Today Our Hearts Are Broken, But Tomorrow They Will Heal

I wrote yesterday about the negativity that can plague even us light-chasers who work diligently to self-heal, heal others, and create a better world.

Today, in the wake of the shooting in Connecticut, I am sitting in my little office, listening to President Obama address the country, saying "Our hearts are broken" and I feel it when I look at my Facebook feed. Every single post is an outpouring of anger or sadness.

When I mourn the loss of those children and teachers, I feel catapulted out of my own world of issues, my little dragons, and into an outer space of our connectedness and with it, our shared pain.

And I don't think this pain only surfaces during a tragedy. I think a lot of us are carrying the collective pains of many. The unspoken, unprocessed, unconscious ones.

Many of us adults live rather steady, love-filled lives. We have everything we need. But then we can be overcome by negativity with no specific trigger. We think it might be something from our past, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it is our own stuff.

But sometimes I think that much of the negativity we process day to day isn't just our own. And maybe as we learn to "shake out" our own traumas, we help shake out the traumas of our collective psyche.

Guy Raz, in a special coverage from NPR News, was just speaking with an expert whose name I didn't catch, who said that there are teams on the way to help the students work through the PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) but that there is still a lot scientists don't know about how trauma works.

However, he says, we do know this: allow the children to express their feelings, to revisit the event and try and find meaning. Try and make sense of the the tragedy, put it into a framework. Part of what terror is is that it's incomprehensible. Putting it into a narrative gives us some control over the events.

As for the rest of us, he advises us to, "Step back and ask what really affects us most of the time. School shootings aren't one of those things." He also said that the thing about trauma is a lot of people come out the other end whole. There is lots of resilience in the human character.

My thoughts go to the parents and families of the people who died today. May their hearts, and our hearts, not be broken forever.

Buffy the Novella Slayer (Because She Kills It)

Meet The Buff.

Part of being a writer is having friends who write. The Buff is one of mine. I call her my "Writing Buffy" instead of "Writing Buddy," which I think is hilarious and wonderful. She's a good sport about it. She's a good sport about most things. And recently she got some great, well-deserved news.

After a year of submitting her first novella "The Dark King's Lover" to a number of contests and presses with no success (DKL is a book I edited last winter, a cheeky, sexy, enjoyably dark love story between a witch and a vicious fairy king), Buff finally got GREAT news:

She finalled in the 2nd Annual Novellas Need Love, Too contest sponsored by the Celtic Hearts Chapter of the Romance Writers of America in the Paranormal category. The finalist submissions will not be sent to an editor for the final round and we'll find out in December (around Christmas) where she placed.

So, is Buffy just having a good year?

I don't think so. As someone who teaches writers marketing and platform development, and thinks a lot about what really works and what really doesn't, I'm fascinated when a friend seems to come out of the woodwork and really make something happen.

And I have worked with enough aspiring writers to start seeing real patterns in what works.

So, join me in the next installment NEXT WEDNESDAY, when I talk about the strange thing I see actually working for aspiring novelists that has nothing to do with virtuosity, years of focused dedication, or industry connections.

And say hi to Buffy on twitter. She'll say hi back and what's more, she'll be genuinely interested unless you are an arrogant d-bag. Even then, she'll find you hilarious.