Category Archives: Journal

All things writing related, publication related.

My Vegan Journey

Journal, Health

Early Beginnings

When I was a child, my dad was vegetarian, so as a default, our whole family was vegetarian. Back in the ye olde days of the 1980s and 1990s, being vegetarian was considered weird. Getting take out food was a challenge, but luckily my mother was a fantastic cook. At home, she would make vegetable soups, broccoli sautéed in butter, and delicious salads.

A Meaty Detour

When my parents got divorced, I stopped being vegetarian. My first taste of meat was when I was twelve years old. It was a star-shaped chicken nugget from a drive-through fast food restaurant. It tasted like a deep-fried kitchen sponge, but it was fascinating to find out what all fuss was about meat. From then on, I did eat meat, but I never lost my preference for vegetable dishes. 

In my opinion, what makes meat taste good is actually the sauces and marinades, which are made out of vegetables—usually some variation of tomato and garlic. Once you’ve chewed out the sauce, what’s left pretty flavorless. 

However, I liked the social capital of not being the “weird vegetarian” that other people had to accommodate. It made things easier when I went over to friends’ houses.

The Wake-Up Call

Everything changed in 2019 when I was diagnosed with vasculitis and prediabetes. My doctor at Kaiser suggested two nutrition classes: a meat-based ‘Pre-diabetes and Me’ class and a plant-based nutrition class. The former felt like a slide into despair, while the latter, led by an inspiring teacher, presented a hopeful path toward reversing chronic diseases. You can read more about my health journey here. The stark contrast between the nihilism of the prediabetes class and the optimism of the plant-based diet class made going vegan the obvious choice. 

Making the Switch

On May 5, 2019, I cleared out my kitchen of all animal products. The following books and resources were incredibly help to me in making the transition:

The biggest help of all was the Forks Over Knives Meal Planner because it basically takes out all the mental labor for what to cook and what to buy. The weekly recipes helped me switch from someone who dreaded cooking, to someone who actually enjoys it.

Whole-food, plant-based diets are way cheaper than meat-heavy and processed food diets. An annual subscription to the meal planner more than pays for itself with how much we are saving on groceries and not spending on medical bills. (Note: I’m not sponsored by Forks Over Knives in any way. I keep recommending them, because I love their food.)

Transitioning Tips

I went vegan overnight, but most people usually need to ease into it more slowly. I recommend signing up for the Forks Over Knives meal planner, and start by switching one meal a week over the course of a month. (Week 1: Vegan breakfasts; Week 2: Vegan breakfasts and lunches; Week 3: All meals vegan!)

Remember, just because something is labeled “vegan” doesn’t mean it is healthy. Oreos are vegan. Potato chips are vegan. A healthy vegan meal is built around the four food groups — whole grains, legumes, vegetables, and fruits — in as close to their original form as you can get. This is why people sometimes refer to this as a “plant-based, whole-food diet” rather than a “vegan diet.” This means the majority of your shopping happens in the produce section.

A whole food, plant based diet has a lot more fiber than most people on the standard American diet are used to. This means that your microbiome will need to change to help you digest all this fiber. A slow transition over the course of several weeks or months will help you avoid surprising gut issues.

The great news is that high-fiber diets have been proven to have all kinds of positive effects on our bodies, such as keeping you regular, lowering insulin resistance, helping to stay lean, and with lowering inflammation.

How do you get your protein?

A varied diet of whole grains, legumes, nuts, and vegetables has all the protein you need. But I generally build at least one meal a day around legumes, for the protein and iron. Eating legumes legumes has been shown to increase lifespan. Bean burrito lunches are my favorite, but I also like vegetable soups with lentils, quinoa, chickpeas, and peas. I also make my own hummus and blended sauces using chickpeas as a base.

In order to avoid all the salt in canned beans, I usually batch-cook my week’s legumes in an instant pot during the weekend.

What about B12? (And vitamin D, and iron, etc.)

Surprisingly, people who eat meat and dairy are also low on B12. This is because this essential nutrient is made from bacteria in healthy water and soil — which we no longer have in many places. Animals in the livestock industry get their B12 from nutrition supplements in their feed. Vegans need to get their B12 from multivitamins and fortified foods.

During the covid pandemic, many of us discovered how important Vitamin D is for healthy immune systems. Your body can make Vitamin D when exposed to sunshine, or you can take a supplement.

Iron is also important for immune system function, and menstruating women are sometimes at risk for being anemic. I make sure there is plenty of iron in my diet by pairing legumes with a vitamin C source — or example: beans and tomatoes, lentils and peppers, chickpeas and lemon — because the vitamin C helps the body absorb more of the iron than the body would otherwise.

When making any dietary switch, it’s important to check in with your doctor and get all of your blood levels checked to see if you have any specific needs you need to address. You should also get a doctor’s check-up every year to ensure your blood levels are healthy.

Beyond Diet: Ethics and Environment

My primary motivation for going vegan was selfish self-preservation.

However, the ethical and environmental aspects are important to me as well.

Books  like Eating Animal by Jonathan Safran Foer and Mind if I Order the Cheeseburger by Sherry F. Colb, and the documentary Dominion really broadened my understanding of the ethical treatment of animals. (Content Warning: Dominion shows animal slaughter and animal cruelty in graphic detail. Do not watch with kids!)

