Offerings and Transitions

New Year's eve, and I'm wrapped up in a blanket feeling the stark combination of caffeine withdrawal and sore throat. I want nothing more than to tuck in a little longer and read The Bird Sisters while drinking the hot sahlep drink at my side sprinkled with cinnamon. I'm ready to say goodbye to 2010's roller coaster cold and flu cycle, but I had such an amazing year in other ways that I'm not quite ready to let go. Two big reasons include these:

Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador - a blog ring that took a stance on a polarizing book promotion on She Writes.
Dialogue2010 at expat+HAREM - the 10-person roundtable discussion that sparked a year of conversation, comaradarie, and creativity.

60 Secs of Holiday Cheer
With just a few hours to spare on this side of the world for the New Year, squeeze in sixty seconds to watch this little video interview I did for She's Next on Family and Traditions from Anywhere.

Compared to last year, when I did a big holiday dinner and had lots of guests, we had a very quiet Christmas. In some ways, it was kind of a relief not to try so hard this year and to enjoy new little traditions of our own.

Creative Life picks for December 2010

• The clue to Justine Lee Monk’s The Secret Ingredient to a Strong Writer’s Platform? Big Meaning.
• Are you a writer? This pick has 10 Steps and 417 Comments.
• A hybrid design/multimedia/creativity thinker gives us Another Look at Self-Actualization.
• Who are you? Nilofer Merchant ponders the question in Rogues, Misfits, or Heroines?
• Karen Woland invites you to Declare your Indescribable Beauty.
• The post that started it all one year ago this month: Mapping the Imagination. This piece for expat+HAREM sparked a year of conversation, creativity, and camaraderie, and the 10-person roundtable discussion, Dialogue2010.

Moving On
In January, I'll be moving my blog from Blogger to my own site (yeah! cheers!). I've been moving my portfolio site to the same website, too, so it's been a learning curve in terms of bringing all these things together. I'll make the announcement soon, but www.rosedeniz.com will be the hub from January onward.

Wishing you and yours a healthy, creatively abundant new year!

Love,
Rose

Monsters, irascible inner critics, and Merilee

"Hybrids are used to strengthen the homogeneous. Grafting different orchids together makes flowers nobody has ever seen before. Cross-pollinating makes hardier fruits and vegetables. Hybrid cars are more energy efficient. Not one, or the other. Both. Conjoined. The hybrid/monster can be sensed even from the shadows. Poison Ivy left behind her traces of vanilla scent. The snakes in Medusa’s hair hissed." 

 - Sezin Koehler, from a hybrid/MONSTER manifesto

When I read The Fluent Self, I find myself enmeshed in Havi's language, the way she talks to monsters like inner critics, doubts, and fears. I've been hanging out with my inner writing critic since I started writing stories on yellow legal paper in this maroon recliner in our farmhouse over two decades ago. I discarded the stories over and over because I didn't like how I had written the words. I didn't like how the words looked. I was obsessed with perfect transcription and had no idea that a first draft could be messy and alive.

I think about the 9-year-old me who threw crumpled pieces of paper on the floor because she thought writers were always surrounded by their maimed, discarded thoughts. The opposite of cultivating a creative life.

Once proud of moving overseas with only a few suitcases, I now have stuff spilling over. And not just physical stuff, but also taking time to work on things that I love, building in quiet time into my otherwise bell-clanging-kid-filled day. Words fill up space. Ideas fill up space. Sometimes our own thoughts seem insurgent to the ones before them and that thinking takes up space. How do we live with conflicting ideas? Mediate. 

I'm in the middle of making 1,600 words a day for thirty days come to life. These run-at-full-tilt-projects are what keep me energized and fueled up.

It's a lot easier to take a break from my irascible inner critic thanks to the 15-year-old girl in my head telling me what to do. Not my adolescent self. Merilee. The girl in my NaNoWriMo novel who's father writes eulogies for a living and who's in love with a celebrity. Totally not my thing to write about celebrities - it's all Merilee's doing.

And then there's this other way of looking at monsters: Sezin Koehler's collaborative hybrid/Monster project is a glimpse into how letting the shadowy side of our selves be visible can create rich, creative, multifarious ideas of beauty.

What are your monsters, and do they ever help you discover something wonderful?