Well, my turn as pseudo-doula has been completed, and life is slowly returning to normal. Over the weekend I managed to get back into my writing zone, and have resumed work on my next novel When Love Isn’t Enough:

When desperation takes a tragic turn, a chain of events unfolds that changes the course of all three of their lives forever. It is a heartbreaking tale of true love, terrible timing, impossible choices, and how you find the strength to go on when you discover that, sometimes, love just isn’t enough…

WHEN LOVE, the prequel to SOUL MATES, is a story very close to my heart. The first six chapters are done, and diving back in, its hard not to be transported back to that place and time. It’s hard to re-create it without re-living it… Hell, I even have an urge to take another “research” trip down to LA to visit you-know-who. Whatever it takes to get those creative juices flowing, right? lol

Remember when I was writing about Goals the other day? Well my new goal is to finish this entire book by June 2006. That will keep me on track to self-publish in December 2006, and I can spend the summer promoting WHEN LOVE while I’m driving across the country… The entire book is outlined and mapped out, so I think this is in the realm of the possible. Besides, if I’m going to be a writer, I better get used to writing on a deadline, huh?

Wish me Luck!

At 12:40 pm today, we welcomed Isabel Charlize Santillan into the world 🙂 6 perfect pounds and 1 perfect ounce. Dena was a trooper and the delivery went off without a hitch. Things got a little intense after the delivery with some complications, but the doctors did their thing and mama and baby are fine…

I’ve seen a lot of cool things in my life, but watching Isabel being born is definitely one of the coolest. Watching the birth of a child is to witness a miracle. I’m not going to lie — I almost fainted when the whole thing first got started… But once I recovered from that and got my bearings, I was sucked into this incredible journey that I feel so honored to have been a part of. I will never forget how it felt to be huddled around Dena expectantly, watching in awe at her strength and grace as she brought her child into this world… How crazy it was the first time we saw Isabel’s head (a FULL head of hair, might I add), and then even crazier after that final push when her tiny little body came spilling out, placed immediately on mama’s chest, mother seeing daughter for the first time… Hearing Isabel’s first cry fill the room was the most surreal, emotional, joyful, magical moment I’ve ever experienced. Isabel was looking around and totally alert from the moment she was placed on Dena’s chest, taking it all in, responding to the sound of her daddy’s voice as the doctors took care of the placenta problem…

Keeping Isabel company while Daddy tended to Mama’s recovery, I couldn’t help but marvel at how perfect this child is. Just hours into her life and I’m staring down at her realizing I am beholding the purest thing in the world — a newborn. Pre-socialization, sans memories, a soft, smushy bundle of uncorrupted lifeforce energy and sheer potential. Amazing. And you know what? There is nothing softer than a baby’s skin. Nothing.

Happy Birthday Isabel Charlize! Auntie Steph loves you!!!

As someone coming off a week of sleep-deprivation, I am definitely experiencing firsthand the way a lack of sleep affects one’s mind and body. In my younger years, I could pull an all-nighter with the best of them, functioning quite effectively off 5 or 6 hours of sleep. But those days are behind me. I’m not a teenager anymore. I am not a pleasant person to be around when I don’t get my 8 hours, lol. Early to bed, early to rise is how I live my life, my sleep schedule so regular that I don’t even have an alarm clock in my bedroom. My body just gets up around 7-ish every morning, all by itself. Unless something happens to throw my schedule off.

It all started Monday when I brought the new kitty home. My new, 7 month old, nocturnal kitty who kept me up all night wanting to play. Not cool. I finally got to sleep around 3am, only to have the phone ring a short while later at 4:30am. It was Dena, alerting me that baby Isabel was finally going to grace us with her presence 🙂 So up to Vallejo I go… A long day in labor and delivery, but turns out it was another false alarm, so back to Santa Cruz… As soon as I return home, I head directly for bed, sleep the only thing on my mind. I got maybe 3 hours in before kitty is all up in my face (literally!) wanting to play. Seriously, this cat seems to like sitting on my HEAD. Have you ever tried to sleep with a cat sitting on your face? Anyways, to make a long story short, I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep all week, and it is starting to wear on me mentally and physically. I feel the second cold of the season coming on, and as someone who doesn’t get sick often, I am beyond annoyed at my weakened immune system.

Faby told me about this article she read in TIME magazine about the effects of sleep deprivation. The author, Sora Song cites a 2003 sleep study’s results:

“The human brain is only capable of about 16 hours of wakefulness [a day] … When you get beyond that, it can’t function as efficiently, as accurately or as well.”

She goes on to say that:

“What most people don’t realize is that the purpose of sleep may be more to rest the mind than to rest the body.  Indeed, most of the benefits of eight hours’ sleep seem to accrue to the brain: sleep helps consolidate memory, improve judgment, promote learning and concentration, boost mood, speed reaction time and sharpen problem solving and accuracy.”

No shit.

Before I read that article, I was suffering through the sleep dep, continuing to stay up late working, trying to squeeze some productivity out of every waking hour. It’s no wonder I find myself staring at a blank page for hours at a time, not producing anything but a steady stream of frustration. What I should do is just Go To Bed.