The documentaries Cowspiracy and Before the Flood make a strong case that what we choose to eat every day has a tremendous impact on our environment.

I think that eating meat made sense, back in the old days when the global population was half a billion people, and when peak life expectancy was 35. Back then, animal flesh was basically a walking savings account for calories to keep us humans from starving to death when the only food available was snow-covered grass.

But we live in a different world now. There are more than 8 billion people and industrial food production has come a long way. As a species, we face different challenges than our ancestors did, and the best thing for our survival is to change our habits and evolve—rather than continue to cling to some romanticized, macho version of the past.

We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in awareness about the health, social, and environmental consequences of eating animals.

For me, veganism a positive and pro-active way to not just be healthier by avoiding chronic disease, it’s also a way for me to live my values by being kind to animals and in doing my part to solve world hunger and lower my environmental impact. Everything about it feels good to me. It is one simple choice that has tremendous benefit to myself and others.

My only regret is that I didn’t go vegan sooner.

Navigating Social Settings

Dealing with social settings as a vegan can be challenging sometimes, but over the years I’ve developed some strategies.

  1. I let people know I’m vegan, but I don’t go into detail about it unless they want to know more. I wrote this blog post to answer some of the frequently asked questions I get about being vegan.
  2. I eat beforehand. When hanging out with friends, it’s not a given that there will be vegan options available. If my family or friends give me the option of choosing the restaurant, I like to check HappyCow.net for restaurants with vegan options.
  3. I bring my own food … plus plenty extra to share. If I’m going over to a friend or family member’s house, I usually bring my own food and enough food to feed everybody else.

If all else fails, I chose the best available option—which sometimes means ordering a baked potato and doing my best to scrape out the butter and pick out the bacon bits. 😝

Why Am I Learning Polish?

Polish, Journal, Music Playlists

My family is Polish.

When I was a child, I would always hear my mom and grandmother speak Polish together, but since their husbands were both monolingual English speakers, they mostly spoke English when their husbands were around so that nobody would feel excluded.

Me, age 10, wearing traditional Polish dress.

The way they tell it, I was bilingual as a small child, but since English was the dominant language at home, my vocabulary never really expanded beyond that of a toddler’s. The fact that I never really learned how to speak Polish has always felt like something of a family shame.

In fact, it’s not unusual for the children of immigrants to lose their heritage language, unless tremendous efforts are made to preserve it and pass it on. My experience is pretty similar to that of Marissa Blaszko of Relearn A Language, who grew up speaking Polish but who lost her native language when she started attending her English-only public school. (If anyone else is in the situation of wanting to relearn their heritage language, I highly recommend her website and her YouTube channel @Relearnalanguage!)

“I had no idea that the language could be so easily lost,” my mom said. “For some reason, I thought it was just going to be transferred to you in utero. I thought that because I spoke Polish, you would also speak Polish.”

It’s hard to explain how deeply I yearned to speak Polish. The sound of the language is like poetry to my ears. It is the sound of love, of my mother, of laughter, of warm food, of soft hugs and kisses, and of being cared for. For me, the language of love is Polish.

I would have dreams in Polish where I could fluently speak and understand the language. And then when I would wake up and feel so disappointed, because the language-barrier was back. Not being able to speak Polish felt like there was a wall cutting me off from a whole section of myself. Not having access to this beautiful romantic, cherished language was like not having access to a piece of my own soul.

Multiple times throughout my childhood, I would try to learn Polish. But we didn’t live in a place with a large enough Polish community to offer external support. There were no Polish Saturday schools in our area. Polish is such a minority language that it was really hard to acquire study materials. Polish was not one of the foreign languages taught at my high school. (Or at my college, or at my graduate school.)

So we’d start at square-one—over and over again. Just naming things around the house. Bread; chleb. Tea; herbate. Food; jedzenie.

We never got very far.

The amount of times I would need vocabulary repeated far outstripped everybody’s patience. We didn’t know it then, but what I needed was a spaced repetition system (SRS). Spaced repetition is a learning technique where you basically get reminded of something at ever-increasing intervals until it moves into long-term memory. But we didn’t have these tools then. It was just me and my mom and my grandma, walking around the house naming things. Within a few days, all efforts would be abandoned. I would feel stupid, and everyone would feel frustrated.

When I was in college, I decided to study abroad to learn more about my Polish roots. Unfortunately, my school didn’t have a direct relationship with any universities in Poland. The closest I could get was Charles University in Prague—which is in the Czech Republic. (Not Poland, but at least on the same continent!)

Before my semester began, I spent a month traveling in Poland. My grandmother had a couple of contacts in Warsaw and Krakow, and these two women were my hosts. They took me all over: Warsaw, Malbork castle, Gdansk, Krakow, the Wieliczka salt mines, Zakopane, and the Tatra Mountains.

Me, Warsaw
Me, Malbork Castle

Getting to visit Poland for a month was an incredibly meaningful experience to me. It touched a deep place in my heart to hear the language surrounding me, spoken everywhere. And I even started to pick it up, because the sounds and grammar were so familiar to me from when I was a baby.

