Time to break out the champagne, my beauties: my book is now up for sale at Amazon! Yes, All Things Glorious and True is officially out in the wild, ready to kick up its heels and cause a good-natured ruckus. I’m so stoked, and relieved, and nervous, and proud, and all kinds of other big, beautiful book mama emotions. After the tumult of losing a good chunk of NOGOODFORME to the dark overlords of the Internet, I feel happy knowing it lives on in some form of another.

(By the way, the Kindle edition will up very soon as well! This is all very new to me, but I’ll let you know and update it here as well, but I’m told it will be up by tomorrow for the U.S. and by mid-week for other sales territories.)

ANYWAY! Order it up, dear friends, and if you feel compelled, please review it on Amazon. Reviews are mucho important, especially for indie-published efforts like mine, and I would so appreciate and cherish it. And if you could share via your Facebook, Twitter or other social media playthings you have, I’d so appreciate that as well.

And if you do order it, please save your e-receipt…I have a lovely special something-something around my birthday time (June 27) for peeps who buy the book. Keep your eyes peeled!

I’m going to have myself a delicious raspberry lambic and a piece of fancy cake to celebrate tonight! Please have some with me in spirit, and thanks so much again for all the support and encouragement you’ve given me along the way during this sexy little literary adventure.

I’ve been thinking lately about tempo, about the rhythm and pace of things and how some things don’t sync up. Bodies vs. minds, heart vs. head, that kind of thing. And lately, as a runner, I’ve been working on getting my speed up, and it’s going really well — I seriously feel great about running the fastest I’ve ever run in my life, especially as I slide down the dark side of my thirties. So the idea of speed and pace is a literal concern of mine a few times a week as a running nerd.

But I’m thinking of pace and rhythm in relation to more abstract things, like the rhythm of blogging and the pace of life. Like how in blogging you feel compelled to do it regularly and consistently if you want to have some modicum of “success” at it — and yet, as a personal blogger, tiny revelations and insights about life don’t happen regularly and consistently at all, or at least at a scale to warrant being documented in writing.

It was easy to write a lot and all the time when I was writing NOGOODFORME — for one thing, that blog covered areas that change all the time. There will never be a shortage of music, style, food, and all that to write about. It’s easier to be regular and consistent as a blogger when you have a thing and a schtick — even if you’re writing about deeply personal issues like grief, there is a compass there, a focus that guides you when you sit down at the screen to write.

Here, though, it’s a bit more diary-like, a bit more personal and yet diffuse. I decided to write here more often because I wanted the challenge of writing more intimately, from a more heartful place — something that feels more honest, kind and, yes, sincere. The problem is that I don’t have personal revelations every day, or even every week — I wish I were that wise, but I’m not. I don’t have a fabulously decorated apartment; I’m not much of a consumer anymore, either in clothes or music or anything that people love to read about. I sort of just live my life and keep my game tight and love like crazy. I re-read and re-listen to things again and again; I try to engage things at a slower, deeper and (what feels like to me) richer pace. I like that a lot; it feels good.

But it doesn’t make for great copy, I have to admit. I worry about being mundane. I worry about being boring. So I don’t know. I want to tell you that I started writing a new novel this month and it’s going really lovely; I sit at my kitchen table early in the mornings as the sun streams through the window and I visit a world set in Old Chicago, and I get to rhapsodize about perfume, about glamour, about dresses by the Callot Soeurs. It’s fun to write a historical novel, using a part of my brain I often don’t get to share. (Fans of 19th century/Gilded Age history, please raise your hand!) I’m very, very into writing as if I am trying to be Edith Wharton or Henry James, though, since they’re masters, I will settle for ending up like Theodore Dreiser. There’s a pretty yellow finch that sits in the tree outside my window. I perfected my egg strata recipe. My summer fashion concept is making me super happy these days. I like how summer in general slows everything down beautifully, and finally thoughts and impulses have time to catch up with me, ready to be shaped and sculpted into more concrete things.

It all exists at once, these pieces of life. When I write here, I sometimes feel like I’m placing them in an order and harmony that I think I know, but the full song has yet to reveal itself fully.

It’s easy to take words for granted. Generally, most of us use them everyday, either in speech, through writing, in texts and e-mails. As a writer by vocation, I use them all the time, torrents of words spilling out of me wih fluency and ease. Or so I wish; maybe on a good day that is true. Most days, though, I can use words quite carelessly, slap-dash, rushing through whole strings of them to get to the next thought.

Lately, though, I have been trying to be curious about words again, as if I am still new to language. When I was five, my dad gave me a big grown-up dictionary — a satisfyingly hefty book with a brown leather cover and speckled endpapers that reminded me of cinnamon ice cream. I used to sit and read the words in it. Like Ione Skye in Say Anything, I checked off all the words whose entries I read; my goal was to read all of them. It just amazed me, how words could describe other words. Words knotted together, forming more meaning, and certain knots and formations changed the shadings of meaning. It just amazed me that somehow people came to agreements upon words and their meanings, and they meant something.

