shoulder just before sacrament meeting starts. "The flower in your hair," she says, "how beautiful."

I want to tell her it makes me feel more tropical, that it makes me happy, that it brings me back to the Philippines. I want to tell her that whenever I see women do it, I never think they are silly, that I think they are brave and are having more fun than the rest of us. That I think about doing it all the time, but I never work up the courage to do it. Until today.

But there is no time to chat, the meeting is starting.

I touch the flower in my hair and reply, simply, "Thanks."

Jewel Allen is an award-winning journalist, author, ghostwriter, poet, politician, and mom. Visit her website at www.jewelallen.com.

Extreme Closeup

In 11th grade, I was subjected to one of my least-favorite teachers of all time.  I had just transferred from a school where I had cracked my English teacher's requirements for getting straight As to Mrs. E's World Literature class.  She consistently gave me C's, with the occasional rare gift of B+.  She flunked me on my term paper after claiming that I was showing a lack of judgment by choosing to write about All Quiet On the Western Front, a book that she assigned.  At the end of the year, I applied to take the honors-level course in American Literature and when I found out that Mrs. E had just been assigned to take over the class, I was sure that she would deny my application.  After all, she had told me that my papers were pretentious and trying too hard to sound intellectual.

The trick was, I was in senior-level English as a junior and all of my classmates spent the last six weeks of the year in internships.  As the lone junior, I was stuck with one-on-one classes with the person who I might have described as my personal Umbridge if Harry Potter had been on my bookshelf at the time.  On our first day together, she announced that she had accepted my application for Honors American Literature and would be spending the next six weeks teaching me how to get an A in her class.

The problem, I discovered, wasn't the vocabulary that she thought was self-important.  It wasn't the fact that I had been taught to write papers based on an overarching metaphor instead of a three-point thesis.  No, her problem was that my papers lacked focus.  She handed me a VHS of an Italian film and told me to go home and watch it twice.  Then I was to watch it a third time and choose a single scene.  Once I had done that, I was to write her a ten-page term paper on that scene and that scene alone.

The film was Cinema Paradiso and about halfway through that movie was a scene in which a lovestruck teenager sneaks into a confessional to profess his love for the banker's daughter.  I didn't even write my paper on the couple.  I wrote it on the screen that divided the two halves of the confessional and the metaphor of class division.  I got an A on that paper and every one after it.

Since that time, I have written many scenes in the style of Mrs. E's instruction.  I once wrote 10 pages surrounding sixteen lines of dialogue in a court case for a work of fiction.  I excelled at what my BYU writing professor called the process story--giving an extremely detailed account of a single event.  My best-respected process story involved my viola repairman replacing a cracked peg on my instrument.
*
To give you a break from the moral of this story, let me introduce myself.  I'm Kathryn Olsen, though I publish under the family nickname of Kaki Olsen.  I was born in Texas and spent most of my formative years in a suburb of Boston.  I studied English at BYU and served a mission in the California San Fernando Mission, Spanish-speaking.

I became a writer the weird way around, though I'm not sure what the normal way would be.  I started telling myself stories at night when I was about six or seven and wrote a book that is thankfully lost now when I was 12.  In my high school notebooks, you can see notes for my Greek class in the margins of my stories.  Given that and my eventual major, you might think that I always wanted to be a writer.

That is not the case, however.  When I was three, my parents allowed me to take violin lessons like my older sister.  I played with VIP Strings in Portland during the few years that I lived in Oregon and it was also in Oregon that I won a year of free piano lessons in a raffle.  In 10th grade, my orchestra conductor offered to teach any interested person enough viola skills to audition for the next orchestra up at New England Conservatory's youth division.  I picked up a viola for the first time in April and auditioned with the Bach Double Violin Concerto and the Telemann G Major Viola Concerto for the Youth Repertory Orchestra.  I chose viola.  I sang not only in the ward choir, but the Lexington Christian Academy Chorale and Youth Pro Musica.  I participated in musical theater as often as time allowed.  I was the only student in AP Music Theory at my school and got a 5 on the exam.  I was the recipient of the Senior Music Award.  When comparing colleges, I met with the heads of the music departments and attended theory classes and choir rehearsals.