Chocholowska Valley, Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

And it was exciting to me to see modern Poland. It is sometimes said that people know more about Mars than about Poland. Poland is a medium-sized country of 41 million people. It has a larger population than Greece, Canada, Taiwan, Sweden, and Australia—and yet few Americans could find it on a map. The Western perception of Poland is frozen time with black-and-white photos of World War II rubble and communist block housing.

Warsaw, Photo by Kamil Gliwiński on Unsplash
Gdansk, Photo by Sebastian Huber on Unsplash

But then my semester started. I had to go to Prague—which was a wonderful experience, but it didn’t bring me any closer to learning Polish. When I returned to America a few months later, I was glad to be reunited with my family, but I also felt tremendously sad at leaving Europe. I felt like my time there was not yet finished.

When I was a graduate student earning my MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State, I made another attempt to learn Polish. And this time I got further than ever before. I studied the Pimsleur audio recordings, which used an audio-only spaced repetition system. That year, I was finally able to have rudimentary conversations in Polish with my mother and grandmother.

This was a good start, but the Pimsleur language course only stopped after only 30 lessons, and then I was stuck again.

Occasionally, I would try to write letters and translate recipes, using Google Translate, but at the time (in the early 2010s) it was a terrible translator.

It would be another ten years before I studied Polish again.

So what changed?

Firstly, I underwent a series of traumatic health issues. You can read more about that here, but the upshot was that I became much more pro-active and intentional about my health and well-being. 

One of the things that was especially transformative for me was strength training. This was something I never thought I would do, and yet week after week I was constantly surprising myself by doing things I never thought my body could do. I saw amazing benefits applying consistent pressure over a long period of time. 

It was incredibly empowering. My body felt transformed, but I was also noticing inner benefits.

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

A. A. Milne

I was two years into my strength-training journey, when the thought occurred to me, If I can do this, what else can I do?

There is a saying that the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. The same can be said of language learning. So I dug in my heels and decided that this time, I was finally going to learn Polish and I wasn’t going to stop until I could speak it fluently.

My 40th birthday was a few years away, and this was a gift I wanted to give my future 40-year-old self.

(I also committed to finally following through with all my paperwork to confirm my Polish citizenship and get my Polish passport. My son and I both qualify for dual-citizenship, but the paperwork is a multi-step, multi-year process…and I’ll leave that for another blog post.)

It was around this time that I saw this Kurzgesagt video: “Changing Your Life—One Step at a Time.” There is a moment in the video that talks about becoming the person you want to be with daily habits to shorten the distance between who you are and who you want to be. One of the examples they give is of learning a language while doing push-ups. And I thought, I could do that.

Thankfully, language learning technology has come a long way since the last time I attempted to learn Polish.

I started with the Duolingo, which had finally created a Polish course. 

Duolingo is an excellent, free language learning program that gives you quick 3-minute immersive language lessons that are in a gamified format. Duolingo is so good that students can actually learn a language faster with Duolingo than if they were taking a college class. The sentences are funny, the courses are built around spaced repetition, so that they remind you of a word just when you are about to forget. And you can look up words if you need to: no judgement.

I love Duolingo and I’ve even gotten the rest of my family hooked. My husband is learning Spanish. My mom is learning Italian. As of this writing, my son has a Duolingo streak that is more than 460 days long in Polish and Spanish!

Starting in July 2022, I studied like a mad woman, fueled by 30+ years of existential frustration. For an entire month, I was working at a pace of one whole unit a day. I was studying three hours a day at least, sometimes more. I studied until my brain felt like mush. 

I completed the entire Polish Duolingo course less than 100 days. There were only 42 units in the Polish course (as opposed to 400 units in Spanish) but this was enough to finally get me over the hump!

In language, learning terms, getting to the end of Duolingo, plus having studied Pimsleur probably put me at the late beginner, CEFR A2 level. If you want to know what the CEFR levels are, you can watch this helpful video by Olly Richards. When I went to spend Christmas with my mother and grandmother that year, I was able to have full on conversations with them in Polish, and start reading simple graphic novels.

After completing Duolingo, I started doing a whole bunch of research about what to do next. Marissa Blaszko at Relearning a Language has a great resource for putting together your own language-learning plan. I found a whole host of amazing resources for learning polish, which I will link down below.

This is my current learning strategy:

Learn 10 new words a day from a frequency dictionary using the Anki mobile app.

According to Paul Pimsleur’s book How to Learn a Foreign Language, the slowest part of language acquisition is learning new vocabulary and moving that vocabulary from short term memory to long term memory. He recommends aiming to learn about 10 new words a day. It’s possible to do more, but given that language learning usually takes a few years, most people can sustainably do about new 10 words say. That has been the most comfortable pace for me.

One of the best way to get those new words into long-term memory is to used a spaced-repetition system. I like using Anki, which is basically a flashcard app, favored by language learners and medical students.

I put a lot of effort into making high-quality flashcards, but once I have them all set up, the daily practice of studying new words usually takes less than 30 minutes, spread out in short bursts throughout the day.

Choosing which words study is incredibly important for making progress because not all words are used equally. As Nathaniel Drew explains in this video, it’s best to focus on an essential core of vocabulary and then extend that in widening circles.

I’ve been putting my flashcards together using this series of Polish Frequency Dictionaries:

– Book 1: Polish Frequency Dictionary: Essential Vocabulary (2500 Most Common Polish Words) — This book has been invaluable for setting up my flash cards because it provides the 2,500 most common words in Polish, along with a example sentences so that you can read how it is used in context.