I’ve been looking to get back to that level of wonder about words. And so I’m taking a look back at words whose usage and meaning I take for granted, and looking up their meanings and etymology in the dictionary again, just like I did as a kid. And so I began with a word that I think so many of us take for granted: sincerity.

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We sign letters with “Sincerely.” Sometimes we refer to our “sincere thanks.” Sincerity is often seen as a “dippy” quality, unbelievably earnest and perhaps square. Victorian pap: bland, cloying, annoying to be around for many people. Sincerity cares; it is open, wide-eyed, guileless, without defenses. There is a direct line between the heart and its expression with sincerity. It is a slightly serious, sober quality, but without darkness. Sincerity is a sunny, clear morning, but underneath the brightness, there is no place to hide.

Sincere is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “free from pretense or deceit; proceeding from genuine feelings.” It has its origins from the Latin word sincerus, which means “clean, pure.” Its opposite, though, isn’t necessarily pretension — its opposite is hypocrisy, when we say something and do the opposite. In sincerity, the heart, your actions and the words you speak are in full alignment. In many ways, genuine sincerity — and, after all, sincerity is by definition genuine — takes true courage. To speak from the heart with openness and without the protections of deceit, hypocrisy or pretense — that is difficult. I read a lot, and I rarely find something that is unadulterated sincerity anymore. Children’s literature is often quite sincere — I think of my favorite book, A Little Prince and Little Women. But as we get older, perhaps, we lose that sense of openness and learn to cloak ourselves in sophistication, intelligence, coolness, “personal brands,” polemic, what have you.

But I’m starting to think, in some ways, that living and speaking with sincerity is a very underrated act or virtue. I like that the word is rooted in emotions but is not emotional in and of itself. I like how it is about the words we speak: about the intentions we bring to communication and the responsibility we acknowledge when we believe in their impact upon others. People who don’t value themselves don’t value the power of their communication or believe their words matter; talk really is cheap. But in sincerity, your intentions and what you say carry true currency, and people are careful of that. And I like the implications of kindness, honesty and all those other old-fashioned qualities with the word “sincerity.”

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To speak and be openly, without pretension or deceit, without guile: it’s really not as easy as it seems. I actually tried it the other day: an entire day of sincerity. It was very difficult: no sarcasm, no irony, no defensiveness. Just speaking openly and cleanly “from the heart,” aligning my speech with my truth. It required a moment-by-moment awareness of what I was feeling and experiencing. And then it required an extraordinary mindfulness of what exactly I was going to say. I found myself speaking a lot less than I usually do — and I am not a very chatty person by nature. For the day, my default was silence, until I could judge enough a situation enough to feel safe to speak openly and sincerely. Sincerity is courageous, but it’s not stupid.

What I did observe, however, is how we rarely use language to communicate. What we say often shields. Sometimes we speak to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. Sometimes we say something to avoid a deeper minefield. Sometimes we say something to protect someone else. We often speak to share information, but rarely not about what life is like where we are standing now. Language doesn’t often communicate outwardly from me to you or you to me — it really does throw up barriers. And sometimes, working out words in your mind, it can throw up barriers within yourself, depending on how much you doubt yourself.

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The few times I did speak sincerely, I realized how scary it felt. I am not used to feeling so exposed. I realized how little I truly share openly about myself, even in the simplest question. When someone asks “How are you?”, I am inclined to just say “Fine” or “I’m well,” when really I am unhappy in the moment, or stressed, or even bursting with happiness. (Interestingly enough, I found happiness hardest to share with sincere speech. It is much easier to say “Oh, work was exhausting today, I am beat” than it is to say “Life is wonderful, I feel so happy and loved.”)

I also realized the connection between love and sincerity. I can’t have love without sincerity — sincerity is the condition that makes tenderness and genuine connection possible, and those are the things that make love possible. I am not talking infatuation or romantic obsession, which are one-way “emotions,” but the give-and-take between two people, one that requires a constant line of openness and genuine honesty. If I think about it, the growth of love in my life is directly correlated with my ability to speak sincerely, openly, kindly and authentically.

And sometimes, of course, you don’t need words at all. The way people in love rub their faces together, eyes closed, or the way a horse will nudge you after you lead her around the arena after a good hour of working together,in a gesture of comradeship and

Try to spend a day, or even just a social event, speaking and communicating as sincerely as you can. You’ll learn a lot about yourself and the people and situations surrounding you, and probably realize that sincerity is a lot less dippy, and a lot tougher, than you first thought.

