Long Time, No Post

Hi.

Remember me?

My name's Marie and I used to write this blog, Booknapped, about all the books and poetry and authors I love.

Then I had a baby, and I got really, really busy. I hardly had any time to blog. But I still kept reading and writing and dreaming of being an author. And guess what.

It eventually happened.

I got an agent. Her name is Lana Popovic.

And Sky Pony Press published my first book. It's called The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl & Random Boy.

And now I am once again writing a YA novel!

And the baby is now a 4-year-old little girl who rules my world.

But one day I realized that I never told you guys any of that because I stopped posting here so long ago.

So if you enjoyed the stuff you read from me here (Some of you really did. You wrote to tell me so!), you should check out my new website, mariejaskulka.com, and my YA novel in verse.

Here it is on Goodreads, where you should totally click the Want to Read button.

Hope all your dreams are coming true too!

From: What My Mother Doesn't Know

Mom's The Word

My mother has never talked to me
about birth control or safe sex or about
whether I should wait till I'm married.

But whenever I'm getting ready
to go out with Dylan,
she hovers in the hall

and keeps wringing her hands,
like she's scared that
I'm going to get pregnant or something.

And if I ever did,
which of course I won't,
it would serve her right....

Sonya Sones

From: "Can't Get You Off My Mind"

"I'm old enough to see behind me,
but young enough to feel my soul."

"Can't Get You Off My Mind"
Lenny Kravitz

I am SO excited to see Lenny Kravitz as Cinna in The Hunger Games. Dude.

From: A Room With a View

"Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them."

E.M. Forster

"Be Nobody's Darling"

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
or line the crowded
river beds
with other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
O the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Alice Walker

From: "No Surrender"

"We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby, than we could ever learn in school."

Bruce Springsteen

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching the palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Naomi Shihab Nye