As of December 2023, I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through studying this book and I have been astonished at how effective it has been in expanding my vocabulary.

By the time I finish studying this book, my vocabulary will be big enough to know 92% of spoken Polish, and 82% of written Polish.

When I finish studying this book, I may continue with the series with Book 2: Intermediate Vocabulary (2501-5000 Most Common Polish Words) and Book 3: Advance Vocabulary (5001-7500 words) or I will take a break and focus on adding words I’m learning from reading novels.

Grammar study with the help of ChatGPT

Polish grammar is different than English grammar. It has seven grammatical cases, and it doesn’t have a lot of articles. Instead, the beginnings and endings of the words themselves change to indicate what is happening in the sentence. Basically this means that it is complicated enough to warrant getting grammar books and just slowly plugging through them, one lesson at a time.

– Marissa Blaszko recommends the Krok po Kroku textbook series. However, this book is written all in Polish, which is great in some ways…but also intimidating.

Polish grammar resources I have found helpful…

  • Basic Polish Grammar by Dana Bielec—Has English explanations of Polish grammar rules, along with plenty of exercises, exceptions, and an answer key in the back.
  • Polish for Dummies by Daria Gabryanczyk—Really breaks down basics of Polish grammar and provides a list of common phrases a person might use while traveling.
  • The Polyglot Club Wiki for language learners — A wikipedia-style website that has lots of mini-lessons to help explain Polish grammar.
  • I also like the Course of Polish YouTube channel because the teacher draws helpful charts and comes up with cute mnemonic devices to help remember the rules.

The biggest help of all has been asking ChatGPT to be my Polish language tutor. This video by Bri Does AI has some helpful tips for how to go about this. My strategy has basically been to ask it things like: 

  • “Can you explain the nominative grammatical case to me?”
  • “Can you give me 25 example sentences of the genitive case, with the words in that case written in bold?”
  •  “I’m going to write 10 Polish sentences in the present tense. Could you rewrite these sentences in the past tense and future tense, and show me in bold what you changed about my sentence to change verb tenses?”

Immersion in 5 main areas

Reading—Years ago, I was really inspired by this blog post on LinguaTrek, which was about the author’s experience of learning Polish by reading Harry Potter. I really love the idea of this method.

I also liked this FluentU article about 9 Useful Strategies for Reading in a Foreign Language. In essence, it recommends you choose a book you really love and go through it in multiple different rounds:

  • Round 1: Get the gist of the passage. Underline words you don’t know, but don’t look them up. Just see if you can figure out what the passage is about. It’s really great to have the audiobook as well, so that you can learn the pronunciation and inflection of what you are reading.
  • Round 2: Slow, detailed read where you look up every single word you don’t know, and make a list to add to your SRS system.
  • Round 3: Once you’ve learned all the new words, read it again.
  • Round 4: Read aloud, either along with an audiobook or with a native speaker. Your aim is for speed and fluency.

I love reading, and I’ve been working up to being able to do more of this. This year I only managed to read five books in Polish (mostly graphic novels or audiobooks), but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to transition to middle grade and young adult novels in this upcoming year. It’s rather difficult to find Polish books in America, so I’ve been ordering them online from The Polish Bookstore online and the Apple Bookstore, which seems to have a wider selection of books in Polish than Amazon or Audible. There are also a handful of public domain Polish classics on LibroVox and the Project Gutenberg.

I’ve also had the language on my phone set to Polish for about a year.

Writing—I’ve been writing weekly letters to my mother and grandmother in Polish, with the help of Google Translate. I’ve also been Bullet Journaling in Polish since September 2022.

Listening— Linsdey Does Languages has a helpful tutorial for setting up your Netflix account to show films in your target language. I’ve set up multiple language accounts for both our family’s Netflix and DisneyPlus accounts. Truthfully, though, I don’t watch much TV so most of my Polish listening has been YouTube channels like Dave z Ameryki, podcasts, music playlists, and audiobooks.

Matt vs Japan has a really excellent YouTube series about how important it is to just create a wall of sound in your target language. His advice is basically to have your target language constantly going in the background, even when doing other things.

I asked ChatGPT to create a music playlist for me based on the music I like. You can listen to that playlist here. What’s neat about YouTube Music is that it will also show the lyrics, so occasionally I will translate the lyrics, if I can’t figure out what the song is about just based on listening.

I found a really cool app (that I haven’t made much use of yet) called LingoClip, which is basically an app that helps you learn language through singing karaoke. Awesome!

Speaking—This is my weakest area. I could be doing so much more, but I’m still quite shy. My mother and grandmother are absolutely thrilled every time I speak to them in Polish, so I aspire to do it more often. This year, I did recently have a conversation with my mom that lasted 30 minutes, all in Polish.

Culture and History—I found this wonderful website called Culture.PL which has excellent articles on Polish history and culture. I subscribe to their newsletter.

I’ve been reading and translating the works of great Polish writers and poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski.

I’ve also been listening to historical and non-fiction books by English-speaking authors about Poland, such as John Pomfret’s From Warsaw with Love, James Michener’s Poland, James Conroyd Martin’s The Warsaw Conspiracy trilogy, No Simple Victory by Norman Davies, and We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter.

