One True Thing from Penny Blubaugh: Staying Power

For today's One True Thing, I am thrilled to welcome author Penny Blubaugh. Penny is the author of the ingenious and powerful novel Serendipity Market, which received a starred review from Kirkus and about which Booklist raved: "This beautiful novel will be a delight to those who enjoy spin-offs of fairy tales and folktales. Readers will find themselves flipping back and forth to figure out how all the different stories hidden in the fold come together to form the greater whole of this charming book." 

Penny is also the author of Blood and Flowers. She is an inspired word-crafter who is represented by Erin Murphy at the Erin Murphy Literary Agency. Penny is a teen librarian in Chicago in addition to her work as a writer. For more about Penny, check out her website at www.pennyblubaugh.com. 

Staying Power

By Penny Blubaugh

One true thing I’ve learned about life is that there are things that I know that I might have lived very happily not knowing.  This is because most of what I know in the category of “important” deals with life lessons.  Life lessons can be hard to take.

Life lessons are usually learned because of a bad situation that climbed up the cliff.  The climb made the situation go from bad to worse.  And then the situation jumped. 

Once I recover from the fall, once the bruising and battering have gone, the lesson stays.  It might make me smart.  It might make me careful -- I don’t want that to ever happen again.  It might makes me reckless -- I survived and I can do anything.  Who knows?  It might even make me sexy.

Mostly, the lesson makes me realize that I’m a survivor, that I have staying power.  The next time something jumps, I’ll remember the last time.  Even though I’ll still feel like I’ve been gut-punched, I know that I’ll eventually get through this, whatever this happens to be.     

   

It’s the eventually that’s hard to take.  But if I let myself remember, I’ll know that I have resiliency.  

On Breaking Rules

By the time we get to middle school, we're already indoctrinated into a whole host of "rules" that serve mainly to keep the status quo alive.

Boys are supposed to act, think, dress, and talk one way. Girls another.

The life you should seek is one which includes fistfuls of cash.

Don't take risks.

Don't question authority.

Look cool.

Fit in.

Wear the right clothes--even if they cost five times as much as the not-right clothes and you don't even like the way they feel.

And there are thousands more, over and over again pressured into our heads and hearts. But the trend can be stopped.

Reversed even--and it begins when we speak openly about the ways we've broken those rules in order to follow something deeper, more potent, more honest than a mob.

So I'm especially excited to share the news that a book entitled Break These Rules is going to be released by Chicago Review Press in Fall 2013. I'm immeasurebaly grateful to Joan Paquette, my agent at the Erin Murphy Literary Agency, for making the deal with editor Lisa Reardon at CRP.

All of the royalties from the projject will go to the Children's Defense Fund.

I'm also deeply grateful to the contributing authors whose essays and sage counsel on rule-breaking will appear in the volume: Kathy Erskine, Sara Zarr, Josh Berk, Carl Deuker, Francisco X. Stork, Matthew Quick, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Leslie Connor, Wendy Mass, Carol Lynch Williams, Gary D. Schmidt, A.S. King, Neesha Meminger, Lisa Schroeder, Mike Jung, Anna Staniszewski, Jen Nielsen, Lyn Miller-Lachmann, Jennifer Ziegler, Brian Yansky, Chris Barton, Tara Lazar, Natalie Dias Lorenzi, Jennifer Reynolds, Lynda Mullaly Hunt, Mitali Perkins, Margo Rabb, Lisa Burstein, Rob Buyea, Chris Lynch, Pat Schmatz, Sayantani DasGupta, Tamara Ellis Smith, and Thanhha Lai.

Here's the official announcement.