It's dark times, y'all. But you know what's cool? Reading. Books. Perseverance. (Both the spacecraft and the concept.) 

I want to start out with a massive thank you to those of you who were able to make it to the release party on January 4th! It was a fantastic night of friends connecting with friends, and it was so, so needed as a way to kick off the year. ​

I was hoping that the high of getting to put this book out in the world and having the privilege of folks in my community read it would last a little longer. But of course, we couldn't have that. I'm sure it's because we're all sinners or whatever. Sodom and Gomorrah and all that jazz. 

There are plenty of high-control groups out there that will use that exact rhetoric to describe the fires that plagued my community over the past month and the massive devastation it caused to the land and the people who live on and care for it: that we were impure and therefore deserved it. That, among other things, our penchant for ensuring that the diversity of our communities can flourish by way of equity and inclusion is an everlasting plague that should continue to hurt us until we surrender to the oligarchy that uses extremist patriarchal religion to control and harm all of us. 

And right now, I want to be clear: that rhetoric is being utilized right now by the United States Federal Government. Right now, the US Government is a high-control group, no question. 

Pushing back on these ideas is exhausting but necessary. The more I experience the collection of humans in Washington, DC plotting the demise of any labor-valuing system, the more frustrated I get with the demonization of anyone but that collection of humans. The more I start to consciously think about what we all have in common, the more I realize that what I want for myself is also what I want for others who might be across the political aisle. I want people to make more money and take away some of the capital being horded by our current powers-that-be. I want people to feel like they're in charge of their lives and their religious beliefs.  I want people to have solid homes and access to good education for their kids. I want them to have a savings account and all of the basic necessities of life without having to hustle with three jobs. 

I'm trying, lately, to try to create a sense of power for myself by way of finding basic commonality with my fellow humans, regardless of political affiliation. We're all suffering now; all of us are subject to price gouging and the vulnerabilities that come with losing workers' protections and healthcare. We are in a high-control environment right now, and that high-control environment has affected our neighbors and friends and family members. The best way to combat a high-control environment is to create a calm, safe space free of judgment. ​

So that's what I'm doing now: trying to connect with people and create community, to reserve my energy for building and not destroying. I'm trying to focus on what's in front of me and provide hope and resilience, to focus on practicalities, and to sleep when I feel like I'm losing hope. Sometimes, I google things like "what people are doing to resist" and come up with hope like this. 

I also read. I resist by reading and sharing books and visiting libraries and encouraging other people to get library cards. I visit my libraries and participate in programming, because there's always a plethora of (free!) things to do through libraries, including movie nights and borrowing Lovevery kits and using 3-D printers and community clothing swaps. 

I connect with people in person. I reach out to friends when I'm feeling down and I need help. And I hope you, my dear reader, reach out, too. 

Now on to book things!   ​

Mott is usually everyone's favorite character. She's sassy, she's fun, she's daring, and she has a whole lot of heart. She's been secretly pining for Paige for a while now, and she's managed to mask her way through this high-control society for her entire life, but now that shit's getting real, she's sort of done. 

Mott's character focuses on this question of whether you really can "just leave" a high-control environment. The short answer is: not really, and the cost is massive. When you leave a high-control environment, you're walking away not just from the things that you hate, but the things you love, too. You can't have both, because they're enmeshed. 

In a high-control environment, you feel trapped. No one has ever really given you a different option before, and there usually are moments of happiness (though I'm not sure that can be said for some extremely bad environments like kidnapping or Children of God). When it's a culture, and you've been immersed in it your entire life, you have no other references. 

For me, it was the feeling of having to please everyone around me. My family loved me, and I knew this, but when I did stuff that deviated from what they wanted for me, I was in trouble. When I said the word "crap" in seventh grade, my mouth was washed out with soap. When I got angry about the way that I was being treated, or my mom was being treated, or my brother was being treated, I got spanked with a wooden spoon or a belt for "talking back." When I was in college and I told my mom that I'd had a religious epiphany at a Quaker meeting and realized that I could believe in pacifism and non-violence without believing that Jesus was the Messiah, and that I felt so much relief in that, I was told, coldly, to not share my beliefs with my brother. 

