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

Found: Motivation

Saw this in a headline the other day and thought of writing:

Hard Work Trumps Talent

Remember that. I'll try to remember it, too.

The article's pretty interesting if you have time to read a few words about a best-selling author who failed high school English.

Found: Nothing Worth Earning Comes Easy

"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."

Boris Pasternak

Thanks for the lead, DailyLiteraryQuote.com.

From: "Fellow Citizens"

...Down in Gilpin Place, near Hull House, was a man with his jaw wrapped for a bad toothache...

He is a maker of accordions and guitars and not only makes them from start to finish, but plays them after he makes them.

And he had a guitar of mahogany with a walnut bottom he offered for seven dollars and a half if I wanted it,

And another just like it, only smaller, for six dollars, though he never mentioned the price until I asked him,

And he stated the price in a sorry way, as though the music and the make of an instrument count for a million times more than the price in money.

I thought he had a real soul and knew a lot about God.

There was light in his eyes of one who has conquered sorrow in so far as sorrow is conquerable or worth conquering.

Anyway he is the only Chicago citizen I was jealous of that day.

He played a dance they play in some parts of Italy when the harvest of grapes is over and the wine presses are ready for work.

Carl Sandburg

Baby Steps

"What has been spoiled through man's fault can be made good again through man's work."

I Ching

Few Things Get Me to Stand Up These Days

Do I break my moratorium on buying new books to get Mockingjay? I can't decide. But I could use a good Hunger Games reading-coma.

I'm not dead, by the way, just very, very pregnant.

It's available on Kindle, which may make all the difference.

I need a sign. Today, I'm looking for a boy named Gale, a bird singing a familiar tune, or a muttation.

From: To Kill a Mockingbird

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."

Harper Lee

*Keep on fightin' the good fight, bloggees. I'm a bit overwhelmed by injustice these days, but I'll be back soon with regular updates.

Reunited: It should feel good.

"Don't edit your soul according to fashion."

Franz Kafka

I recently taught one of my friends a secret trick I learned a long time ago from a magazine. When you feel like a giant failure (my friend is particularly vulnerable to people who make her feel this way), imagine yourself when you were 10 years old. Envision 10-year-old you meeting now-you. What does she think of you? Would she want to grow up to be like you?

That's how you measure success.

Why Being Told You Suck is a Good Thing

Let me tell you something true about me:

I HATE disappointing people. Yet, sometimes at work, I screw up. People come down hard on me, but no one comes down on me harder than I do. Because I hate to hear people point out things I did wrong--especially when they are choices I stopped and questioned, and then did anyway.

Maybe that's why this section of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is loitering in my mind:

"Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn't he?" he said.

I could barely muster a "yeah."

"That's a good thing," the assistant told me.

"When you're screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."

...

You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you and want to make you better.

Remember, bloggees. People tell you your writing sucks because they believe you have the potential to do better. Prove 'em right.

Your Freudian Slip is Showing

I keep typing "write" when I mean "right." I imagine this is my creative brain giving me subtle hints. It reminds me of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, a lovely writing book that talks about a Zen approach to writing. One thing the author, Natalie Goldberg, suggests is being aware of your typos--don't just fix them; let them teach you first.

She's full of all kinds of good advice:

"Continue under all circumstances. Don't be rigid, though. If one day you have to take your kid to the dentist when it is your time to write, write in the dentist's office or don't write. Just stay in touch underneath with your commitment to this wild, silly, and wonderful writing practice. Always stay friendly toward it. It's easier to come back to a good friend than an enemy."

Are you fighting with writing? Make up. Try to remember why you two hooked up in the first place.

From: The Secret Year

"I want to call you. I just looked up your family's number. I'm pretty sure it's yours because the address is on the flats, near the Higgins Farm Bridge. Would you want me to call you? I feel so cut off from you. It seems crazy that I don't even know how you are. Sometimes I love the fact that nobody knows about us. We have this secret, so juicy I can feel my mouth dripping. Other times, like now, it seems stupid to hide this way.

It's later. I just talked to you. You didn't sound mad. Your voice felt good in my ear."

Jennifer R. Hubbard

"There will be time, there will be time"

"To lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time."

John Lubbock

And Now You May Commence

"Pinocchio went out into the world filled with good intentions, with vision, he went ready to do all the things he dreamed, but Pinocchio was pulled this way and that, he was distracted, he faltered, he made mistakes, but he kept on.... Pinocchio, in the end, became himself, because the little flame inside him, no matter what crap he went through, would not be extinguished."

Patti Smith by way of UnBeige

Found on the Local Weatherperson's Blog

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression in unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost."

Martha Graham