Not one of the cold kids!

July 8, 2017 by Z.A. Maxfield

She looks like Elsa From Frozen!

That should have been my first clue!!!

You know those commercials about “the most interesting man in the world?” That dude has nothing on author Debra Holland, one of the amazing writers from #OCCRWA. She’s smart and funny and lovely and also a total badass, and in this picture she’s about to get into a cryo tank. Yes. To be Cryo’d.

Without getting into the reasons either one of us might get into one of those babies, specifically, there are a lot of reasons that people do.

And I’m an old hippie soul, gosh darnit. I was doing Transcendental Meditation at the age of 12. I have been a hundred different religions and also no religion at all. Before I was in college, I had experienced past life regression, had my astrological chart read by experts, memorized all the Christian Science tenets of faith, had energy work done and faith healing, and been rejected by prospective inlaws as being both too Jewish and too Christian–when not even theoretically, but actually I was neither.

So when Debra said, “Wanna try getting in a cryo tank?” I said, “I’m in.”

Because when life asks you if you are a goddess you say:

YES!

And I admit I’m easily led but I’m super, super smart about who I let lead me. I probably would have drawn the line somewhere. Electroconvulsive therapy, maybe. Heroin, definitely. I would have said no to heroin, had she offered it even if she’d said, this will make you feel good. So… You know. I can be led only up to a point. And it seemed like a good idea.

But Elsa up there has an obvious advantage, what with her being the goddess of ICE.

Hello yeah. I come from generations of people who lived in HAWAII.

Here’s a comparison:

You see what she’s doing? She’s DANCING. To a cute hit song. I shit you not. She is dancing to a song inside a machine that is freezing her alive. And it really looks like fun, doesn’t it? It looks like she is having a good time. Like she’s enjoying her own personal rave in there. Whooo. Spooky. Gotta get my groove on now. It’s cold.

But I ask you! How is a girl who was given up for adoption by four generations of Hawaiians and then adopted by five generations of Angelenos gonna know from cold?

She is not going to have a clue going in, that’s what. She is not going to have a single clue that she is about to get the abso-fucking-lutely worst headache of an entire lifetime of ice cream headaches and she’s going to think it’s never, ever, ever going away.

Behold, Le MOI!

I don’t think I’ve needed that particular expression since I gave birth to my second child. I swear, I really tried. I danced. I smiled and I acted as if. I placed myself in the hands of my higher power, and then I asked if I could please get out. Right now. Please. NO. I can’t seem to put on my robe, sir. I’m afraid I’ll have to run through your studio in my granny panties and bra, sir, what with my inability to imagine life after this moment…

Because yeah. No. Cold is cold. There’s a reason people wear clothing when the weather dips. And therapeutically speaking, we should probably have walked before running. Because I lasted slightly over one minute. And I really seriously think punching out was the right thing to do.

Maybe I’m just a hothouse flower. And maybe I’ll work up to it. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be one of those polar bear dudes, who leap into the frozen lakes and now I know. I will know more tomorrow.

Special thanks to Debra! They need to start making beer commercials about you!! Wow!

WTF?

June 24, 2016 by Z.A. Maxfield

Thanks to EVERYONE who wished me happy birthday yesterday! That was so kind. I had a lovely day, reading and relaxing. I spent a least a THIRDS of my day reading an ARC from my favorite series. SO GOOD! (See what I did there?)

Yesterday I turned 56. While I slept, the count was finalized. Brexit is a go. This morning showed the DOW lost 500 points. Panic is widespread. Global markets are melting down. Those wonderful pictures of Wall Street stock traders head-desking and face-palming and weeping majestically are already cued up.

It’s business as usual in the world. Things go up. Things go down. People make great choices or they make awful ones. I vote in America when it’s required of me, but there are things in the world I have no control over–things that nevertheless affect me–those pesky butterflies that flap their wings on one side of the world and create global meltdowns on the other.

Did we forget?

We’re all connected. Whether we like it or not. Whether we legislate it or not. We are all connected, both physically by the world we share, and metaphysically, by the stuff we are made of.

This does make me wish I’d cashed my tiny stockpile of June checks, some of which will be worth far less today than they would have been Wednesday. Live and learn.

I guess I’m blogging today because I couldn’t really do anything except watch. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. Britain is a go. Scotland isn’t happy. France is now flexing its muscles. What does this mean for any of us?

Not a single clue.

What I do know is that we’ve been through worse. We have choices. We can vote our conscience in November and weather this storm.