So as an adult, I spoke up. I spoke out. I cussed, a lot. I tried out new religions, I had my first sip of alcohol when I was 17. I denounced Christianity and decided to stop feeling guilty about not going to church. I took antidepressants. I ate sugar, gluten, dairy --- all the things those closest to me had at some point or another told me not to do. Slowly, I started to walk away, but I always felt this tether that brought me back to the things I'd been taught to value. 
​

The thing about leaving is that at some point, you realize that your value system has completely changed, and you realize that in order to survive, you have to let go of the old one. The cost of staying in and pressing yourself into this tiny box at the edge of your body and pretending like that squashed thing is You is just too high, and you start to realize how miserable you really are in that environment. You start to recognize that your happiness is based on everyone else's happiness, and that even though you try to control every piece of yourself to support their happiness, it's still forever out of your hands. Something tips the scales and soon you find yourself coming up for air because you only realized just then that you were drowning. 

Paige has this sort of experience. But Mott's experience is that of the more secular regular-attenders, the people who weren't anything close to church royalty. Everyone knew that they smoked, or drank, or had tattoos, or were reformed addicts, or went pole dancing, or had gay sex, but it was okay because they were chill and they liked everyone and everyone liked them, and as long as they kept coming to church and asking jesus to be their lord and savior, then they were just sinners like the rest of us. They were performing their surrender, and so long as they practiced humility, kept believing in the same thing as everyone else, it was something of an equalizer. In fact, these were the people who were lifted up as exemplars. In some ways, they had a lower social status because they had allegedly fallen so far that they had to be lifted up even higher than most people just to get their feet back on the ground, and wasn't god so amazingly powerful to be able to do that? Incredible. Awesome. If he can save them, he can save you, you lesser sinner with fewer problems, too. 

People like this weren't particularly threatening to the purist community, because they didn't hold a lot of power. They didn't really sit on boards, or teach classes -- maybe they would act in a play, or sing in the choir, but when it came to making decisions about church power and wealth and influence, they didn't have any say. They were the poster child for how the church was effective, how diverse and inclusive the community was. That was it. 

Heretics will put up with a bunch of low-level mistreatment as long as there are people there they still love. But once you threaten the people they really, truly love, all bets are off. They won't keep their mouths shut about that mistreatment to the general public. They will get out of there and get the people they love out of there, or die trying, and death in high-control groups doesn't look so good to authorities (that is, if the group hasn't already staffed all of the local authorities with its own membership). They're exceptionally loyal and fiercely protective, and they're dangerously honest. 

This is probably why people like Mott so much. She understands the bullshit of the world around her, and makes the best of it while maintaining her healthy dose of imagining what things could be like, or delving into history to see how other people used to live differently. She keeps her judgment at bay, and she's always there to gently encourage Paige to question the things around her. She's a breath of sanity in a world that makes you feel insane. And willing to do anything for Paige, whether she has to burn the whole world down or not.  
I love her, and I'm excited for you to meet her. 
​
And at this point in my life, I'm excited to be her.

My head is a jumble of thoughts right now. Now, more than ever, I feel resolute in my insistence on creating art that resonates with young people. I want my art to create refuge for those who are seeking answers and comfort, and I want it to bring them hope. 

But I also want it to serve as a warning for young readers who haven't been exposed yet to things like The Handmaid's Tale: the way that high-control environments are direct consequences of widespread fear and destruction. I want it to speak to the promises these communities make about delivering us from pain and powerlessness, offering us comfort when no one else can, and also serve as a warning as to the steep price of that comfort.

In times like these, when we feel battered and bruised and exhausted and fucking shit, not this again, I feel like surrendering. I want the comfort that religion used to bring to me, like I describe in my experiences as a young person below. And I think there is something valuable in allowing myself to surrender, but only to a certain extent. 

Right now, I surrender to the reality that this is the dystopic world in which we live, and that our country has chosen to live in this world on purpose. That is inherently, objectively true, and I won't resist it. 