And on that note…

Ever catch yourself walking by a mirror and gasp, wondering “Where the hell did THAT come from???” lol Well, my habit during winter is to hunker down and hibernate, so I accept the fact that over the holidays I’m going to gain a little ‘winter weight.’ Now that the temperatures are starting to warm and the skies are beginning to clear, I’m realizing it’s time for me to get off my ass and get moving again. Cardio. Yoga. There is no time like the present. It will be swimsuit season before we know it and I may be in the Islands as early as April.

So it’s time to start riding again. Spent all day yesterday cruising around town on my bike. The Groundhog may have signaled six more weeks of winter, but it was gorgeous and sunny in Santa Cruz…

My ride started up at UCSC, looking down at my lovely, little ocean town.

Then I rode down into town and North on Highway One towards Wilder Ranch…

Then back into town, cruising along West Cliff…

Even stopped at Steamer’s to watch the surfers for awhile… There was some kind of surfing competition going on…

It was a great day and being out in the sunshine really energized me. I think its time to shake off winter and start thinking about the ways we can prepare for the coming of Spring. It’s the start of a whole new cycle of birth and renewal!

Well, its been over a year now that I’ve been doing this writing thing (seriously), and I’m starting to notice some of my cycles/patterns. Like the writing/editing/reading pattern. After I meet a writing deadline, I switch hats and go into editing mode, which involves looking at the manuscript in a completely different way. When writing, the focus is on expansion, and when editing, the mentality is slice, cut, shave… I’ve discovered that after I finish a major edit/revision, I need a break from writing altogether. I find myself spending my “work” time reading, which I suppose is still technically work if you think about it as studying your contemporaries and researching your competition. 😉

I’ve resumed reading NEVA HAFTA, which I had to abandon halfway through about a month ago to read about HypnoBirthing. Anyways, it’s funny how one can’t fully ‘shift gears’ overnight. Here I am soaking in the bathtub, trying to enjoy my book, when I hit a paragraph that makes me want to reach for my red pen, lol. My mind is still in editing mode, and I just want to axe every stray “that” and rearrange complete sentences… And it’s not even my book! LOL! Will I ever be able to read like a normal person again???

(Not to say that Edwardo’s book is riddled with bad grammar, which it’s not. His writing is very strong. I’m just stuck in editing mode.)

Anyways, critical twitching aside, its nice to be a consumer again. I believe reading makes people better writers, and I try to devote as much time to reading as I do other parts of my career. When my mind if sufficiently decompressed from the stress of overwork to meet a deadline, I will pick up the pencil again and get to it. Full circle…

Freakin’ FINALLY!

Oh my God, if you even knew how hard I’ve been working the past 3 days… This thing took way longer than I would have liked to get shipped, but what can I say, sometimes life gets in the way. I totally would have met my Monday deadline too if I hadn’t spent over eight hours in the car this weekend, driving back and forth from SC to SF for the Hypnobirthing classes, and then up to Vallejo on Monday for a “practice run” of Isabel’s birth 🙂 But alas, Dena wasn’t really in labor, and so back to Santa Cruz I went for the final pushes of my own personal labor.

I am so happy right now I want to throw a party. It’s DONE. No more editing, no more revising. It will soon be in the mail and I can forget about it and move on to other things. Like writing the next book. And finishing Edwardo’s, lol. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders, and I seriously wanna dance around or something corny like that, lol. Man. And its a LOST night? Life is good.

Alright, this is my first night “off” in awhile, so I’m about to get to it. Just wanted to share the good news 🙂

Well I am coming off the most spiritually intense weekend I’ve had in a while. I have been selected to be present when my cousin Dena gives birth to her first child, and as a member of the birthing team, I attended Hypnobirthing classes with the couple this weekend. Cool stuff. First I gotta confess – I really wanna have a baby now, lol. I simply cannot wait to give birth to my first child, it is going to be so cool… Okay, now let’s box that thought up and put it on a shelf for a couple more years, LOL. But seriously, a natural birth with no unnecessary medical interventions is the way to go, and that is what we are trying to do for the Santillan family.

The premise behind Hypnobirthing is for birthing mothers to use self-hypnosis and meditation to interrupt the Fear-Tension-Pain model, to facilitate birthing with the least amount of discomfort. Most women are perfectly capable of birthing their babies without drugs or surgery, and it was only when men and the medical establishment got involved, turning pregnant women and childbirth into something that had to be “managed”, that all this fear got introduced into the birthing process. In order for the baby to move smoothly down and out of the body, all the muscles in the woman’s body need to relax. Fear – by triggering the fight, flight or freeze response – causes tension in the body, which leads to pain, as the body is now working against its natural instincts to birth the child. It’s all so simple really, mind over matter, right? Well Dena is an incredibly spiritual person, and I’m confident that she can pull this off. And I will be there to offer all the positive energy I have to the process, as well as acting as a forcefield to keep negative, fear-inducing influences out.

Yes, a very deep time indeed.