Okay, so it’s not a novel, it’s a record, but Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. City is so ace, so smart and complex, that it’s better than most “great American contemporary” novels I’ve read. I don’t write on music as much anymore, so I’m out of practice, but this whole collection of songs really deserves to be called an album — it’s cohesive and amazing from beginning to end, with a real narrative and character arc, storytelling smarts, moral ambiguity and just an engaging sense of craft and intelligence behind it. I listen to it again and again and there’s a new detail, a new angle I haven’t discovered before. The only thing I think that rewards that kind of attention and pleasure are certain books, and TV shows like “The Wire” — you can go back again and again because they’re so damn substantive. Singles don’t really do it justice — you really have to listen to the whole thing to get a sense of how amazing it is.

The record’s essentially a “man vs. the world” story, about a young man, just trying to score with his girl and have a good time, trying to rise above his background — a kind of social schizophrenia that he details in some of the best lyrics. There’s real candid vulnerability, regret, thoughtfulness — and beyond the emotional range, real skill in telling a story, knowing when to change the shot, POV, camera angle. Best record of the year so far, for sure. Honestly, I don’t think much else will top this. It’s rare that pop music can be called an achievement — this record, though, is it.

This is my favorite track so far, “The Art of Peer Pressure.” This is like an object lesson in subjectivity — both cinematic and intimate at the same time.

But if we’re going to talk real bona-fide American novels — as well as stay on the cinematic and intimate tip — I just finished the new James Salter book, All That Is, and it was just a fantastic experience. Salter gets called a writer’s writer for the clean, precise, light-filled prose he writes, the strange, graceful way stories shatter into streams of images and sounds, then recombine back into strands of narrative again. I love his short stories more than his novels, in all honesty, and that’s still the case.

But All That Is has both an intimacy and sweep, covering one man’s life in war, in publishing and in love. Interestingly, I think the closest experience to reading a James Salter novel is like watching a modernist European film — like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, which shares a certain drift through memory and time and a distant European glamour with Salter.

(Another thing to note about this book: crazy great sex scenes, raw, explicit yet strangely refined.)

I once described Salter as “Hemingway without the misogyny,” and while I think that’s way too facile and simplistic, I still think it’s a good tagline for Salter. There is an elemental quality, a masculinity, but it doesn’t seem to come at the expense of women in Salter’s fiction. I love the sense I have of Salter’s women — they are enigmas, to me as a reader and to the main characters, but you have a sense that they have their own lives and thoughts off the page.

So yes, Salter and Lamar — only someone like me would put them together in the same blog post, I suppose! But to me, there’s an affinity between an elderly white male writer and a young black male rapper — both have a gift for portraying subjectivity, with an aim to capture the distance we navigate between who we really feel ourselves to be and the world we have to express ourselves within. It’s tricky terrain to be who we want to be in the world. The consequences are different for both writers, as are their stakes, but the journey is no less treacherous for either.

I’ve been thinking about work and livelihood lately, in kind of a lazy, drowsy way. I’ve been working since I was about 15. In the personal finance and “new frugality” classic, Your Money or Your Life, one of the steps is figuring out how much you’ve earned over the course of your lifetime so far. You gather up your Social Security statements, your tax returns over the years, even those babysitting jobs when you were a teenager….and the amount is truly astonishing once you tally it up, especially if you’ve spend over half your life working. I’ve been ticking away at this task slowly since I read the book a few years ago (I am slow at this kind of thing) but as I’ve worked through it, it’s brought back lots of memories of the odd, random jobs I’ve had so far.

When I think of the turning points and important things of my life, jobs don’t rate as high as relationships, creative projects, my education and other more emotionally resonant things. They’re just not as sexy. Jobs are mundane, boring, necessities brought about by an often senseless system. Why do people work? my nephew asked me once when he was little. Beyond the usual platitudes, it was hard for me to explain. Most of us just have to. Most of us have to fork over our time and energy to someone else to do things for them, and a huge part of our life is thus given over to something that isn’t fully of our own making — for most of us, at least. As a result, we compartmentalize that aspect of our life, and put it in an airtight container so it has nothing to do with the rest of our life and self. Jobs are already a huge investment; why invest any more beyond professionalism and pride, perhaps? And yet for something we spend so much time upon, it’s interesting we don’t reflect more on its impact on our lives, whether we like it or not. Maybe we don’t because it’s often depressing; but maybe there’s something worth looking at.

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It was hard for me to get my first job; I applied everywhere but I couldn’t get even a crappy cashier job at Kmart. Through a friend, I finally got a job at a Nature Company-type of store, but I was terrible at most aspects of it. They never fired me; I just got fewer and fewer hours. The one time I was good at it, I was in charge of the New Age music section over the holidays and was astonished by how many people bought CDs of jungle sounds and whale mating calls. Later, I had another job sorting through files for a financial planner, and I liked that much more; I got to sit by myself in a big conference room and didn’t have to interact with the public. But I zipped through the piles of folders and they ended up running out of work for me to do.