But that's the extent of my surrender. For the rest of it, I will continue to resist. I will continue to make art, to build community, to be the intersectional minority I am, because that experience is a real human experience and cannot be erased. I will continue to be complicated, to exist. 

I will continue to be. 

​When I was in youth group service at church in high school, I raised my hands during songs, moved by the power of what I thought was god. I surrendered myself to jesus’s love. I surrendered myself to the will of a legendary being who allegedly created the existence of everything, and whose existence I can’t prove but I must trust at risk of losing my faith, a fate worse than death. Or abuse. Abuse is worth it—valuable, even—in the process of faith, because faith can get you anywhere. Faith can set you free.

Except for me, faith was the thing that chained me. I was accountable to it. Everything I did was in service of a faith I inherited from other people. It was a faith not just given to me, not offered, but mandated to me.

As Paris Paloma so succinctly put it, “it’s not an act of love if you make her.”

This teaching of surrender in Christianity may seem like a relief to some. It did for me, when I was younger. I wanted someone to take control over my life and give me peace, because I was fucking tired. I wanted to surrender to something, anything, that could make my pain better, whether that was Jesus or death or, hell, both.

Eventually I realised that Jesus wasn’t going to do shit, because it was all a setup. Some dude in the sky made a world I didn’t ask for, made me suffer in ways I didn’t ask for, and then had some ego trip telling me that he was the only one I should believe in, then made my ancestors provide blood atonement, then made it so I had to surrender my life to him? And he would somehow make it better? I was surrendering. I was surrendering as hard as I could, and I was still having panic attacks on a regular basis. I still wanted to die to escape it all, because I hadn’t signed up for any of it.

The thing about growing up that way—about being taught the importance of surrender as a means of survival, of being “saved,” rescued from a fate you were destined for without your consent—is that you learn to surrender yourself to other authorities in your life. Church leaders, teachers. Parents. And the surrender doesn’t actually save you. It just gives people control over you.

So I walked away. And it was terrifying, because with relinquishing my faith, I was then alone and without any coping mechanisms. To let go of faith is in itself an act of sheer faith—that you're going to survive without the safety net you've been able to know is there your whole life. It's trust in what you know: that that safety net has had holes in it this whole time, and that no matter how many times people tell you it'll catch you, you know it won't catch you. And when you have a new faith, and don't have a community reinforcing it around you, it's lonely and terrifying. 

But in my case, it was also incredibly worth it. 

I have found so much healing over the years from walking away from my religion. I have recreated the foundation of my sense of belief, of how I see my existence in the world, and I am constantly learning more and shifting. But now I've built in the ability to shift into my foundation, and my sense of self is malleable to be able to handle when I'm unsure or wrong. What I've built on top of it is also a sense of surrender: to the knowledge that I don't have all the answers yet, and that I likely never will, and that I will be wrong many, many times. I've found peace in knowing that there's no such thing as purity, though I'm still trying to unlearn the impulse to clean all of my mistakes in a way that will render me blameless. Peace is now something that I have created for myself, and it isn't something that someone else has created for me. 
​
It's mine. 

​And with that, I am extremely pleased to reveal the cover of this new book!

​Drumroll, please . . . 

Paige, our heroine, is a true believer. 

True believers are people who have bought entirely into their belief system. These are the people who make excuses for all of the terrible things that people who are in their belief community do, because all of those terrible things are in service to the greater good. These are the people who believe so much in the greater good that they are willing to die for it. 

I was that true believer, too.

I grew up Baptist in Fresno, California. Fresno is an interesting place, and quite conservative for California. It's a place with lots of local pride, where there's a simultaneous sense of "we're an awesome city in its own right, who needs those big-city jerks" and "let's install world-class cultural institutions so that we're comparable to Los Angeles." It's a relatively large city--500,000 people during the aughts--with tons of insular communities. Fresno is more than 50% Hispanic/Latinx, and my insular community reflected this: my dad's family is Mexican, my mom's family is Spanish and French, and both of them were raised Catholic. I was raised immersed in my dad's family, everyone of whom spoke fluent English, but who had strongly inherited Mexican-Catholic sensibilities. 

