I totally forgot this was here. Hi! to all my livejournal friends. This blog has helped me so much over the years, I can't believe I have neglected it so, slumming, practicing voyeurism really, on Facebook.
I'm currently enjoying a tasty seasonal Blueberry Oatmeal Stout out of Buffalo Bill's Brewery (Is it wrong of me to immediately think Silence of the Lambs?), listening to the roar of the heater and the tappity tap of rain on the roof, thinking about how I should approach writing villanelles in Latin with my 9th and 10th graders tomorrow instead of our usual Wednesday Latin prose composition at Starbucks. I do love my job. But, as I awoke yesterday wondering, when will I cease to be a teacher who writes and become a writer who teaches?
My life has changed so much in the last year. Traumatic, yes, but damn it, much improved really. Who'd have thought? Who the hell'd have thought.
xoxoxo

Starting at square one, again. It has been ten years since I decided to to write fiction. I'm not going to look back at the ten years too closely. The passage of time terrifies me, and ten years, that's a lot of time. Without peering at the details, I have learned a lot from a lot of people. I've forgotten, given up, stared over, delighted myself, disappointed myself, set unrealistic goals, and abandoned realistic ones. I don't want to look too closely at my writing future either. I'd just spend too much time wondering and worrying what might come to pass.

It seems trivial, an excuse, but I have a new writing tool. A new laptop. I did my best writing on an used Notepad. I loved the size, the feel of her keys. When she died two years ago, I got a lovely new machine, a Toshiba Satellite. I was really grateful for the gift. Giving it a go fresh out of the box I felt the keys were too easy, didn't gave that satisfying click with just the right resistance, but I was willing to move past that. I've never believed I'd be one to get too caught up in the ritual. Sometimes I emotionally attach too tightly to objects, and I really am not the best at accepting change, but I've really tried not to let that sort of thing hold me back. I'd always been pretty good at choking words out one way or another. I didn't realize how much trouble I might be in when it shut down without warning the first day I got it. After the third time it shut down – pop, power off- while I was in the middle of a story, I was shell shocked. I couldn't trust the machine and I didn't trust myself. Getting sucked into the story realm only to yanked back without warning sucks. Sure most of the time Open Office had me safely backed up to restore right where I left off. But I don't startle well, I didn't like the uncertainty and the tension that sat down with me every time I tried to write. Writing got more and more difficult for me. I didn't want it to be, and I was afraid I was just using the machine as an excuse to not write, like maybe somehow I didn't really want to, but didn't know it, or that I was afraid. Whatever the story, between the mind games the laptop played on me and I played on myself (and a demanding job and demanding derby), not much writing happened. Some here and there, but not enough. Last fall, after a final Frankenstein attempt to fix the fan/power source issue before being able to deal with the bios issue on the poor, thing, it quietly gave up with a puff of smoke leaving commemorative scorch marks on my desk.
I have my old writing files on a backup drive, I haven't lost anything. I even have my music loaded here, music helps me write, but there are no story files here yet. Maybe I've been easing in to my new sleek black writing toy. It's been two months and she seems really stable. Perhaps I'm ready to trust again, to put my soul in the line and pull together some stories out of that literary ether. I sure hope so. I'd like to make the next decade of writing better than the first, together.

My garden is back. I had a garden last year, managing to keep it alive through the summer, and then reaping a huge autumnal tomato harvest. That was the start. This year, although we planted late , we have more of a variety of fruits and veggies, and even some grains. Not much harvested yet, although as I write, there are probably some strawberries that need eating and some zucchini that needs picking. There is even a rose bush in the ground that yesterday offered up a large, fragrant, purple blossom.
My last serious gardening project was my rose garden. It started with a few flowers and then really took off when one of my best friends needed to find homes for a couple dozen rose bushes that had been in the front of her new house, most of them probably since the fifties. I dug and amended the soil in my backyard, put together the irrigation system, and they grew. They flourished, and so did I. Man, I loved those flowers. Every day I found time for them. I pruned them carefully, cropping off the dead and dying buds to encourage new growth, feeding them, adjusting the watering, just so, for the time of year. Once I started teaching, I had less time for tending, specifically for ripping the vile scourge that is Burmuda grass out by the roots on a regular basis. I started teaching in August; by December I could hardly see the roses for the Bermuda grass. In desperation, I pruned back my beloved roses, dug up all the bushes, lovingly wrapped the roots, built a temporary planter filled with compost, and poisoned the hell out of the grass. Then we had two of the coldest nights ever. Right in a row. That cold snap killed every last rose bush. The Burmuda grass survived. That's when I gave up gardening. My yard became a wasteland. Until last year.
I guess it's not a surprise as to why, but writing and gardening are linked in my life. I had hit a stride with writing just before I started teaching. Much like my garden, in that first year of teaching my writing life became weedy and desperate. I lost control and the doubt that lies beneath the soil of my mind like fragments of Bermuda grass root came into quick and full growth, right alongside the flowers and fruits of story, choking them out. But I am tending my writing again again, spending more time journaling, planning, and writing, planting those metaphorical seeds, pruning, tending, and hoping, rather than fretting about what is lost or what has died, putting in the work, getting my hands dirty that a garden, fruit and flowers of words, might grow.