We can. We do. We will. Always. Just sayin’

Nano WHY Mo–

November 30, 2015 by Z.A. Maxfield

So… It’s the last day of NaNoWriMo, and once again, I have to face the truth. I did not “win”.

Or… did I?

If my narrow definition of win is writing 50K in one month, no…

I did not win.

But you know me. I have no narrow definitions for anything. I’m the perennial optimist. It says so in at least one of my many stock bios, “perennially optimistic and pathologically disorganized” or some such. And I can take a win from ANYTHING, including a NaNo year in which I got barely 20K written in a single month (an all time low for me.)

And in a year where I totally lost my shit and was unable to come up with a blog post for a friend’s birthday party, (Goddamnit, apologies go out to the ever-awesome Amber Kell, the original OG “mother of dragons”) I will take the fact that I am writing THIS blog post as a total win!!!

So much happened this month, personally, professionally, in the genre, in the REAL WORLD, that I’m reeling a little. At one point, just opening my laptop was like diving naked into a vat of acid. I don’t know why I was unable to do my job to my satisfaction. I don’t know which straw broke my camel’s back, but creative jobs are a strange thing. Would I have been unable to make widgets on an assembly line? I was unable to string words together in any meaningful way. I did sit, I did stare, I did put words down on the screen, but this month, my delete button got a major workout. It’s possible I even went backward, as far as my word count goes, because I started out with a half-finished project, and I literally deleted more than I wrote.

Sometimes, life is like that.

And I am still counting it as a personal win, and by that I don’t mean “Everyone gets a trophy for trying.” I mean that creating isn’t magic, it isn’t easy, it doesn’t come from outside, and sometimes, I am unable to do it to my satisfaction.

I learned something, both about myself and the world around me. I managed it–not well, not wisely–but I feel like I can put the NaNo month behind me with a new steely determination to do better. I have already recovered from my failure, and it’s over, and because I can always find a new normal, I’ll work from that.

So, in my book, that’s a win. Not the win I wanted. But it’s a start.

So if you didn’t get your word count in, take a minute and discover what you did do. Did you put words on paper? Did you put your time in? Did you struggle? Did you hit delete more than usual?

Did you make choices that led you away from your work? Were they good choices, in that they were necessary because of family or life or health or something else? Did you stumble, pick yourself back up and keep going? Or will you, now that NaNoWriMo is in the rearview mirror?

Yeah. That’s a win too. And that cat picture above, (hangover cat, he’s called) is a creative commons graphic, and you can probably use that as your lose-winning badge. Because sometimes I don’t win NaNoWriMo and sometimes I do, but I’m always going to feel like I won something, even if it’s just hard-earned experience, until I am not trying anymore at all…

So, maybe that’s a cop-out, or maybe that’s just how a person who has a bad month gets back to work, but since I have some creating to do, I’ll let you decide.

ZAM out!

For the Stuffing Ball recipe –

November 26, 2015 by Z.A. Maxfield

You can go to Love Bytes Reviews and read my guest post, where I impart the magical, mystical secret to my oh, so delicious but decidedly pedestrian Stuffing Balls.

It’s stuffing. Shaped like BALLS.

Because everything is funny when mentally, you’re still a twelve-year-old.

Get the recipe, and more information about my holiday than you’d care to know, by clicking here.

Mourning Moon – some thoughts on Thanksgiving

November 25, 2015 by Z.A. Maxfield

I guess a Mourning Moon is the last full moon before the winter solstice. We’ve had some awesome moons lately, moons with rockstar names like the “Blood Moon,” in September, and “The Supermoon,” in October. The Mourning Moon on the eve of Thanksgiving ushers in a time of cleansing and making ready for winter. In some traditions, it’s a time for letting go of the bad habits and negativity we’re carrying around, and maybe it’s not a moment too soon, huh? Because things have been harsh lately. Things have been painful. On the news, people are fighting and killing and dying and in our own circle, folks have been disillusioned by plagiarists and disappointed in those they thought were their friends.

For me, when the Mourning Moon disaappears, it’s time to let the emotional tide settle too. It’s time to remember everything we’ve still got going for us.

It’s a fact. Complex things happen when people get together to create anything. Whether it’s books or the internet or friendship or family. People are human. Some can be self-serving. They lie. They manipulate. They steal. There are complex reasons for why people do the terrible things they do, whether it’s on an incomprehensible international scale, like the attacks on Paris, or the local scale, like yet another unforgivable social injustice, or in a microcosm like the community of writers and readers we belong to.

