1. When I experience kindness and affirmations from others, I feel humble. There’s something sacred in the piece of humanity that reaches out, warms, accepts and encourages. I never take this for granted and sometimes even feel superstitious about it — like if I don’t stop to truly appreciate a kind word or good deed, I might never know another. I feel the same way about every success, overcome obstacle, good fortune, or really great day I’ve ever known, even the really minor ones.

2. My pride tends to come in through the back door and stems more from a self-defense mechanism than a feeling of achievement. Any variation of someone telling me “you’re a no-good, terrible, rotten person” hurts of course, but it also calls up the reasons I have to not hate myself. I wish I could say this kind of pride feels good, but it doesn’t. It feels, instead, kind of desperate and unhappy.

3. I hold hipsters responsible for the internet popularity of bacon, Justin Bieber, ADD, and jeggings. The power of hipsters scares me. I wish I had a hipster friend.

4. There’s a contingent of people on the interwebz who just make stuff up or grow their own conspiracy theories and then spread their stories around until at least a few other people believe them — even if Snopes, common sense, or even a tiny bit of exploration would prove them wrong. I think Rupert Murdoch would approve.

5. This guy, Danny Miller, is like a movie savant. Seriously. Check out his personal website, Jew Eat Yet, where he also shares his love of film and his quirky penchant for writing celebrity obituaries. I think he’d make a great edition to entertainment television.

6. Just because thousands of people believe something doesn’t make it true, ethical, good, or right. Michael and Debi Pearl are hardline Christian fundies who are best known for promoting the corporal punishment of children, including infants. Their most infamous tome, How to Train Up a Child, has sold thousands of copies and ranks consistently high in Amazon’s ratings for child development books. The Pearl’s believe that children should be trained to obey authority instantaneously, without question and on command, and that any hesitation to do so should be met with swift and immediate physical punishment. They also believe that children should not be allowed to express any emotion outside of happiness or gratitude. This sentiment falls in line with the corruption of the “Be Sweet” element of Mormonism by its fundamentalists. Can parents brainwash their children from birth? You decide. This article on potty training infants was written by Shalom Pearl, Michael and Debi’s grown daughter. Personally, I found it disturbing.

To have a five-month-old wait to be put on the potty and then obey Mama’s voice when you say that special word to him and see him go potty for you, then you are not only beginning to train your baby in self-control, but obedience — almost from the womb. How cool is that?!

7. Through a Kindle forum, I learned that this author makes five figures a month from books like “Daddy’s Dirty Little Angel” and “Sex With the Sitter”.  I think if I tried to write porn, all my characters would end up falling in love, being monogamous, and getting comfortable enough with each other to wear their favorite sweatpants and go without makeup. The older I get, the sexier I find things like being at ease and unpretentious. A partner who helps change the sheets? Who sees your vulnerabilities and flaws, but loves you anyway? That’s pure erotica to me.

8. This makes me feel very humble.

It’s the by-product of a recent Kindle promotion, with word spread by readers on Twitter and Facebook, and may not last, but while it does I am profoundly grateful and touched by the support of those who believed in this story.

9. To pay the rent, I’ve been working in the warehouse of a used book store. I am reminded everyday of just how never-ending and pervasive the search is for answers to human problems and frailties.

The shelves are stocked with bibles, tarot cards, runes, ancient Chinese secrets, affirmation journals and books that promise healing through self-reflection, religion, crystals, meditation, mysticism, diet, prayer, magic singing bowls, gaining or losing ego . . . It’s sobering to realize that so much of this stems not just from curiosity, but from pain and the desire to heal something that feels broken, or to fill up a space that feels empty.

10. I wonder what we would go in search of if we all truly felt well, good, and whole.

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A beautiful card from my Twitter friend, Maggie.

The path from the Martin’s house to the small strip mall, with its grocery store and Starbucks, is a 3/4 mile long trail that’s been cut into the desert. Everyday and sometimes twice a day, I walk or bike ride through the dirt, even if I don’t need anything at all. It’s become a ritual — my time to commune with myself, Van Gogh, God, the fates and the future. I talk out loud, spilling secrets, worries and wishes into the sky, into the sagebrush, into the ears of whatever benevolent guardian might be listening.

And someone or something has been listening, I’m sure of it.

My future still hangs in the hour-by-hour and I have no idea where I’ll go in 17 days, which is when my lease with the Martin’s expires. I still don’t have a car, or a sense of security, and there are no big miracles in plain sight, but. . .

• I needed an interior book designer for the paperback version of Elephant Girl. I found one.
• I needed to redo the electronic versions and correct a few errors. I could.
• I needed to order proofs to get to the next step of the process. I did.
• I need to see a dentist for an emergency. I get to see one on Monday.

Small miracles are happening every day. People are good and kind. I am grateful to long-time friends and new friends alike, who have offered assistance and encouragement, and who are spreading the word about Elephant Girl.

While I haven’t sold as many e-versions of EG as I’d like, the response so far has been positive. Nine people have left reviews on Amazon and 352 people have “liked” the Facebook fan page. Many people have told me that they are waiting for the paperback version and if all goes well with proofs and corrections, it may be available in less than two weeks.

Young artist Kaytlin Kuns paints her vision of Elephant Girl for me. I love the imagination in this painting.