How did I decide to become a writer with that background?  In another moment of extreme close-up, I'll explain.  For the Christmas concert my senior year, the Chorale sang Vivaldi's Gloria.  In the middle of the second movement, my conductor stopped the rehearsal, turned to me and asked me to explain the chord and rhythm progression and how it related to a principle we'd been studying earlier that week in AP Music Theory.  Because I was very good at the subject, I identified the unusual rhythm pattern on the third page and explained a few different ways that Vivaldi could have finished that phrase.  He beamed like a proud uncle and resumed the rehearsal, but before I had finished the analysis of the music, a voice sounded in my head saying, "I hate thinking of music this way."  It was a rebellious thought, but it wouldn't go away.  It eventually led me to realize that if I became a professional musician or even made it my major in college, I would despise music.

So I decided to look at what else I loved as passionately as music.  The only things that compared at all were reading and writing.  I never found myself hating the process of world-building or story-telling.
*
I am, first and foremost, a fiction writer, but I got my start in personal essay.  In 2000, a site called iEmily was looking for nonfiction about teen issues and I accepted the assignment to talk about my self-injury habit that had run its course during 9th grade.  They sent me $20 and with that check, I bought my brother Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  A few weeks later, they published another of my essays on being a religious minority.  Just before I went on my mission, a feminist magazine contacted me about publishing an essay I had written on the day that I became concertmistress of my middle school orchestra.

I am absolutely a fiction writer, but I can't escape my non-fiction.  This point was brought home to me recently with the process of publishing my first novel.  Swan and Shadow is about a fictional set of twins, one of which is a swan by day and a human by night.  In the original ending, she realized that she was in a loveless relationship and chose voluntarily to leave, knowing that she might never again find someone who loved her and would be able to break her curse.  My editor loved the book and said the ending made no sense.  We compromised and found a story resolution where things were still uncertain, but less pessimistic.

She was never told that writing my character into the darkened room where her depression dwelt in that original ending was an act of autobiography.  I based it on 18 years of clinical depression and 7 years of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.  I claimed that my character's supreme act of bravery was risking a life without true love because in 2005, I fibbed to my husband that I'd be back from visiting my sister in time for Valentine's Day.  While visiting my sister, I got a divorce attorney.  I have never been an attractive person and I left realizing that I was abandoning the person who claimed to love me most.  The problem was that the person who swore all time and eternity to me punched me in the face when he got a bad grade.  He tried to strangle me to death when I asked him to stop screaming at me at 3 a.m.  He broke my wrist on Christmas and my rib on January 28.

That's an extreme close-up for another time and place, but the process of changing my ending actually led me to my current project.  One of the hallmarks of mental illness is cognitive distortion.  It is a form of extreme close-up in which things are blown out of proportion and it's very difficult to distinguish reality from anxiety.  To give you an example, it's why I would listen to my mother calmly discussing my GPA and yell that she had to stop screaming at me.  More recently, my boss told me on a Friday that she wanted me to talk to her on Monday about a problem Id had with a client.  After a full weekend in which I had a series of panic attacks about my imminent termination and envisioned how I would beg on my knees to keep my job, she blithely told me that she wanted me to know that she didn't blame me for the client's dissatisfaction.

I know from my life-long attendance at church what mercy and repentance are.  I know I am a beloved daughter of a Heavenly Father.  I know that my Savior loves me.  But I can't hear those words when my mind is screaming at me for my catastrophic life choices.  I decided to write down common cognitive distortions and write individual responses to each of them based on the gospel.  Once I'm done, I'll have talked back to some of those angry voices in my head and I hope to share it with other people.

Because it feels like a description of every step I've taken along the way, the book is called When I Walk Imperfectly.