My final high school job was through my father’s factory, the summer before I started college. It was a real blue-collar job, an assembly line type of thing. I basically sat at the end of a line and made sure these screws stayed neatly in a pile inside a package before a machine stamped the cardboard and plastic bin shut. It was mind-numbingly boring; I played entire records in my head all day, forcing myself to remember every single lyric and chord change. (This is why I know the first few PJ Harvey records so well.) I had to get up early to be there by 4:30AM, and I worked with the most random people: a girl who talked about her sex life all the time, another girl who was working to save money towards her dream of becoming an undertaker. (Yes, she really truly did want to be an undertaker. When “Six Feet Under” came out, I thought about her and wondered if it was her favorite show, and if she ever did become an undertaker.) My dad told me I had to take this job so I would know why I was going to college. It paid pretty well, and I was young enough so that the hours didn’t really bother me. But it still sucked to get up early.

In college I had a steady work-study job, working for a secretary for one of the offices that programmed events for the university. She was a truly sweet woman, very Christian — she gave me a Bible once, not in a holy roller move, but because I was curious about Biblical history. Most students in the office with these jobs didn’t do much; it was understood we would work on our homework, fulfilling occasional requests to make copies and such. But I did end up setting up the e-mail accounts for the office, if I remember, and typing up letters often because I could do so very fast. During the summers I worked as a temp in various offices. Put me behind a typewriter or computer and I knew what I was doing. Sometimes I would go out to lunch and imagine being an office worker for the rest of my life, and the thought both suffocated and comforted me. It was something I could be good at, but I knew the monotony would bore me. But it was humble but honest work, all of it. The final summer of college before my senior year, my job was working at the college paper and as a house painter. To this day, I can still paint a room quickly.

I had infinitely more glamorous, colorful jobs after I graduated college and moved to New York. New York is good for that; people have a lot of money and some very random things they need done. I got paid to dress up, go to a big nightclub and dance a few times, essentially keeping the dance floor going and looking cool in the process. It was the twilight days of the rave era, and I was a good dancer — plus, I was always broke and I needed the money, though the people were very dodgy. I worked for three days in a fancy boutique in Soho, for a designer whose clothes I loved — but I hated retail. Retail is just awful for me. (I should’ve remembered: I hate any job that requires interfacing with the public.) But mostly I worked in film, and those jobs were the most stressful yet fun of my life. I made fake vomit as a prop stylist and master. I trawled prop houses and picked out furnishings for imaginary houses, imaginary weddings. I left messages on Johnny Depp’s answering machine for a producer. I read scripts that were messengered to my apartment and wrote up my feedback on them, trying to be sympathetic yet tough. This could be me one day, I thought to myself, and I wanted to earn good karma. I did a lot of freelance writing. Through it all, I was doing my “real work” — my own writing and filmmaking — but in this bright, busy layer of life, life was full with a patchwork of paid endeavors. I never really thought of my jobs as my “real work,” ever, just things I did to fill up a bank account that could never quite stay as full as I wanted. But it was exciting, and it was adventurous, and it made for good anecdotes and stories.

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I’ve been thinking about this schism I’ve had for so long between “real work” and “job.” I’m at heart a Marxist — not in the sense that I believe in his proposed system of government, but in how Karl Marx looked at the way institutions like work, government and politics shape our consciousness, rather than vice versa, which was the Enlightenment approach to matters of political economy. We want to think we are completely sovereign over the systems that organize money, time, energy and other major aspects of our being, but in truth they do shape us, even just a little, which is why we chafe under their pressure. They shape how we see, what we learn every day, who we interact with for about a third of our days. The idea of jobs vs. work is, in some ways, a healthy distinction — I don’t identify myself with my job or even my work. My identity is my values, my beliefs and convictions and the actions that emerge from them. My history, my relationships, my alliances and allegiances. I think that’s healthy.

But in some other ways, it’s a pity that “jobs” are so detached from what we do. Even if “jobs” are not ourselves, we want them to be meaningful, to serve something larger than us, to give us some kind of pleasure in some way.

When I look back through my “job” history, I see a lot of things. A larger frame of reference, of what working-class work really felt like — something that echoed when listening to the college punks I knew talk about workers rights and “authenticity” while professing their allergies to the people and cultures they reportedly advocated for. A compassion for what my dad did, year after year. Learning how to read a terrain and figure out where the power centers were, and when not to care about any of it. My strengths, weaknesses and preferences. How and when to negotiate, and when to walk away. How to get along with people who aren’t like you or aren’t even compatible with you. The importance of money. And of course, how to make fake vomit. I look back on it all and I’m slightly astonished. Along the way, I’ve become savvy about some things, despite the hodge-podge and the enforced divide between “job” and “work.” And so while I don’t expect ultimate life fulfillment from my job, I do want to think of what I will learn, what it will build upon.

