It’s been a busy couple of weeks in my world. I’ve been teaching, writing, publishing. Here’s the nutshell update:

1. Re-vamping this very website. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. I’m still tweaking things and would love some feedback.
2. The next issue of Under the Gum Tree. Subscribe, if you haven’t already. Submit if you haven’t done that either.
3. Getting ready for a trip to AWP in Chicago. I’ll be staying with my cousin, who blogs over at Pop!GoesAlicia.
4. Teaching online writing workshops for young writers. Next session begins March 12. Spread the word if you know a young writer.
5. Setting up an email newsletter. You can sign up here and get a copy of my ebook, Bold is Beautiful. I’d love some feedback on that as well.
6. This ebook: Bold is Beautiful. You’ll get a free copy if you sign up for the email list. If you get the ebook, let me know what you think!
7. Blogging again: Why I don’t Celebrate Valentine’s Day. Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

Whew! That might seem like a lot of info to take in. Not to worry, I’ll be doing more stuff online featuring one thing at a time. For now I’d really love it if you sign up for my email list — you’ll get a copy of my ebook if you do. Hope to see you around these parts on a regular basis.

“So tomorrow is Valentine’s Day,” my husband says to me.

“Yes, it is,” I say.

“Are you OK if we don’t celebrate?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Now, conventional wisdom says that when a woman says she doesn’t want something, she actually does want it and she’s just testing the man to see whether or not “he really knows her.”

Maybe some women do that, and if they do I say it’s a bunch of bull shit.

There are no reasons to play such childish games. If women have a real relationship with their significant other, it should include honesty and meaning exactly what you say.

And I meant it when I said it was OK if we didn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. I’ve never liked the faux holiday and that doesn’t change now just because I’m married. The thing I hate most about the day is not that it’s a money-making scheme, but that everyone falls for it every damn year.

You know that flowers and candy and cards are more expensive on Valentine’s Day, and yet you still buy them. Why?

You know that getting a dinner reservation on Valentine’s Day will be more difficult than on any other day of the year, and yet you still attempt to make one. Why?

You know that all the other love-struck people are going to wait until the last minute to buy all their Valentine’s Day crap and so that store will be extra crowded and the lines will be extra long, and yet you still participate in fighting the crowd for the last dozen roses or the last heart-shaped box of chocolate. Why?

Why do we do this to ourselves? It’s all a frenzy to do what we are supposed to do: we buy things that are put in front of us at the store, we send cards because Hallmark tells us to. We are robots, automatically and mindlessly doing what the consumer culture dictates.

Wine tasting over the weekend. This is my brain on wine:

Should I keep blogging?

I’m bored by blogs. Most of them recycle the same content over and over. Everyone in the blogosphere is an expert, and non-experts seek advice from the experts on how to become one. If you want to be successful as an A-List Blogger, you need to help your readers: you need to solve a problem or fill a need. Which basically means you have to be a teaching blog or a how-to blog. I don’t want to have a teaching blog or a how to blog. I want to tell stories. I think I tell pretty good stories. Here’s a fun story I wrote about giving my phone number to a homeless guy and here are some fun stories about my old scooter, Scottie.

Anyway, if I find the medium unappealing, what is the purpose of contributing to it? I can’t decide.

How does food affect my being?

Notice I didn’t say, “How does food affect my body?” During the month of February, I did a 21-day cleanse. It was the first time I’d ever done anything like it and it really was an amazing experience. The purpose of a cleanse is to detox your system, clean out the liver and essentially reset your digestive tract.

Good news: Not only did I lose 12 pounds (yay!), but also I was more in tune with my body than I’ve ever been in my entire life (not exaggerating). I had to pay attention to things like, how often am I peeing? Am I really hungry, or should I just have a glass of water? Can I really go for THAT long without bread? It’s bread we’re talking about here. Bread.

(Also. Apparently I am something of a trendsetter because no less than 10 people I know decided to, or want to do the cleanse after I did.)

Bad news: in the last 2 months since being off the cleanse, I am back to being my bloated, sometimes constipated, grumpy-in-the-morning and moody self. So the question remains: how does food (and which foods) affect my being?