Basically, "Encanto" is my life. Minus the happy ending. 

That environment did a number on me. I grew up with this idea drilled into me that I was a sinner, and that was just by default, and I had to confess how awful I was to Jesus in order to be saved from being burned for eternity when I died. And more than that, it was up to me to prevent my friends from that same fate, and if I didn't, it would be my fault. 

I was taught evangelical recruitment techniques: give the gentle sell, use the particular gifts God has given you to show how much you're so happy that you have Jesus and God in your life, that you have been saved from being the scum you were born as, because as soon as you were born you sinned. You sinned with your impure thoughts that Jesus saw on a regular basis on a giant screen in Heaven at the pearly gates, judging you for whenever you got there, and you had to hope that your faith was good enough during your life on Earth, that you had asked to be saved enough times that you wouldn't be rejected right then and there for that one time you masturbated in secret and didn't ask for forgiveness. 

Because that's what religion was in my community: a lifetime of servitude to the Lord. A lifetime of knowing the right things to say, of giving platitudes for everything, of feeling obligated to share every compulsion I had (when I got my first kiss, I felt like I had to sit both of my parents down separately and admit it to them, guilt and delight warring equally for space in my brain). A lifetime of prioritizing work and family and putting friends and fun at the bottom of your list. And when combined with Latin culture, it meant no space for privacy. Total vulnerability. That was what faith meant. 

Pleasure wasn't part of that. It was something to hide.

I started writing Paige in 2011, when I was 21 years old. At the time, Mott was a boy. The book was called Ritual Girl, and I published it on FictionPress to much success (133 reviews! 43 users following the story! It was glorious), and you're welcome for that link, because not many people in my current life have seen it. At that time in my life, I thought I was very straight--because that was what I had been trained to believe about myself. That was the narrow frame of existence I had been taught was available to me throughout my childhood. 

Things were rough at home, and I existed in a constant state of anxiety, knowing that I was a sinner and constantly needed to try to get a clean slate, apologizing over and over for my sins: fighting with my brother, writing fanfiction instead of doing my Latin homework, talking back at things I found unfair. 

I started to have panic attacks. When I was in high school and I was overwhelmed with my lack of living up to expectations, I started to beat my legs with the heels of my dance shoes, bruises blending in with the bruises I had all over my knees constantly from dance anyway. I was told to not tell my friends about it, because they might tell their parents and it was a "family matter." We could talk about it within our family, with our grandparents, but they did nothing. They prayed for us. And prayed for us the next time it happened. And the next time. And the next time. 

It did nothing. I was still miserable. If anything, I was even more miserable than before. 

This clip from the reboot series "One Day at a Time" perfectly illustrates how mental health was treated in my family. Penelope (Justina Machado) says, "I'm Cuban! You know, we don't really do therapy," and her new friend Jill (Haneefah Wood) says, "In my family, the only therapist we're allowed to talk to was Jesus. And he must be booked up because he has not returned my calls." 

I sneaked into therapy in high school. Sneaked into it again in college. And when I finally started to deconstruct my religion, my family culture, how messed up it wall was, and I wanted to start therapy, I was told that therapy was just a scam, someone who would charge them for me to complain to them. 

So when you're experiencing anomalies in what you're "supposed" to live like, and you don't, you're not satisfied, and it's your fault that you're not just grateful that you have food and shelter and people who profess to love you, and you ask Jesus over and over again for help and you ask family for help and the only help that comes is hollow and empty, you're alone. Talking about your struggles with other people isn't an available option. In my case, it made my suicidal ideation more intense. 

For Paige, it makes her feel like the only way out is to die. She feels like she has to make up for her Aunt Felicity, who was labeled a "Theorist" (essentially, an apostate) whose sin was loving another woman--

--and was "cleansed" (burned at the stake, a la Joan of Arc) for it. 

So when Paige starts feeling these dangerous signs of pleasure when interacting with her best friend, Mott, who is also a girl, the only way out seems to be to die with honor: to be sacrificed before anyone can find her out. 