From all the negativity on the news and in our own community, it would be easy to make the case that people are kind of shitty and we should all just hide in our beds and wait for the Zombie apocalypse to sort things out.

I won’t be doing that, though, because I think people are just…people. I’m not here to judge anyone. God forbid. Wow. I’ve made my whole life about being an object lesson, not a role model.

And I’m only bringing any of this up because I am thankful for all the people I work with and those people who have shown me kindness in the writerly community and elsewhere in my life.

It’s thanksgiving, and I’m grateful for so many things, I thought I’d list them here:

I’m so thankful for my friends, authors and readers alike, who are too many to name.
I’m thankful for my publishers, (the now defunct) Aspen Mountain Press, Loose Id, MLR Press, Samhain, Carina, Torquere, Berkley InterMix, and Riptide.
I love my agent, Deidre Knight, who is f*cking awesome (and hopefully I tell her that enough). I love all the editors I’ve worked with in the past, and those I’m working on projects with now: Tera Cuskadin, Sarah Lyons, Cindy Hwang and Kristine Schwartz.
I’m grateful for readers and reviewers, without whom I’d be out of a job.
I’m grateful to all my teachers, mentors, and coaches: Margie Lawson, Lou Nelson, Michael Phillips, Eric Maisel, and John Adamus and everyone from every panel at every conference at RT and RWA and every blogger, Chuck Wendig, Morgan Hawke, Janet Reid… there are simply too many people to name.
I’m grateful for William, my author assistant, and those people who have done PR work for me, Viviana Izzo and Dawn Roberto.
I’m so grateful for my AWESOME family, all of whom have put up with my nonsense forever. I LOVE them so much and I’m so lucky to have them.
I’m grateful that when I’ve needed help and I’ve been able to reach out for it, it has been there in the form of church or family or kind strangers.
I’m grateful that help finds me when I don’t see I need it (but obviously, I do.)
I’m grateful each and every time I can be the “kind stranger” who helps someone else.
I’m grateful I live in America, for all it’s faults, I love the land and the people living here.
I’m grateful for Thanksgiving, because it’s the perfect time to quantify and reiterate all the things I have to be thankful for.
I love the folks at Dickey’s Barbecue who fry my turkey–YES I SAID IT, my turkey is FRIED, health bitches. Whatcha going to do about it? It’s ONE DAY out of a whole year. Honestly. *rolls eyes*
And finally, I’m grateful for creamed corn, orange cranberry relish and my mother’s stuffing balls.

Happy Thanksgiving!*

Bright blessings for a happy–not terribly unhealthy–holiday season and a fresh new start next year.

*Please make sure you’re signed up for my newsletter, (you can do that up there at the top of my site) so that when I decide to do some sort of last-minute but wholly awesome holiday newsletter-subscriber-only contest you’re part of the gang!

GayRomLit Retreat 2015 – a debriefing.

October 22, 2015 by Z.A. Maxfield

Wow! This was the view from Belinda’s (McBride) and my room, although this tiny picture doesn’t do it justice. From our balcony, we could see the bay, and the steamboats, and also everyone coming and going from the lobby. Which was kind of handy when we needed to find people.

We were right next door to Wade Kelly and Kayla Cooley, whose room number, 666, made me want to scritchy scratch the walls in an ominous way at night (although I suppressed the urge.)

The weather was glorious. The staff was nice. During the Luau, I dug my toes into the sand and let the HAPPY wash over me and it never left my heart the whole time!

I need to thank all the folks who helped me wish Sarah Lyons well. (Although I lost those signs somewhere…I am such a ditz…) We’re all on #teamsarahlyons !! Be fierce my friend!

Thanks also to all the new friends I made and all the folks I know from years past. It’s the people I enjoy at these events.

I want to thank all the authors who let me lose my shit over them. I will never get over fangirling the authors I don’t get to see often: Rhys Ford, Jordan L. Hawk, Charlie Cochet, and Jordan Castillo Price, to name just a very few. So many great authors!

And I LOVE, love love meeting readers!

I gave away a ton of swag and a boatload of books and some posters.

I danced the night away. Twice.

And then, after the conference was over, I got my tattoo cherry popped. My husband’s name is Marlin, in case you’re wondering what that’s all about. It’s a sly homage to someone I’ve been with for 33 years this month.

And then I slept for two solid days when I got home. I think I’m going t sleep until this weekend! Bless you all, and I can’t wait, I’m ready for next year already.

*shakes head* (No I’m not. Not yet. But as soon as I get a second wind…)