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Hello all! Just using this end-of-the-post space to keep people updated on book things and other such matters. The book’s micro-site is coming together nicely, and I enjoy adding small bits and such to it. I like the design of it a lot; maybe I’ll turn it into a quasi-Tumblr. Keep your eye on it for brief excerpts from the book; I’ll be putting longer ones up in the special section of my site available to newsletter subscribers. As for the book itself? Ugh, remind me next time to hire a proper proofreader! Maybe the whole process is just making me increasingly OCD, I don’t know. But it’s submitted for final proof now. I thought I would be done by now, but alas, I just can’t let some mistakes go and then sometimes the technical aspects of the project are bedeviling. (I’ve never learned so much about PDF conversion in my life.) But a book feels so permanent, like PERMANENT RECORD permanent, so it’s worth the effort. Also: the picture with this post has nothing to do with jobs, I admit, but do you really want to see a picture of a job? Zzzzzz….

I couldn’t sleep last Sunday night. I had no caffeine during the day, and generally everything felt fine when I went to bed at 11PM, the remnants of a thunderstorm rumbling further in the distance as the cool air streamed through my bedroom windows. Post-thunderstorm cool nights are my favorite sleeping weather, and I drifted off to sleep comfortably.

But I woke up at 3AM, feeling hot and stuffy and distinctly uncomfortable. The air wasn’t moving at all anymore, so I put on the fan and went back to sleep. Only…I couldn’t fall back asleep. I had no idea why. My mind wasn’t racing. I felt relaxed. And yet I could not get back to sleep. After while, I got up, puttered around a little like they say for you to do, went back to bed…but still no sleep.

I started to feel stupid-anxious, like Oh my god I NEED to get to sleep, why can’t I sleep, this is so horrible. I could hear the birds chirping now, like they do before dawn. I could feel my body and mind worn out, but I had that weird raw feeling, like all your nerves in your skin are too alive and too sensitive, and even the bed feels wrong beneath you. I could feel myself beginning to agonize and panic, because I had a lot to do on Monday and I didn’t want to do it on so little sleep. Panic, pressure, a buzzing mind: not really the best way I want to start a week.

Finally, I just took a deep breath. I just accepted that fact that I was awake, instead of fighting it so hard. I told myself that in order to make it through the day, I was just going to have to check in with myself often and do what I was capable of, and take things slow. It would be a moment-by-moment thing. Fine, I said to whatever odd spirit has the privilege of overlooking sleepless nights. I’m awake. It’s nearly 5AM. What should I do? I had about three hours before I started my normal day. That free time would normally be a gift, so I decided in my sleepy, hazy way to treat it like one. I actually got it in my head to get a pedicure, but there aren’t any salons open at that hour in my town. (Note to self: 24-hour nail salon here would be a hit.) So, I thought to myself, I’ll go the gym. My gym’s open 24 hours; it’ll be a new experience.

I got dressed, got in my car and headed on my way. I tried playing music, but everything seemed too harsh and loud to me. So I drove in silence, noticing how quiet the streets are at 5AM, how pretty the sky is right after dawn. At the gym, I realized there was no way I could do a long run on the treadmill, so I rowed and biked instead. I people-watched, noting how different the early workout crowd was from the late afternoon, when I usually go. After the gym, I got home, took a shower and revised a short story. I tried writing a new one, but that felt beyond my powers. But revising felt fine, and so did sketching out a few blog posts. Every so often, I asked myself: What can I do now? This is what I can do. And I would do it as slowly as I could, because otherwise I would end up doing it wrong.

The day wore on, and I oscillated between feeling like crap and feeling fine. Every moment, every transition, I checked in with myself often. How was I feeling? What did I feel capable of? And if that fell short of my expectations and desires, I didn’t harangue myself about it. I just accepted the fact that I was incredibly sleepy and tired, and went on with it.

But I noticed something interesting (besides the fact that I craved way more sugar and carbs than I do normally.) I was tired and felt like I was going slow and easy, but I was actually incredibly productive. I wrote. I revised. I got errands done. I filed. I paid bills. I set up accounts. I made plans. I organized my summer wardrobe. I took and edited photos. I returned my library books. I even experimented with a new hairstyle. (I call it “I Wish I Were a Khaleesi.”) Part of it was the extra three hours of the day, no doubt. But I noticed the constant checking-in with myself — and the willingness to cut myself some slack for the realities of real-live actual lifeness — created a sense of ease and gentleness in the day. And we all know what happens when we remove tension and friction from things: they actually work better.