I’ve always found it frustrating that I can’t draw or paint. I’m a visual thinker without the ability to use more than words to bring my mental images to life. One day, I was telling my friend Karoli about a picture that I had in mind. I wondered if perhaps her teen daughter, aspiring artist Kaytlin Kuns, would want to give it a try. A couple of weeks later, I received this beautiful watercolor in my email. It is so close to the kind of life-saving, happy visions I carried around in my head at 14, 15, 16  years old that I was moved to tears. One day, I will frame this painting and hang it in the imagined room with the mahogany desk.

I’m living on faith, heart, belief and imagination. I’m making plans one day and one possibility at a time. And although I haven’t been blogging as much, I have been writing. Letters to Vincent, a short-story collection, and the yet-untitled sequel to Elephant Girl, which will be written as a novel.

I have my fears and worries, and there are times I wonder what the hell I’m doing, and how far I’ll get before I end up starving and homeless, but as Toni Morrison once said, “If you wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Fear is a heavy weight, and doubt wraps chains around even the most believing heart, so when I feel myself starting to sink I just spill out my burdens and dust off my wings.

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Click the picture or go to Amazon to buy!  (If you don’t have a Kindle, Amazon allows you to download one for your computer free–just check the right hand side of the page). Other e-versions are now also available on Smashwords. The paperback will be available in about a month.

This is an exciting, nerve-wracking, beautiful, overdue and scary time for me. A book that took me 49 years to write is finally finished and it’s getting out there slowly but surely. I hope you’ll all let me know what you think — good, bad and in-between — through emails, social media, or posting your reviews on Amazon.

More to come soon! In the meantime, I’ll repeat what I wrote for the inside of the book:

Acknowledgements

With deep gratitude to the readers of janedevin.com, who heard my voice and encouraged me to keep speaking.

To those who understood that a white flag doesn’t always mean surrender—that sometimes the bravest thing we can do is to seek peace: Much thanks to Colette Jacobsen, Samantha Thomas, Suzi Kressler, Bruce Nunnally and Teri Matheason Voyna.

It is often the case when living hand-to-mouth that both are empty. I deeply appreciate the generosity of those supporters—too numerous to mention—who contributed resources that made the completion of Elephant Girl possible.  Thank you to Rick Stabile and Doc Sheldon for being dedicated proofreaders. Thank you to Jessica Gottlieb, Tanis Miller and Karoli Kuns for their encouragement. Thank you also to Terry Kline and Connie Burke of General Motors and Karen Smith of Verizon Wireless.

For writing a beautiful song to accompany Elephant Girl, I thank Suzen Juel, a brilliant composer and lyricist as well as a generous soul.

Finally, I thank everyone who ever gave me a chance, a helping hand, a warm smile, or a good word. You are who makes the green fields possible, both in reality and imagination.

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Not surprisingly, I’ve been feeling suspended lately. I recently told a friend that I feel like I’m on a starting line, all geared up for a race, waiting for the starting pistol to sound. Instead, there’s been only a few false starts and a lot of twitching muscles.

Ambiguity makes me angsty, but waiting slays me. I’ve been waiting eons, an eternity, two months and one week. Seriously, doesn’t it feel like forever since I announced that I finished Elephant Girl?  The thirteen year-old in me, the one with the blue Smith Corona and Chinese Checkers box full of secrets and stories, feels like it’s been at least that long.

My wiser, more reasonable friends are split. Some are chanting the mantra of patience into my cocked ears while others are encouraging me to blast ahead. My spiritual friends are channeling the benevolent Universe on my behalf and telling me that great things are in the works. Lately, I’ve been tossing and turning, inside of bed and out. I’m navigating the subterranean space between breath-holding anxiety and fearless hope.

On the positive side, I’m pushing ahead with a couple of collaborative projects, including an Elephant Girl song with Suzen Juel. I love the raw and uncontrived lyricism of Suzen’s music and was honored when she agreed to help me out with a tune for my book trailer. The esteemed Aidan Morgan (known online as Palinode), has said yes to creating the video when I have the details of publication. Jessica Gottlieb recently e-introduced me to author Charles J. Orlando, who has experienced wild success with his book, which he published on his own and with a shoestring budget. Charles has managed to connect with over 500K Facebook fans in a little over a year and was gracious enough to share his experience and wisdom with me over the phone. When our conversation concluded, I felt ready to grab the starting pistol myself and run the race.

And when I fell in love with this picture by photographer Gregory Colbert —which could not express the mood of Elephant Girl any better — and learned that there was no chance that he would let me (or anyone) use it for a book cover, a couple of my artistic acquaintances offered to try their hands at a cover design. I remind myself every day that I am blessed to know some really talented and genuinely good people.

On the less positive side, my life continues to be very much up in the air. Which is okay and not unexpected—I knew I’d have to give up a lot to make EG happen—but I really don’t know where I’m going next, or for how long, and it’s kind of scary.  I have loved living with Jess in Albuquerque—it was a stroke of luck that I found her roommate wanted ad and we’ve become good friends—but her daughter is moving back home soon and I’d really like to find a place to call my own for at least a year or so. In the meantime, Jess’s parents have offered to rent me a room in the upstairs of their beautiful home and I also have standing offers to come to Iowa, Nebraska, and North Carolina for a while. I’m not geographically picky, but I do like the warmth of New Mexico. Ideally, I’d like to find a small studio somewhere, get EG launched, and write my second book. Fantastically, I dream about going on another road trip, this one a cross-country book tour. Of course, I’d have to have a book published first. And a car. And book stores and readers who were interested.

So everything is very close and yet still so far away. And I hate cliches like that, even when—especially when—they’re true and I’m living them.

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