What’s really important to me?

Without getting into a bunch of boring details, I’ve also recently been dealing with some major health issues. And if you think about it, the idea of losing your state of good health brings pretty much everything into perspective, doesn’t it? I mean, if you don’t have the energy to participate in every networking event available (because of your health), is attending any of them even important to begin with? If poor health kept you from doing more than one social outing per week, would you choose a networking event where everyone puts on their fake selves or would you choose to meet up with a college friend you haven’t seen in 5 years?

How can I tell stories more effectively?

Rather, how can I actively help others with the power of vulnerability and my propensity for it? Remember back up under the question about whether I should continue blogging, the part where I was talking about having to help readers by solving a problem or meeting a need? Yeah, see, the thing that I’m best at in the world is being vulnerable. This poses a huge problem, because how does one turn being vulnerable into something that meets a need or solves a problem? It’s not something you can package very easily and it’s definitely not something you can sell. But when I tell stories, the response is always positive and something like “wow, I’ve felt/experienced/dealt with that same thing, but thought I was the only one.”

Logically this means that the simple act of sharing does help others. As long as there are others to receive what I have to share.

So should I stop blogging?

If sharing vulnerable stories helps others, what does that mean for me if I stop blogging? See the dilemma? It’s a catch 22, right? A vicious circle.

Well, maybe not. I can use a different medium to tell stories. And if I choose a different medium, I can provide an outlet for others to share their story as well. That is how I came up with the idea for Under the Gum Tree.

I still haven’t decided whether I will keep blogging or not. But in the meantime, my energies are focused on continuing to contemplate these things and produce the first issue of Under the Gum Tree.

I would love to hear from anyone about the project, whether you’d like to contribute or you just have an idea. And, please, help spread the word.

There are times in life when keeping your distance from regular habits and responsibilities is good for you. The month of January is one of those times.

Think about it. After New Year’s Day, there isn’t much going on for the rest of the month. Hallmark starts ramping up for Valentine’s Day, and the only thing people can ask you as a conversation starter is “how were your holidays?” To which you are expected to respond with a laundry list the many trips to relatives and the gifts you opened on Christmas morning.

So I am declaring January Official Hibernation Month. It’s the perfect time of year to hide, get your bearings after running around like a crazy person for 6 weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and refocus — you know, evaluate how you spend your time and energy, that kind of thing.

Here’s why:

January is cold. What better time of year to stay inside, sit in front of the fire (or heater) and contemplate life? Or watch Alias. (Though, for the record, watching Alias does sometimes qualify as contemplating life, and I have a blog post coming up to prove it.) Not only is the weather cold, but also there must be something in the air — or maybe it’s the after-holiday spirit — that makes people cold. As in mean. They are grumpy. I am grumpy. We’re all grumpy after the holidays. Why is that? Probably because we’ve all eaten too much and gained weight. We’ve all spent too much and lost money. We’ve all had some kind of emotional and dramatic encounter with family regarding whether or not to exchange gifts or why we won’t be at Christmas dinner. Isn’t it best, then, to just take a break, keep your distance, and recoup?

January is dark. Coldness alone is enough reason to avoid the outdoors. But add darkness on top of that — well, it’s just a sad month. (No offense to those who have birthdays in January. There are many, I know. But you have a reason to celebrate and be cheery during this dreary month. The rest of us are not so lucky.) Darkness is sad because you can’t see very well. And when you can’t see very well, you might get lost. And getting lost is no fun. I guess it can be fun, depending on whether or not you intended to get lost. But still. A new year symbolically marks a fresh start (no matter how hard we try, there is no getting around this. It’s just the way our culture works.), and who wants to be at the beginning of a fresh start not knowing where you’re going? Instead of trying to feel your way through the dark, hands in front, groping around, just hibernate. Take a break from trying to figure things out. Rest up so that you can pace yourself through the rest of the year. Seems like so many people obsess about starting the year off with a bang, they jump off the line into a sprint. But that only works with short-distance races. You don’t have to have everything accomplished by February 1, and you don’t have to have everything figured out by then, either. Hibernate for a month. Everything will be OK. Really.