Since I’m a writer, I’ve also been reading as much as I can about Polish history, literature, mythology, and about slavic culture for some wonderful books I’m planning on writing at some point in the future.

I have begun writing historical fantasy short stories set in Poland. I hope to collect these interconnected short stories into a book, tentatively called Beads of Amber. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress.

I’m also considering writing an illustrated collection of Polish fairy tales and myths, tentatively titled Slavic Spirits, similar in style to D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths.

Who knows what the next few years will bring?

This Is Your Brain on Genre

Journal, Health, Polish

I’ve decided to rewire my brain.

One of the things that I realized when I was writing the stories for What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse was how naturally the horror-genre voice came out of me. Horror stories are all about imagining the worst-case scenario—and wow am I good at that!

I think writing scary stories came so naturally because I have a slightly anxious personality. I don’t think I have an anxiety disorder, but my mind definitely leans in that direction, sometimes. I recently took the Brain Health Assessment online questionnaire by Dr. Daniel Amen, and it said I had a “cautious” brain type. In reading about that brain type in his book, You, Happier, I was like, “Oh yeah. This is totally me.”

My husband sometimes refers to the voices in his head as his “committee members”—kind of like the characters Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust from the Pixar movie Inside Out. I think this is a helpful metaphor. Whatever is going on in my mind is just chatter, and the more I recognize it as chatter, the easier it is to ignore the destructive committee members that are not helpful to me.

This is an interesting Peter Attia interview about the process he took in changing his own negative mental chatter.

This brings me back to my changing relationship with my writing, and with genre.

I’ve been a journal-writer since I was eleven years old. Sometimes when I would write in my journal, I would notice myself entering the same old tracks of thought. “This is self-pity mental track #395.” “This is procrastination-busywork mental track #219.” 

I can recognize when I’m on the track, but sometimes I have a hard time getting out of that track. I’ve read that, neurologically, repetitive thoughts are kind of like sledding down a snowy hillside: the more often you ride down those same trains of thought, the deeper the groove gets, and the harder it is to change course. Thanks, brain.

My tendency towards doomsday future-tripping became especially apparent during the pandemic—as I’m sure it did for many of us—when it seemed like the end of the world was literally outside our window. 

These last few years, I’ve also had a number of health problems that have forced me to pause, slow down, and take a long, hard look at my habits—both physical and mental. You can read more about my health journey here.

Back to genre…

When I write horror stories, I find it incredibly cathartic because it’s like I get to take one of my many fears, lift it out of the pile, and let that movie run all the way to the end…usually to a climax scene where a hero figures out how to defeat the villain.

What I love about the horror genre in general—and about Stephen King books specifically—is that those stories are often about resilient characters. They don’t just stop and quiver like frightened rabbits. They fight back.

And one of the classic horror-genre moments is the “Hero at the Mercy of the Monster” scene, where the protagonist has their back against the ropes, all is lost, and they are about to be beaten…but then they somehow find a way to harness their inner gift to defeat the monster.

Usually that inner gift is some variation on “Rationality” or “Cleverness” or “Magic” or “Teamwork” or “the Jungian wisdom of integrating one’s Shadow and thereby triumphing over it”… or whatever theme the author was working with in that story. 

I would say that in 90% of horror stories, good triumphs over evil and the heroes survive. 

(Which is more than can be said about “literary” fiction. I think fictional protagonists have a much higher chance of surviving and finding happiness and meaning if they are in a horror novel than if they are in a literary novel—especially if the protagonist is female. Just think back to all those classics you were forced to read in high school English, and you’ll see what I mean. Antigone dies. Tess dies. Hester dies. Anna Karenina dies. Thanks a lot, AP English!) 

In the rare occasion a horror-novel hero dies at the end, it is usually because they sacrificed themselves to save someone weaker than them. Altruism triumphs over selfishness! Heroes do exist! — And that, my friends, is the meaning of Christmas!

I love this. Horror stories have been great for me because they are a way to externalize fears, dramatize them for entertainment (maybe even laugh at them) and ultimately attain catharsis by triumphing over them.

But that’s not the whole story.

Although writing these scary stories feels powerful, and they bring me a lot of satisfaction and peace for learning how to triumph over a particular fear…I’ve also noticed that they sometimes leave me in a jumpy frame of mind.

There is a reason horror is a niche genre. Not a lot of people like feeling freaked out all the time. Heck, I don’t like feeling freaked out all the time! The whole reason I wrote horror was to get it out of my mind and onto the page, where the monsters in my mind could be defeated and neutralized. 

And I wonder if constantly being on the lookout for horrible things for story material is actually reinforcing the negative confirmation bias in my brain? At what point does writing horror stop feeling cathartic and start feeling like a downward spiral?

A therapist would probably ask, “Does this behavior serve me?” Does this thought pattern of constantly looking out for danger serve me? Does anxiety serve me?

In some respects, yes!

As Dr. Daniel Amen says in his book You, Happier: you actually need a little anxiety to stay healthy. Anxiety is a very useful emotion. Fear for the future is why I exercise every day, eat healthily, and do my best to save for the future. When channeled in the right direction, anxiety can get you off your ass so that you turn in your homework on time.