Then I remembered something from my childhood. When I was little, my dad was fond of saying “Be easy with yourself” when my sisters and I were doing things that frustrated us. I remember bashing the shit out of some toy I was trying to assemble when I was a kid, getting more and more enraged in the way that six-year-olds can get. “Be easy with yourself,” my dad said as he watched me, which only got me more enraged. “It’s not easy!” I fume, thinking my dad was talking about putting together the toy. But that’s not what he meant. “I know it’s not easy, but you’re being too hard on yourself. Be easy,” he insisted. Furious, I told my dad to stop Yoda-talking me. (Yoda-talking is what I called it when my dad was trying to offer advice and I was just too young and headstrong to accept it.)

What I didn’t understand then — but I do now — is that the anger and frustration he observed were not just about the toy I was putting together, but my own frustration and even shame at my inability to accomplish this supposedly simple thing — and that inner experience was only making my outer one even more difficult. There is the doing of a task or action — and the way of being you bring to it, which ineffably affects the experience as a whole.

So often “productivity” and productivity routines and systems are designed to automate, to free up your attention from boring, annoying tasks so you can focus on the “important things.” But after my sleepless night, I found being aware of my present moment, practicing a radical acceptance of where I was at and doing things in as gentle of a manner as possible actually helped me do more, and do it more satisfyingly. Even though I was tired, I felt as if I had lived every hour of the day with a certain fullness that my day-to-day life sometimes lacks, as I race from task to task, activity to activity, occasion to occasion. I didn’t “automate” anything; I didn’t “focus.” I was forced to exist mindfully and treat myself kindly, and that made all the difference.

I went to bed that night at the previously unheard-of time of 10PM, finally just too exhausted and fatigued to go on. But I did think about how good the day ended up being despite it all, about how much our own judgments about ourselves and who we should be cloud our experiences and keep them from being as full and good as we’d like them to be — and about how acceptance and ease creates a kind of space in your life for everything to flow throughout the day. And then I kind of laughed at myself. That’s so Yoda-talky, I thought, and finally fell asleep.

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I’m gearing up to send out my next newsletter in a few days! It’s about love, anxiety, relationships and being brave despite it all. If you’re interested, sign up here. I don’t often send my newsletter, maybe once every month and a half, but I consider it my best, most searching, most intimate writing. Also: you get access to an excerpt from my novel, as well as a sample of new writing from my upcoming book.

This year I want to remember that summer is a time to slow down. Springtime has been so busy: I’ve been gearing up to publish my collection of essays soon, and while I thought this would be a quick, easy project, it has not. I’m embarrassed at my naivete, actually! But the long-winding journey is ending soon, and soon I will hold a final proof in my hand, and soon I will approve it, and soon it will be done, done, done and out, out, out and hopefully some of you will read it and it will live a long, thriving life as a book in the world! I’m so excited, nervous and relieved. Relieved, like a thing that has been clogging up my master to-do list will finally be cleared off. Relieved, because my inner sense of integrity and honor and keeping my own word to myself will be appeased. Relieved, because now I have time to work on new things! But in a nice, slow, leisurely way. Not in a push-push-push, striving kind of manner, but one where I take pleasure in seeing ideas unfurl into concrete shapes, and savor the twists and turns. Summer is savor, and I can’t wait. Here is how I’m inching into the season, while winding down the spring.

Baker Baker

This spring I discovered baking, but like baking for really lazy people. I got a cute little Babycakes donut maker, and I’ve been experimenting with different recipes every now and then. Baking to me isn’t just something you whip together — you have to be precise, and you just can’t whip things together, which is something I can do with regular ol’ cooking. Baking donuts is a project, something I have to carve out time to do and gather stuff for. But the good thing is, it’s something that I like doing with my niece and it gives us something to do together. Plus: apple cinnamon donuts are delicious! I’m on the hunt for pistachio donuts now; I want to bake a little more before it’s summer and it gets too hot out to put the oven on. But one thing I like about foodie things: it’s a nice way to feel creative and make something tangible (like my friendship bracelets) without everything being a protracted, agonizing process. As everything gets all big and complex, it’s nice to have those smaller things in your life.

Lazy Type-A Stuff

I’m looking at my hippie productivity bible, my year planner, which I filled out at the end of last year, reassessing my goals, seeing what I’ve made progress on. I’m cleaning out my digital clutter again, going through which sites I want in my inbox, my RSS, my bookmarks. I emptied out my inbox, sorted through my paper mail clutter, recycled all my old magazines. Basically, everything is slowing down, and it’s nice to refine any systems you have in place — or put in new ones where you need them. I’m in the phase of my life when I’m just paring everything all done. It sounds more Zen than it is, I guess, but it’s really just asking myself, Hmmm, do I really need to subscribe to these five fashion blogs that all talk about the same thing in the same way? I don’t, really, so goodbye, digi-clutter.