So when I was reading through the weeks/months of LJ posts yesterday, I swear I read a review of a book and I thought, I want to read that. I looked at it carefully, said it aloud to myself and then assumed I would remember the title.
Not only can I not remember the title, I have no idea what the book was about, or who posted the review/recommendation, and I can't find it.
I'd like to include it in my summer reading; odds are it was spec fic of some variety. Hmmmm.
Oh, well, if anyone has a recommendation for a good book there's currently an open spot on my list.
:)
While I'm here, if anyone has advice on this particular issue, I had some strong new ideas about this novel I have been working on since freakin' 2001. I have started it over and abandoned it multiple times over. My dilemma right at this moment is whether to keep trying to poke the material I already have written into shape, or whether to start retelling the story from scratch, something I have done before without success.
In favor of the carte blanche approach is the imbalance of writing style through the thing. I started it when I was very first starting to write fiction seriously. There are words that very likely should never see the light of day and I don't necessarily trust myself to be able to pick them out. Plus, I have changed a lot, improved, I trust, over the years.
On the other hand I have rewritten large chunks of the thing over the years, so maybe that's not such a big problem. On the third hand, my early problems with plotting, which I have overcome to an extent intellectually but not in practice, might be too big to overcome by revision, even extensive revision.

I vote rewrite. I'm making the rules and can always change my mind if it's not working, right?

Once upon a time, I had a very bad brain. This brain never got the hang of object permanence or something. So, one day, as my brain and I were brushing our teeth, I looked down and saw on the shelves next to the sink, a lovely carved wooden box. It was lovely. My brain had no recollection of it, where it came from or how it ended up on the shelves next to my bathroom sink. I became worried. Obviously I had put the box there. I had acquired the box somehow and the brain had decided, this box should go here on the shelf to hold razors and whatnot. However, the brain had no blinking idea where the box originally came from. I picked it up. On the bottom written in gold lettering, "Betsy 1983 -Grandma." I received the box from my grandma, 26 years ago, have kept it ever since, put it into use and still have no recollection of it. Argh. Bad brain.
Something similar happens with Livejournal and things like that, I will suddenly stumble upon a reference to it, a clue somewhere and the brain lurches into action, "Ah, Livejournal! I remember now! This is where I can write and read about my friends! What a great invention." So here I am, we are, back. For how long, who's to say? Until it disappears from sight again?

I worked on my novel today. Not a lot, about an hour, just over a thousand words, but it was writing. I added brand new words and ideas that carried the story a tiny bit closer towards its ending, which has in the process become clearer. And it was fun.
Maybe there will be more tomorrow, maybe even more before I sleep tonight. I guess it'll be a surprise.

Got back from a weekend trip to L.A.; our girls were invited to join the Jr. LA Derby Dolls at their first bout. It was an expo during the Baby Dolls, LA's freshmeat, bout. There were about 1800 people there and the kids were so excited. Apparently Ellen Page, who is starring in the upcoming Whip It Derby movie, was there too. Man, were the kids excited. The banked track bout was fun too. It was quite an experience.
We also spent an afternoon at the Bergamot Station Galleries in Santa Monica. Rocked. Lots of political and Halloweeny art.
I came up Friday evening with a friend, Dylan drove the kids earlier in the day so they could get there for a party/practice on the banked track. She and I took the 8 up through San Diego and Orange county. Coming down out of the mountains into San Diego I had a strong sense of coming home. Clarion homesickness. I need to remind myself, Clarion was never really home. It just felt like home while I was there.
My students are doing the NaNoWriMo young writers' program. I'm not even going to try this year. Not a novel at any rate. I might try to get 2-3 hours of writing a day in. Not sure how, but it would be nice to get some things finished up and some work, not teaching related, done. We'll see.
The only time I ever made it to 50,000 words in the month was before I started teaching in 2003 when I wrote Starburst Passing a novel about my Dad's afterlife which came in at 51,648 words. Since then it has been, let's see...
2004: 6415 words (A story I have since totally forgotten about.)
2005: 7428 words (Ditto.)
2006: 5582 words (I remember this one because it's about a guy who suffers from migraines. Six days later, 12/6 I started in a cycle of 5 weeks of killer headaches.)
2007: 4461 words (I didn't even make the 5,000 word goal we set at school.)
I used to write before teaching.