January is blue. When compared to the hoopla of holiday parties, holiday shopping, holiday meals, holiday services, holiday shows, holiday, holiday, holiday around every corner for 6 weeks straight, it’s easy to feel down and alone in January. In November and December we spend all our energy making sure to see all the friends and family who we probably see only once a year. Our love cup gets filled to the brim, and even spills over the top. Then when January comes and there’s way less to do, it’s easy to mope about having no social life or nothing to do because there are less reasons to be out and about around people. Instead of moping, why not embrace the down time? Sit at home, or at a cafe, or at a coworking space and evaluate whether running around to keep up with all the other crazy people has any true merit. Make some space for yourself, away from others to think about what you can do differently this year. Would you do anything differently, or are you pleased with the way your holiday season unfolded? What about the rest of the year?

Here’s a personal example: I didn’t publish on the blog in January. When I don’t post it’s usually a rule of mine to not point out how long it’s been since my last post or to apologize for not posting. But to prove my point, I spent the month not posting to see what would happen. With the blog and with my own interest in blogging. A surprising thing happened: it worked. I got a few new subscribers, even without new posts. My traffic didn’t go down that much, even without new posts. And I have a renewed fervor for becoming an A-List Blogger. Yes, you heard read right, an A-List Blogger.

With that said, I’d like to ask for your help. As I’m in this process of reevaluation, I’d love some feedback on a few things that I’m thinking about. Would you mind taking 5 minutes to fill out this survey?

Traditionally most people try to cram this reflection into the month of December on top of all the other expectations surrounding the month. But that’s just adding stress on top of stress. Why do that to yourself? I say, screw that — bring on Official Hibernation Month!

#reverb10 prompt, day 21: Future self. Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (Bonus: Write a note to yourself 10 years ago. What would you tell your younger self?)

Note to self:

Stop comparing yourself to others. All the reading online and finding new blogs that you do is nothing but destructive. You discover a new person online whose writing brushes up against what you aim for, and instantly let defeat creep into your brain. You scour that person’s site, trying to glean ideas for your own site. You waste so much time scouring other people’s sites that you don’t write or work on your own site. What is wrong with you? The first thing you should do every day is write your own stuff — worry about you. Don’t take in anything until you have done your work. No online reading — blogs, Facebook, Twitter — allowed until you have done your work. When you get to ThinkHouse, the first thing you should do is your work. Your work is to write. Write stories from your life that will help other women. Write stories from the lives of others that will also help women. Do this work first, then — and only then — may you investigate the work of others. The work of others should not determine your work. It may influence your work, but it may not determine your work.

Stop worrying about what others do. You seem to apply this mentality when it comes to other areas in your life — with coworking and ThinkHouse; with artwork; with music; with faith and spirituality — you keep your head down and quietly do your thing: whatever strikes your fancy. Take ThinkHouse for example. You never concerned yourself with what others were doing. You focused on the workspace that you want. You focused on the community that you want. You focused on building relationships with people that you want to work with. You didn’t get distracted by the noise coming from so-called competition. So why do you worry so much about other writers, what they write, how often they write? The only writer you should concern yourself with is you. Keep your head down, quietly do your thing: write whatever strikes your fancy.

Stop obsessing about the future. Focus on the now. What can you do today that will move you one step closer toward that future you envision? Do that, and nothing else. Write. Publish. Repeat. The only thing you can control is what you do with the time you have — today. You cannot control how things will turn out in a year from now, let alone in seven years from now. Who knows. The thing you’re working on now may not even exist in seven years. But if you knew that, would you stop working on it? Would you not even try to make it the biggest success you’ve ever known? Would you give up? Quit? No. You would tell yourself that the future hasn’t happened yet, so there is still an opportunity to be successful. You would attempt to alter the future.

Stop being depressed. Do something about it. You can change your mood. Go to a tanning booth. Better yet, get a light therapy lamp. Exercise. Get some fresh air, even when it’s cold outside. Spend more time with friends and people whose company you enjoy. Go to places that inspire you, like the art museum or the park or the coffee shop or the balcony at your own house. It’s like depression gives you an excuse to feel sorry for yourself and justify your pissy mood. Well, knock it off. Who do you think you are, anyway? There are millions of people in the world who are a lot worse off than you are, and you have the audacity to be depressed because you filed for bankruptcy? At least you have the luxury of that protection.