But too much anxiety is no good. When you spend too much time thinking negatively, there is a danger in shaping your reality in order to confirm those negative thoughts. Confirmation bias. A huge part of our lives is shaped by our attitudes. If you have a bad attitude about your job, you will eventually be fired. If you only recognize the worst in your partner, they will eventually dump you. If all you ever focus on is lack, then you will always feel hunted and frightened no matter how much money you have in the bank. Having a bad attitude can sour any blessing.

What’s the opposite of horror?

For me, it’s romance.

Romance is an absolutely mind-blowing genre to me because the golden rule in that genre is that you have to have a happy-ever-after ending. As a reader, I know it’s coming, but it still surprises me every time. 

You mean sometimes things can actually work out?! No way!

When I started reading romances on a regular basis, I felt as if it were re-wiring my brain for joy. For love. For hope.

It was like in The Music Man musical when Marian Paroo is serenading her heart out to Professor Harold Hill.

There were bells on the hill

But I never heard them ringing.

No, I never heard them at all

’Til there was you.

The music man

I’ll be honest: this is not my brain’s natural tendency. But I want it to be.

I’d rather be an optimist than a pessimist. 

Writing love stories is a lot harder for me than writing horror stories, but they also feel a lot more healing. I cry easily. I feel my chest get warm and melty. And it feels like something I need to be reminded of over and over again—that it’s okay to be loved, to be loving, and to let people care for me.

I’ve heard people say that writers tend to write in the genre that concerns them most.

What genre comes naturally to me? Horror.

What genre would benefit me by causing me to grow the most? Love stories.

To me, writing at the intersection of those two genres is also a powerful combo because Love and Fear have a lot in common. 

(Yes, the heroes in romances are sometimes afraid of silly things, like whether their love interest will still find them lovable and attractive when they put on their glasses, but I digress.)

But on another level, falling in love can sometimes involve overcoming actual terror. 

For example, in my short story, “Angel Man,” I write about a woman who is the survivor of domestic violence learning how to fall in love again when she meets a man who is literally her rebound-angel. He is caring. He is patient. He goes at her pace. He is consistent. And because he is so safe, she is able to heal and slowly overcome her body’s traumata-reflex so that she feels safe being alone with a man again.

“Angel Man” illustrated by E. S. O. Martin

That story was harder for me to write than some of my other scary stories. But it was also more satisfying.

My hope in writing “Angel Man” was that maybe I could rewire the brain of someone who needed this story, so that they could have a metaphor with which to approach healing. Perhaps by getting introduced to “Angel Man” on the page, they could have an easier time finding their own real-life angel man. And perhaps this story could teach a man how to be an angel for someone who needs to take things slow.

And readers unanimously loved this story. It was interesting that out of all the many people who read early drafts of What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse, “Angel Man” made it into everybody’s top-three favorite stories.

I suppose it’s kind of like that Netflix horror show, Black Mirror. People have strong feelings about that show—but “San Junipero” is everybody’s favorite episode.

So…that was interesting data when it comes to thinking about what types of stories I want to bring to the world. What do I need? What does the world need? It seems like the answer is more stories about love. (And maybe about overcoming fear in pursuit of love.)

In finalizing my collection of stories for What We Talk About, I made the conscious decision to include only the best of what I’ve written during the last seventeen years.

There were half a dozen stories I chose not to include because they were too dark, too pessimistic. The stories worked. They were well-written, if I do say so myself. They absolutely fulfilled genre-expectations for the horror genre… but in reading them, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the world didn’t need more of this?

Or maybe this wasn’t how I wanted my mind to exist anymore. 

I honored that realization in the other stories included in What We Talk About by portraying established couples in “Inheritance” and “Forever House” in using the power of love to overcome horror. In “Library of Unfinished Projects,” I wrote about the love of a family overcoming the horror of aging. In “Prince of Birds,” I wrote about the love a father feels for his son in surviving a harsh and dangerous world. The stories may have scary parts, but there are also loving parts. 

My aim was to be more balanced: scary things happen in this world, but with love and compassion we will triumph. Love can help you transcend your starting circumstances.

Bonus Lesson: Change Your Language, Change Your Brain

In a strange way, learning a new language—Polish—has also helped me become more conscious about my mental chatter and whether my thoughts aid me.

Last year, I started journaling in Polish—with the help of Google Translate app on my phone. It was interesting to notice that learning a new language actually turned my mind into a blank canvas with which to re-evaluate my own vocabulary. As I sat with my open journal, about to engage in a petty compain-a-thon, I thought to myself, “Is this negative vocabulary really what I want to learn and practice in my new language? Hell, no!”

If I’m going to go through all the effort to learn a new language, why not take the opportunity to gift myself a new personality as well?

I’ve heard of people say that speaking and thinking in a different language can change their personality. For example, my mom says that the Polish part of her brain feels more emotional and intuitive—like reading a love letter—whereas the English side feels more cold and logical.

If it’s true that when neurons fire together, they wire together, then couldn’t I consciously create a Polish-speaking version of myself that was happier and more optimistic than the English-speaking version?

So I started bullet journaling and keeping a five-minute gratitude journal…in Polish.

This had the positive effect of allowing me to learn all sorts of awesome vocabulary for what I love about my life in this new language—which I also love. But it also gave the English-speaking side of me a break.