After class I hooked up with another spirit who quite literally, rocked my world. A very powerful and intense spirit. A spirit who actually healed the pain in my back with his hands and some stones. Crazy. I’ve been in physical therapy/chiropractic care/acupuncture for YEARS, and this boy walks in, lays his hands on me, and makes all the pain go away just like that (just like he said he would). It was a trip. I think spending the morning meditating in the Hypnobirthing class prepped me to be ultra-receptive, but we were doing some major energy work, balancing and alignment, real good stuff. I think I’ve spent too much time lately around non-believers cause I forgot what it was like to be in the presence truly spiritual people. Seriously, I haven’t been vibrating on this level since I fell in love with Mr. Max…

So on top of all the other things I am trying to do right now, I am adding “Reconnect with my Spirituality” to the list. We’re talking regular yoga, astrological meditation, balancing and grounding work and most importantly Positive Thinking. You get back what you put out people.

PS: The manuscript will ship on Tuesday, providing Dena doesn’t go into labor in the next 48 hours.

PPS: Look at the cool things that happen when you let a photographer loose in your house 🙂

Thanks Adam =)

Man, there just aren’t enough hours in the day… Demands on my time have been high, and I haven’t had enough left over to put in quality work editing. I’ve hit the halfway mark on the editing project, but I’m still not done. However, the shipment of this manuscript cannot be postponed much longer before I risk looking *gasp* unprofessional… So I’ve decided that I will print and ship on Monday, whether I’m finished or not. I try to align most of my projects with astrological omens if at all possible, lol, and the New Moon is on Monday. For those of you that don’t know, New Moons favor initiations and new beginnings.

In other news, Kanye West’s provocative ass is at it again… The rapper has decided to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine posing as Jesus. Uh huh. I have mixed feeling about the man — I respect him as a talented and sometimes brilliant artist and producer, but also strongly believe his ego is WAY out of control. No one should be that full of themselves, it can’t be healthy… I wonder if he’s going to be as whiny in this article as he was in the VIBE article I read… Someone will have to read it and let me know.

For those that don’t know, my day job is Program Manager of the Center for Cultural Studies at UCSC. Today we hosted our major winter conference Reflections on Katrina: Place, Persistence and the Lives of Cities. I wasn’t required to be “on duty” today, but because the topic interests me, I headed over there bright and early and spent the bulk of my day listening to the presentations. There was provocative discussion, intense imagery (courtesy of the near-constant stream of Katrina slides and a lunchtime photo exhibition), and I walked away from the whole experience totally overstimulated. Of course. Cause I’m Steph.

Two of the panelists were actually from New Orleans, so they were able to provide a insiders perspective and analysis that you’re just not going to get from the mainstream news media. A media that seems to have forgotten Katrina even happened, its horrors removed from our TV screens, and in turn wiped from public memory as we re-focus on our own self-interests and more trivial matters. But the aftermath of Katrina is still very real to many people, people whose lives will forever be changed. And you know what? Shit is still hella f*cked up down there. The reconstruction efforts have only just begun, but what is being reconstructed? For whom? How will race and class politics shape the efforts to rebuild? And how can communities, displaced and destroyed, come back together and set down roots in soggy soil?

Those geographically removed from the Gulf Coast region have what I believe is the privilege of not having to deal with the aftermath of Katrina, with economic and environmental consequences that will prove even more devastating and far-reaching than the hurricane itself. We watched it unfold on our TVs, safe in the comfort of our air-conditioned homes… We felt outrage and sadness, our hearts broke for those suffering, but it passed. Maybe we donated some money to the relief efforts, but most likely, we didn’t. Cause it happened to them. Over there. Someone else in a land far, far away. Why is it people only stand up and pay attention when something is directly affecting them? And why are flashes of compassion so fleeting?

There is so much we can learn, as a nation and as human beings, from this terrible tragedy, but I fear Katrina and the issues it brought to the forefront are suffering from a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Have we forgotten? Or is a change gonna come?

Well I guess the mission of the conference has been accomplished – I am reflecting on Katrina. On all people across the globe that are suffering.

Donate to the Red Cross

I’ve decided I’m going to start a Thursday blog tradition of LOST venting, lol.
*****LOST SPOILER ALERT*****

“Who are we, to tell anyone what they can or can’t do.”
–Locke

Well, that was one testosterone-fest of an episode, a good ole-fashioned alpha-male showdown. Everyone waving their dicks, er, I mean, guns around, pissing lines in the sand, marking their territory. And they want us believe it’s the WOMAN’s fault that evil reigned supreme, a la Eve (ha) in the Garden of Eden, when in fact, she probably just saved the world and they’re too puffed up on pride to realize it. Reminds me of the Commander and Chief episode this week where the female President averted nuclear war simply by agreeing to apologize. What a concept, eh?

Seriously, Michael can stay lost in the jungle for all I care, cause that’s one less crazy person with a gun running around who might accidentally shoot one of my favorite characters. They really need to start utilizing Libby’s skills as a psychologist to get some group therapy going on. Talk about a group of folks with issues…