Corpse Pose

There was a time when “corpse pose” in my mind referred primarily to an Unwound song, not a yoga pose. But then I moved to San Francisco, and it’s practically a state requirement to do yoga. You can’t walk a block without running into someone with a yoga mat or seeing a yoga studio. I did Ashtanga for awhile but kind of burned out on it. Plus, all the weird spiritual high-minded talk from these teachers often sounded really elitist and holier-than-thou to me. So I stopped, plus I moved, and life got insanely busy. But lately I’ve been doing brief spells of yoga — just 5-10 minutes of stretching in the morning and night, nothing major, just enough to loosen up my spine and hips, which can get tight from running. And it’s made a world of difference. I also discovered Tara Stiles, who I like a lot because she’s super-accessible and keeps it all down to earth. So: yes. Yoga: it’s nice to have you back in my life.

Getting Ready to Novelize

I’m so excited: I’m going to start writing a new novel soon! I’ve been itching and itching to get done with my current book project so I have a nice chunk of time and attention and energy to focus on my novel. Outside a few short stories and pieces of writing, I haven’t written anything new in a bit and it is driving me nuts. So once this agonizingly long self-publishing process is done, I am just going to write, write, write. I can’t wait.

Baby Plants, Please Don’t Die

This is my spring-into-summer prayer these days! I never thought I’d be a growing-plants type of person, and my thumb is honestly midway between green and yellow. But I’m emboldened by the success of my basil plant, which has basically managed to stay alive when I started cultivating it in winter. This year I’m also growing cherry tomatoes and cilantro. I was eager for bell peppers, but let’s not get so ambitious yet! One thing I like: I can’t really force a plant to grow faster or slower. I have to think like a collaborator about growing and gardening, and just create conditions in which another life form gets to thrive. It is a nice metaphor, I think, about control, letting go and nurturing. I am all about living good metaphors.

In Which I Make Friends of the Equine Nature

Springtime also means: horses! Riding! Stables! Ponies! Last weekend I went to an open house at a new stable, and as my reward to myself for publishing my book, I’m going to take lessons again. I can’t put into words what I love about riding and being around horses — I feel absolutely myself and yet unburdened by the fears and worries that obscure my self from me at times. Riding demands total focus and calm and equanimity to do it well, as well as a profound awareness of the animal beneath you as you ride. It is really the most beautiful thing, and the connection I feel to a horse is often so much more attuned and subtle than I do to most human beings. When I am being utterly honest, human beings disappoint me — but horses never do. A horse cannot lie to you; it can’t dissemble. It can’t delude itself. It just walks and runs and grazes and nuzzles. A pure creature, really. I love that.

Re-Thinking Webby Things

I think about this space and what I want to do here, and sometimes I wonder if I should blog about more things and risk being unfocused, or if I’m really a diarist and that’s what this should be, or if I want to launch a whole new thing and just write about fashion, music and stuff like I used to, which is sometimes an itch that I get. But is it a sustainable itch? I know I want to redesign this site just a little. To be honest, I like designing things and being visual — sites, mostly, but I took great pleasure in doing my own book cover. Maybe by summer’s end you will see a whole new look or slant here, but the thinking and planting of ideas begins now. You know that whole idea of harvest? In effect right here, though the rewards won’t be seen for a few more months.

Lately I have been feeling like I have to have all my ducks in a row before I do anything, or have it all polished and perfect, before I talk about it publicly. But then it is paralyzing me from publishing on this blog more. So I’m getting over that, starting…now! Ladies and gentlemen, my book All Things Glorious & True is coming out soon! Here is the book cover:

I’m very excited! It was so thrilling to get the actual proof copy of my book and hold it in my hands, underscoring how beautiful and happy-inducing physical objects are. I held it in my hand and looked at my shiny, pretty cover, and felt the rather substantial weight like a strange miracle, like, Wow, did I really write all these words that are weighing me here? I put it on my bookshelf, right between novels by Simone de Beauvoir and Susanna Clarke, and felt oddly happy at the thought that now I have something that people can nestle onto their own bookshelves. It’s 300 pages long, set in Bodoni and it looks lovely. It’s just kind of amazing to put something that reflects, even a little, my journey of how pop culture and fashion brought me just a bit closer to adventure, beauty and liberation.

The idea of people buying my book is equally thrilling. A tiny bit scary, because a lot of the new material and commentary I added is much more open than I ever was on at NOGOODFORME.com, but still wonderful to contemplate. Getting this out has really brought out my inner perfectionist, but at this point, I just need to move on and get it out.