Stop blaming others for your unhappiness. You may think you’re allowed to be sad because you miss your friends and because you tell yourself that they don’t have time for you. But the reality is that it’s no one’s fault but your own. And you know it. If you miss your friends, then call them already. Take the initiative to make plans with them. Same goes for when you’re annoyed and stressed because the house is a mess or you feel disorganized. You can’t point your finger at your roommates or the cat or your boyfriend or anyone. Is the mess bothering you? Clean it. Do you feel scatter-brained and frazzled? Take a day off. Make time to organize. But if you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t have time to clean or organize, then just remember that no one schedules appointments on your calendar except for you. You choose how to spend your time, whether it’s with friends, cleaning, organizing or sitting on the couch eating cinnamon pita chips and watching 10 episodes of Friends in a row.

Bottom line: you know what you have to do, so focus and get to it already.

Inspiration for processing 2010 and looking ahead toward 2011…

“I have proved that you are all original and talented and need to let it out of yourselves; that is to say, you have the creative impulse.

“But the ardor for it is inhibited and dried up by many things; as I said, by criticism, self-doubt, duty, nervous fear which expresses itself in merely external action like running up and downstairs and scratching items off lists and thinking you are being efficient; by anxiety about making a living, by fear of not excelling.

“Now Blake thought that this creative power should be kept alive in all people for all of their lives. And so do I. Why? Because it is life itself. It is the Spirit. In fact it is the only important thing about us. The rest of us is legs and stomach, materialistic cravings and fears.

“How could we keep it alive? By using it, by letting it out, by giving some time to it. But if we are women we think it is more important to wipe noses and carry doilies than to write or play the piano. And men spend their lives adding and subtracting and dictating letters when they secretly long to write sonnets and play the violin and burst into tears at the sunset.”

Quoted from If You Want To Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit, by Brenda Ueland.

#reverb10 prompt, day 14: Appreciate. What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

Do you ever have one of those days where you think to yourself, “man I really could use a phone call from a friend right now just telling me how fabulous I am”?

Or if you feel like sitting down in a muddy gutter full of leaves and waiting there in the rain until someone comes looking for you, do you ever pick up the phone to call a friend and ask her to tell you how fabulous you are?

Didn’t think so.

I’m lucky to have a few friends who take those calls from me and are still my friend. But you can’t make those kind of calls every day, right? Even if you need someone to tell you how fabulous you are for like 119 days in a row.

News flash: you don’t need someone else telling you how fabulous you are, you need to tell YOURSELF how fabulous you are.

I’ll go first. Here are a few things I appreciate about…ME:

What about you? I hereby give you permission to appreciate yourself.

#reverb10 prompt, day 5: Let go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year?

Letting go brings a feeling of loss. Someone told me recently that any type of loss requires a period of grieving. Initially I rejected this. Why does it need to sound so terminal? No one died. How can I compare my depression — which of course must be self-inflicted — to true grief over the loss of a loved one?

But.

Even though I haven’t lost a loved one, a few things I have let go of and am grieving the loss of this year:

The Urban Hive.
Last year I helped found a coworking community in Midtown Sacramento. It was the realization of an idea I’d been working on for nearly three years and in June 2009, the stars seemed to align with an available space and willing people of a similar mindset. The opportunity was amazing; too good to pass up. It also allowed me to do a lot of cool things that I wouldn’t have done otherwise: moderate several panel discussions in partnership with The Sacramento Press; facilitate and host Sacramento’s first ever Freelance Camp for independent professionals; by connecting appropriate people with Vox Sacramento and the Sacramento Rescue and Restore Coalition, I like to think that I had a small hand in making an art show happen for Human Trafficking Awareness Month.