Wait... no whining.

Sorry, that was close.

Still struggling with the writing thing. I guess if I have learned anything in the past five years it's that teaching and writing don't mix. I have learned a lot about writing and grammar and all kinds of things. I feel like everything should be all lined up and just fall into place and yet it doesn't.
I have two writing groups going, ok, critique groups because I have produced nothing in the way of writing, really. I'm just there providing feedback for my more productive colleagues. I started a short story over the summer, thanks to Drew, but didn't go anywhere with it. I keep thinking about revising some of my work from last summer, but thinking and doing are not the same thing.
I want to find the magic switch inside myself. I've done it before, where writing just happened. I wasn't less busy, then. There was still a demanding job, and little kids and the house and stress and all kinds of busy things, but there was writing, too. A lot of writing. Where did it go?
I'm here in a coffee shop. An old familiar one, but I've never written here before. A change of scene. I got a lot of grading done earlier, no Derby tonght, kids are doing homework. I'll see what I can get done here; hopefully have a bit of fun that will lead to more fun and more...

So, school has started again, and I continue to try and find balance. I emphasize basic skills a great deal, partly because I am so bad at spelling, penmanship and grammar even as an adult, but I try to make it fun. Fun for them and fun for me. My new system for spelling is to have a list of 20 words each week. Five come from a list of 120 "Spelling Demons" from about 1908. It has Demons right in the name, I have to use them. My goal is that all the kids will be able to spell all of the words correctly by the end of the year. I then have 10 words that follow a basic spelling rule. This week was "i" before "e". The last five are challenge words, optional, that share something in common. This weeks words all came from Arabic. Although I have ideas about how to derive the lists, I like to just pick them spontaneously during first period, so little to no foresight goes into them beyond these basic rules.
The quiz is a dictation quiz and part of my weekly fun is to take this list of words and put them into two paragraphs. I love the way just lists of words serendipitously form themselves into relatively coherent passages. Perhaps I write spelling quizzes the way William S. Burroughs wrote novels.
Here are my three groups of words:
Demons-school, their, there, though, trouble
"I before E"- belief, cashier, chief, conscience, hygiene, mischievous, quiet, receipt, review, variety
Challenge Words (From Arabic)- alchemy, azure, guitar, massage, monsoon

Here's what I wrote for them to write out:

The first week of school is always an exciting time. There is a variety of students. That girl is mischievous and seems to attract trouble. The boy in the corner is quiet and always follows his conscience. The kid over there could use a few lessons in hygiene. They are all busy with their new activities. Chief among these are learning locker combinations and trying to remember to keep the receipt from the cashier at Target in case something needs to be returned. Though we all do a lot of review at first, it is my belief that before long we will be learning more than any other sixth graders in the state.

Challenge

Through time's special alchemy, our monsoon is coming to an end, and the afternoon skies are azure. No more lazy days of giving the dog a massage or playing the guitar, it's time to hit the books again.

They loved the second paragraph. Audible gasps of approval from the classes. Sigh. It's pathetic, I know, but I love an audience.

Today was the first day of Summer vacation. I think I did everything that I want to establish as habit. Well, almost everything. There are a few important exceptions like conditioning. However, the kitchen is cleaner, a load of laundry is one step closer to being done, there are fewer cat hairs on the floors, less Bermuda grass in the yard, more flowers in the ground, bird feed in the bird feeder, homemade nectar in the hummingbird feeder, the family is fed, the latest book read, and 500 additional words written on new short story. I meant to get started at 9:30 but it ended up being more like 2:30, but words were written, and I have time for more tonight.
I feel good about getting down to writing this summer. I feel like a window opened in my brain sometime in the past three weeks, like last summer has finally been processed (I am a slow processor) and I have clear and useful lessons from each of the instructors. It's like they were eight, (eight?) fairies granting gifts in my infancy, and now I have come of age and can claim them, ready to take all the gifts and put them together into my own writing style. Maybe by style, I mean method since it's not so much about which words to use as how to get plot to move and characters to develop and put real emotional jeopardy on the page. Okay, I think I need some serious work on the emotional jeopardy, hell, on all of it, but I have a direction, a clear path in front of me. Writing doesn't seem like a mysterious excretion. Still mysterious, but something I can, if not control, at least look at objectively and understand. So, I can talk the talk, what's that next part?