And, presto-change-o, the English side of me started to change as well. I was focusing so hard on noticing positive things with which to write about in Polish, that it felt like the negative-tracks in my English brain were starting to get weaker from lack of use. It’s now easier for me to have positive thoughts in both languages.

Learning a new language is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

If you liked this blog post, you might also enjoy subscribing to my newsletter. I send out notifications of new books, music playlists, and whenever I post one of these infrequent blog posts. You’ll also get access to cool free stuff, like my short story, “Heart in a Jar,” which is a haunting and poetic story about love, longing, family, and magic.

E. S. O. Martin interview on The Imaginary Possible Podcast

Journal

I was interviewed on The Imaginary Possible podcast about my experience of using AI tools to supercharge my creativity.

For the past few months I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT4 as a brainstorming partner and outlining assistant. I have been really impressed with it, and in the interview I go into a little more detail about how I have been using it.

Before you listen to the interview, I’d like to add a disclaimer about something I wish I had said differently. When Suzanne Le Grande asked me if I was worried about big companies scraping people’s material for AI training without permission, I basically dodged the question and my response was basically, “Meh. Just keep writing.” I’m not a legal expert or a computer programmer. I’m just a regular shmo who has been playing around with a clever online widget for a few months, and offering my opinions about it on a podcast.

I want to go on the record to say, of course I am concerned about it! I think it should be investigated whether the companies who are training these large language models have boosted people’s work. Of course I’m worried about these new technologies making my work and my creativity obsolete. Yes, I am afraid.

But I also see the tremendous benefits this technology can bring to me as a writing assistant. These are what I focused on in the interview. 

Rather than sticking my head in the sand, I’ve sought out role models to help me figure out how to integrate these large language models into my writing process.

Here are some helpful resources I’ve been following to learn more about using Large Language Models in writing.

The United States Copyright Office. If you live outside the USA, your country’s rules might be different.

Always be sure to read the full terms of service and privacy policies for whatever AI software you decide to use.

“The AI-Assisted Artisan Author With Joanna Penn.” Joanna Penn has been thinking about AI a lot, and her podcast, The Creative Penn, has lots of interviews with other authors about how they are integrating AI into their workflow.

I subscribe to J. Thorn’s Creative AI Digest Newsletter, which comes out with news every Monday. He also has some helpful books. In particular, I recommend Three Story Method: Cowriting with ChatGPT: AI-Powered Storytelling.

ChatGPT Profits by Jonathan Green.

Write with AI and Love By The Prompt by Rachelle Ayala.

And here are some other memes and AI creations that have made me laugh.

Lord of the Rings by Wes Anderson trailer

Bot Writes Batman Movie

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Illustrations

Journal, The Story Behind the Story

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to learn to draw. Since I’m a person who believes that you can learn just about anything from books, I checked out a copy of Betty Edwards’s book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I sat down with that book every single day and worked through the exercises. By the end of the summer, I had learned to draw.

The thing about learning to draw is that it’s really about learning how to see. It’s learning about how to flatten the 3D world in your mind so that you can create the illusion of three dimensions on two dimensions. 

To me, it felt like an explosive burst of sparkles in my brain, learning how to see in this new way. All of a sudden, I was noticing the tiniest details, shapes, colors. I felt like I was seeing the world for the first time.

Learning how to draw woke up my brain to beauty. It woke up my brain to being present, being slow, and truly noticing the world and the beauty of small things.

Even though I learned to draw, I never identified “artist,” even though making art was incredibly gratifying. I was a writer, not an artist, and drawing was this little thing I did on the side for fun. But I always enjoyed hanging out with artists, and I even married an artist. I met my husband in college, where he was studying sculpture and printmaking. His mother, my mother-in-law, was also an artist. She did clay, crafts, and wonderful botanical art. 

When I was in college, I took some classes on art history, and I fell in love with European art and architecture—particularly during the Renaissance, neoclassical, and romantic periods.

When I was lucky enough to study abroad in Prague, I spent the two months before my semester begin backpacking around Europe. In the Louvre in Paris, I remember breaking down into tears at all the wonderful art that I had seen in books.

I loved the aesthetic of the paintings and sculptures in the Musée d’Orsay. My favorite artist of all was Auguste Rodin, because it’s so beautiful how the figures in his sculptures seem to be pulling themselves out of the rock. I fell in love in the Rodin museum. I loved Rodin’s “The Kiss.” It is one of my favorite sculptures. I had drawn “The Kiss” in high school in my art class.

In Italy, I read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and I delighted in the art of Michelangelo. He’s my favorite Renaissance artist. “The Pieta” brought me to tears.

I loved the detail and the brightness of colors in the Sistine Chapel. I loved how his sculptures seemed to come alive, and how the colors in his paintings were so vibrant. There’s a lot about his art that seems to elevate the spirit.

Once I got to Prague, I was like, Whoa, this looks just like Paris, but with far fewer tourists! Indeed, some of the same architects designed both cities. I absolutely loved the architecture of the neoclassical and romantic era in cities, particularly in the art nouveau style. As people moved toward cities, they brought with them the beauty of the natural world. Their plazas celebrated nature spirits, like mermaids, gargoyles, and fairies. Their wallpaper had floral designs. The stone and iron work was carved to look like flowers and leaves. Everywhere I turned, there was beauty. I drank it in. I fell in love with Prague. If given the chance, I would absolutely love to live there again.