Because the opportunity and community were so incredible, letting go of it was one of the hardest decisions I made this year. And I think that enough time has passed (it will be one year in January) that I can share one small insight: when you feel like you’ve been laboring to birth an idea, you need enough self-awareness to determine if that idea’s about to have a premature birth. Sometimes when you be believe in something so strongly, and you are so passionate about it, you talk yourself into doing ANYTHING to make it work, right? You’re going to force the idea to be born no matter what, and YOU are gonna make it happen; it WILL work if you just get everyone on board, if you just convince everyone to care as much as you do, if you just start taking action, if you just…if you just…

Whoa. Take a step back. Ask yourself, “What am I compromising for this project, and is it worth it?” Examine your situation and evaluate the compromises you’re making to pull it off. Are you compromising relationships? Values? Downtime? Peace of mind? And is the thing that you’re willing to do ANYTHING to make work worth those compromises? My answer to that question was yes…for about 6 months. Even when saying yes was no longer sustainable for my mental and emotional stability, walking away felt like I was giving up (and I’m not a quitter!). Like my 8-year-old self who let her precious kitty, Pig, be to sleep after a dog attack. (So sad!)

Grieving this loss was more about preparing me for the next beautiful and exciting adventure than giving up.

Debt.
This year I filed for bankruptcy. You’d think that letting go of debt would be an easy thing to do. A clean slate? Absolutely. Give it to me. Now. Where do I sign?

But the pathway to it was excruciating. In my mind, bankruptcy meant that I was incapable of taking care of myself. That I couldn’t support myself. That I’m helpless. That I can’t do anything right. Because it’s not just that I can’t support myself by paying my bills, it’s that I was the one who got myself in the mess in the first place. It’s my choice to freelance. It’s my choice to not have health insurance (mostly because I can’t pay for it, but that is a result of my choice to freelance). I was my choice to use credit cards when I didn’t have any money. And all those choices led to an unmanageable debt, for which I filed bankruptcy. If I had just made a few different choices along the way, maybe the whole ordeal, tears and all, could have been avoided.

Grieving this loss was, and still is, more about letting go of my own feelings of inadequacy than letting go of the debt.

Not one, but two houses.
One was foreclosed and the other surrendered in bankruptcy. When I first moved out on my own, I owned the townhouse where I lived. It was a two bedroom, and I rented the second bedroom for 500 bucks a month — 1/2 my mortgage. In the first year that I owned the townhouse, the value increased 100% (we’re talking circa 2003 here). So I got the idea in my head that I could own rental property, earn passive income and eventually live off that. (Yes, I really thought this.)

It’s not that I didn’t want to work ever, I just didn’t want to work full time. I wanted to write. Still do. The hard thing about wanting to be a writer if your name is Janna Marlies Santoro is that you can only write what other people tell you to write for so long. Sooner or later you get tired of following someone else’s rules and you just want to write about what YOU want to write about, dammit. After all, you have a lot of distinct opinions and a lot of good stories to tell. Why would you waste your creative energies writing news for El Dorado Hills? So when you finally can’t stand it any more, and you need the creative energy to finish your grad school master project anyway, you quit your job and never even think about going back to what the rest of society calls a “real” job. Only problem is then, when the rent on your two houses doesn’t cover the mortgage and the insurance and the taxes, oh, and maintenance, you don’t have enough money to make up the difference. I guess you could say it’s the classic cart-before-the-horse scenario: you bought property before deciding on a lifestyle that could support a mortgage, let alone two.

Grieving this loss was more about letting go of an antiquated world view than letting go of two houses.

What other people think.
Especially when it comes to writing. I have been practicing writing — and publishing — without worrying what others will think. When I wrote about getting permission to piss people off? Yeah. That was me giving myself permission to piss people (you) off. Is it working?

This mantra started as a mere inkling at the end of last year when I caught a glimpse of a book titled Ignore Everybody. I had no idea who wrote it or what it was about. I didn’t need to know those things to know that I wanted to paste those two words all over my house as a reminder to plow forward in spite of the critics, in spite of others telling me I’m psycho, in spite of the voice in my head saying, “What the hell are you doing?!” Ignore everybody means EVERYbody — including myself.