This is what it's like to live with the pressure of a religion with a narrow focus on how life should be lived. This is what it's like to live in a community that encourages you to keep quiet with people outside of your community. Eventually, the people who love you--whom you love--train you to believe that the deviation in how you experience life is unacceptable and should be corrected--love the sinner, hate the sin. 

When you are in a community where the people who love you the most tell you to keep your pain away from your closest friends, that trained professionals are just out to get your money and would never understand, it makes the community ripe for abusive behaviors. 

This was my experience of what Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife, describes in her memoir: a "cult without walls." In a podcast interview, Levings reflects on her experience of falling deeper and deeper into high-control religion, which isn't so much a single church but rather a continuum of one religion, which is how people find themselves in cultlike (more specifically, high-control) environments. 

I wanted to tell the story of a true believer in fiction for the modern era. George Orwell's 1984 obviously is a hallmark of cults in fiction, but not a whole lot of that exists for YA readers today. There are plenty of books about dystopian rebellion, but those tend to be about main characters who are already hesitant about the system. Paige is a character who is completely bought into this system, who believes that this will be her salvation, who can't fathom other ways of being. She is willing to stuff parts of herself down so that the system can continue, believing that she and she alone is the thing that is wrong with it. There's a strong element of self-gaslighting when you're in a high-control environment like this, and I hope that readers can relate to Paige's journey and find their own empowerment out of it. 

Image sources

Paige

• https://depressingquotesz.blogspot.com/2014/01/quotes-about-depression-depressing-quotes-0077.html
• https://www.deviantart.com/wholio/art/Stares-into-space-52164153
• https://magic-spelldust.tumblr.com/post/95997259506
• https://prima-coffee.com/equipment/hario/bdk-80-w?%3Futm_source=instagram&utm_medium=paidsocial&utm_campaign=dpa&utm_term=carousel-ad&utm_content=viewed-product
• https://www.pinterest.com/pin/114208540545109440/
• https://www.instagram.com/p/Bwx01VzB3FY/?epik=dj0yJnU9WGJpMmRRQmY2TWFMaWo3X2g1SFR2d2xnV21MV0dqN0UmcD0wJm49bndYZERpYm5aaFpLZnBmNUxKNndXdyZ0PUFBQUFBR2F6ZW9B​

Types of Cults

• https://www.peopleleavecults.com/resources/is-this-a-cult 

This particular passage above is one of my favorites from the entirety of Vessel. It's creepy and has a pushing rhythm to it, and when you read it out loud and emphasize the consonants, there's something about it that feels awful and metallic. 

The book features my spin on a post-apocalyptic ritual sacrifice. Much of the lore in this book is a mishmash of traditions; this ritual, known as "the Ascension," is an annual mass human sacrifice that systematically kills every single citizen of the age of 65 and turns their bodies into something that cleans the post-nuclear air (don't worry, we're not doing Soylent Green here). Our heroine, Paige, wants to volunteer as New Standard's sacrifice, known as the Ritualist, and even though the narrative of the Ascension is shrouded in veiled puritanesque language, she understands on some level that she'll die in the process. 

Dear friends,

​Guess what? Nope. Don't guess. I'll just tell you. After years of writing and editing and submitting and getting an agent and losing my agent and new projects and leads and losses and the constantly cinching of new talent in the publishing industry...

I've decided to self-publish my debut novel. 

I've been dreading self-publishing, if I'm honest. But at this point, I've been working on this book for over a decade and I want it to just see the light of day and maybe finally worm its way into someone else's heart, publisher or no publisher. 

So here I am. I'm shit at marketing, let's be real, but I want to share this with you lot first. There are fewer than 25 of you subscribed to this email list, and who even knows if any of your addresses are still active! I'll be sending updates to you as I'm working on the book. Little things, like character names and profiles, bits of history and drawings, etc. Today I've got a snippet for you, and I hope you enjoy it. 

The book, Vessel, is a blend of Rory Power's Wilder Girls and the 2019 movie "Midsommar."