It will be available on Amazon.com as well as Amazon’s international outposts for all the lovely Europeans, Canadians and other far-flung readers. It will also come to Kindle as well, and I hope to make it available to other booksellers as well.

Just for fun, here is my micro-site for the book: allthingsgloriousandtrue.katasharya.com. It has a description, table of contents and a FAQ; it’s a bit rough at the moment, but it is super-pretty, especially on an iPhone or iPad. I can answer any questions here as well!

Anyway, keep your eye out in this space — I plan on running some giveaways and promotions once the book is launched. Yayness!

So one of the unanticipated effects of a long winter was that in March I went on a bit of a fashion bender. After a pretty abstemious January and February, it’s like the floodgates opened and suddenly everything on the sales rack looked good to me. Neon! Weird abstract prints! Lime green jeans! It was like having the shopping equivalent of beer goggles.

Luckily the old habits of caution and discrimination are inculcated enough, and most of my enthusiasm was contained in the dressing room, satiated by taking plentiful amounts of dressing room try-on pics. (You know the ones I mean.) But the will was broken when it came to these printed pants. They are a bit 70s golf lady, but I do not care. I got immediately inspired when I brought them home and tried them on with a zillion different tops. It’s a couple of months later and I still love them. (Yay!) My 5-year-old nephew calls them my “cheetah pants” and gives them two thumbs-up because they “make him dizzy.” (Dizziness is a sought-after quality by most little kids, if I remember.) My beau gets a kick out of them as well. Even my mom loves them! Everyone wins! Most of the time I’m very intransigent when it comes to clothing and pretty low-key, but I’m glad I took this fashion risk and went out of my comfort zone a bit.

I am usually a jeans kind of girls, or I wear leggings on one of those days when I’m running around and I know I’m headed for a run or a dance class or the gym or riding and don’t feel like changing so much all the time. These are very much “today I’m going to play” kind of pants, and I like that about them as well. It’s all too easy for the days to be packed with industry, hard work, tenacity and effort — so it’s nice to put on clothes in which all I can be is playful. Plus: prints! How can you not love prints?

A bit ago my niece got me hooked on making friendship bracelets. She got a little kit, and being an auntie, I got roped into making a bunch with her — and then I couldn’t stop at just one. Though I knit, sew and do a few other handiwork kind of things, I’m not really much of a crafty person. I sometimes enjoy those things, but since film school and full-time work, any of those potential hobbies has fallen by the wayside — almost all my free time outside of family and loved ones is consumed by writing, publishing, blogging or other literary-oriented pursuits.

But there’s something comforting and relaxing about the weaving of thread, the picking of colors, and the fact that within about an hour’s time, I have a tangible object to show for my labors — something that has a beginning, middle and end. I like most that I can’t be on a computer to do it — I like the break away from glowing screens. I like the fact that it has nothing to do with words, nothing to do with writing or editing, nothing to do with electricity. Working with my hands, with a physical medium — it’s such sweet relief, relaxing yet absorbing, and so satisfying when I finish. I’m pretty much on the computer all day due to the nature of my work, and then for hours longer because of my novels and essays — and I’m realizing it’s just not healthy, all this computer time.

But what gives way? I need to make money. I need to write. I can blog a little less, but then I hear the dreaded “should monster” — I should be building a platform, I should be researching agents, I should be taking this webinar or that webinar about publishing, I should be blogging, I should finish my newsletter, I should be better at social media. Should, should, should! Nothing kills a passion more than the should monster! I have been thinking about what it means to be a writer in the 21st century, to constantly hear advice about what we should do, and sometimes I follow it — but it takes me farther away from what I truly love: writing. As much as I enjoy Twitter and blogging, I don’t want it to be a replacement for writing stories and essays. I don’t want to feel a sense of boredom and dread when I turn on my laptop to write, simply because I’m fucking sick of sitting at my computer — I want instead to feel excited to play with my characters and plotlines and language.

(I don’t mean to sound anti-technology, because without it, I wouldn’t have a job, I wouldn’t be so lucky to not work in an office, and I wouldn’t be a working writer. But you can go too far the other way, and while I think the whole idea of “work-life balance” is a unicorn that doesn’t exist, I do think you need to strike a balance with technology — because otherwise it is a vampire that can suck your soul dry. But maybe I’m just feeling a little melodramatic.)

I don’t know if this means blogging less, blogging shorter, writing a novel in longhand, writing it on my iPhone, blogging on my iPhone, tweeting less, focusing more on my newsletter and less on my blog, saving up all my juju for future e-books or chucking it all and disappearing entirely off the grid. (Trust me, the idea is highly tempting.) I’ll figure it out, and figure it out again — I’m sure this is a regular cycle for any active writer. In the meanwhile, I’ll keep weaving threads and knotting string, corralling all the threads until they form a solid, connected strand. In bright, pretty colors, of course.