Then when I was working on my 2010 personal plan with my planning buddy Shawn, one of the goals I wrote for the year was “practice ignoring everybody,” and the sentence was finished with the tactic, “by writing as though I am writing to my college friend Jen K.” See Jen K. thinks I’m frickin’ hilarious. We’ve lost touch in the last few years, but after college we stayed in contact for quite a while. I would write her novella-length emails about the saga that is my life and she would tell me how frickin’ hilarious I am. I loved writing those damn emails. It doesn’t always work, but now when I sit down to write I try to imagine that I’m writing an email to Jen K.

Grieving this loss was — wait a sec, I’m not grieving this loss. So there.

Grieving, as it turns out, does not require death. And that’s OK. It’s OK to to allow yourself to grieve loss — as long as it’s for a time and not forever.

#reverb10 prompt, day 4: Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

For me, cultivating wonder happens by intentionally searching out beauty, the unexpected, the unfamiliar. Here are a few ideas for how to do that:

Take trips. Even when I can’t afford to go far, one of the best ways to cultivate wonder is to take trips. Wonder reveals itself when I’m out of my element. Of course everyone would love to travel the world, and I would too. I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Europe several times in my short lifetime and to Israel once. But these days, I consider it lucky if I get to take a trip (by car) to the coast or up to the mountains.

Look for wonder on a drive up to Tahoe, on the stretch of Highway 50 that follows the American River. At the lake, where the water shimmers and reflects the surrounding mountains, snow caps and all. When the sun sets, casting brilliant colors through the sky and streaking the lake’s surface. On a wine tasting trip in the foothills, when winding through the hills and back country of Northern California, where grape vines line the landscape in perfect, parallel rows.

Taste test. A while ago I made it my policy that when I come across a food or drink that I’ve never had, I taste it at least once before making a judgment about whether or not I like it. I admit, this is not an easy policy — especially when it comes to things like oysters, which taste like a mouthful of slimy seaweed straight out of the ocean. And I know because I have tasted them. I also know that this policy brings doses of surprise to my life because it forces me to taste things I might not otherwise taste and I’m often pleasantly surprised.

That’s why one of my favorite activities is wine tasting. Not only is wine just plain good, but also the variety of flavors that come in a wine bottle are unlimited and affected by so many variables that you never know what to expect when tasting wine. Even if you always drink the same varietal from your favorite winery (something I’m known for doing), you can’t help but be surprised.

Try things. Some friends of mine have recently gotten into rock climbing. I caught myself dismissing the sport in my head, telling myself that it’s not for me since I’m likely to lose my grip, slip off the wall and make a fool of myself. It’s not something that really interests me, but — like with tasting new food at least once — how do I know whether I like it unless I try it? I probably would never have run a 5k or 10k unless I tried. I probably wouldn’t like yoga unless I had tried it for the first time.

I just started using 750words.com a few days ago and I love-love-love it. It makes writing toward a daily word goal a fun challenge. The first day I used it, I clicked away from the page a couple of times before getting to 750 words. When I was done, my stats told me how many times I got distracted. That’s all it took — the next day, I wrote my 750 words with 0 distractions. And today, I’ve already written 1,513 words. But I would never know how great this program is unless I had tried it first.

Guess that means I will have to give rock climbing a try.

#reverb10 prompt, day 3: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

Considering the word I choose for 2010 — bumfuzzled — it feels like most of my energy has been spent on surviving. Hunting for an ever-elusive destination, all the while ripping my jeans, smudging dirt on my face and blowing the bangs out of my eyes just to keep a view of the path.

Feeling most alive, then, happened in brief stints when taking breaks from traipsing through the jungle and hacking through whatever obstacles appeared. When sitting still, outside on the balcony, in the sunshine. Warm skin. Hands wrapped around a mug of steaming coffee almost too hot to hold. Feet up on banister. Sun kissing toes. Mug to mouth. Steam whispers a sweet and nutty aroma. Green leaves contrast against blue sky. Black crow flies overhead. Close eyes. Traffic whooshes by, rushing down I Street. They can hurry. Let me rest. Deep breath. Smile. Looking forward to this moment gets me through the day.