Photo by Lachlan Gowen on Unsplash

Once I graduated from college, I rarely drew. There is this weird thing about the arts in America where if it isn’t monetized, it’s not seen as worth doing. I graduated just in time for the Great Recession, and my anxiety over not being able to pay my bills was so huge that it left little space for doing things just for fun. 

In any case, my latent drawing ability was forgotten and unused for about 15 years. Until this year.

Earlier this year, when I had finished the manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse, I gave it to my family and editors to read. My mom said, “What if you did some drawings before each of the stories?” My mind lit up with the possibilities.

So in February, I opened up my sketchbook once again, and began drawing illustrations. I thought about each of my stories and tried to come up with an image that would most represent the mood and content. How delightful it was to draw again! These illustrations will be included in the print and ebook versions of my book. Here is a preview.

Illustration for “Angel Man” by E.S.O. Martin
Illustration for “The Awakening” by E.S.O. Martin
Illustration for “The Inheritance” by E. S. O. Martin
Illustration for “Prince of Birds” by E. S. O. Martin
Illustration for “The Tell-Tale Cough” by E. S. O. Martin
Illustration for “What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse” by E. S. O. Martin

If you like what you see, you might consider signing up for my newsletter. Newsletter subscribers get access to book deals, essays, music playlists and other awesome content. My illustrated short story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About The Apocalypse will be available for purchase by the end of 2023.

Where Have I Been This Last Year?

Journal, Health

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve written anything for the public!

2021
2022
2023

What happened? Where have I been?

Well, it turns out I’ve been doing a lot, but it has mostly been internal and personal work.

I’m one of those introverted-type people who tends to need a lot of quiet and deep thought in my life in order to feel balanced. The book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain explains my personality type, and the book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport explains how I aspire to live my ideal writing day—with long stretches of deep work, followed by meaningful interactions with people I care about.

I have social media accounts, but I’m pretty much never on them. At most, I log on once or twice a year. The interactions on these sites don’t feel very deep to me. I’d much rather meet my friends face to face, and go on a long walk together so we could truly catch up on each other’s lives. Social media posts are shallow and external, when what really makes me feel connected to people is the deep and internal.

Last year, I decided to wean myself off from doomscrolling the news as much as possible because my mental health was starting to suffer. This year I’ve also been experimenting with going on a news blackout. This interview on Hidden Brain with Steven Pinker, titled “Beyond Doomscrolling” captures the fallacy of the news: in a time when humans are at their most peaceful and cooperative, the news is a glowing, screaming screen, inches away from your face that scours the globe looking for the worst bits possible. News sites purposefully ignore the good in humanity in order to throw you into a state of fear and anxiety, which makes you more reactive and more willing to click on whatever ads are floating next to their doomsday headlines.

A book I read this year with my son was Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter. I know cynics like to make fun of Pollyanna for being naïve or overly cheerful. But I loved that book. I thought, If there was ever a personality from history or literature that I wanted to emulate, it would be Pollyanna. I loved the Glad Game, where you purposefully look for things in your life to feel glad about. It’s a lot like those [gratitude journals] that happiness psychologists recommend to rewire people’s brains for happiness. Pollyanna even goes so far as reframing challenging and uncomfortable things as opportunities for personal growth.

I think that’s why I love reading so much—especially reading fiction. These last two years have been tremendous reading years for me. Last year I read 166 books. To date, I’ve read 140 books this year.

What’s wonderful about reading is that you get to have these wonderful, deep interactions with someone. Fiction stories, in particular, often involve a character struggling through a horrible experience in a compressed period of time. But where fiction differs from life is that these characters are often on the lookout for how they can learn and grow from these terrible experiences. The character on the last page is often wiser than who they were on page one. 

I love this. I love being reminded of the human capacity for change, and that sometimes the sweetest fruits can spring from the rockiest soil. This is inspirational to me.

And it’s something I always try to include in my own stories.

These last two years I’ve been mostly focused on short stories because those are an even tighter form of characters forced into a crucible of change. Short stories are more challenging than novels, in some ways, because it’s a lot harder to “stick the landing” on a believable moment of character transformation in 2 pages than in 200 pages. 

Whereas an epiphany at the end of a novel often feels like a nice coffee after a long, luxurious three-course meal, an epiphany at the end of a short story usually feels like the floor dropping out from beneath you. Totally different feeling.

I’ve been working on gathering together the best of the short stories I’ve written over the last 17 years in a collected titled, What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse. 

For you literary nerds out there, the title is a spin on Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.” These are relationship stories.

My stories are also relationship stories. Couple relationships, friendships, neighbors, parents and children, and humans and animals. These are stories where a character is forced to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about themselves, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. That’s what I aspired to do.

My stories often involve characters interacting with our current world, but I also play with genres a bit. I have stories with angels, stories with ghosts, stories with vampires, and stories about how technology is shifting our reality.

I hope to publish this collection by the end of the year. While you wait, you can read “Prove It,” which was published by Club Chicxulub online. You can also hear me read the story. They did a fantastic job setting a soundtrack as background to the stories. I highly recommend you check out my story and the rest of their literary magazine. They did a great job.