A Teacher Who Writes, or a Writer Who Teaches?

I began my dual career path as a teacher-who-writes twenty-six years ago, give or take.  Honestly, trying to do both meant I didn't write all that often or all that much. Teaching, especially when you're new at it, will swallow all of you, if you let it--demanding your time, your energy, and your love and leaving you depleted. Not the best recipe for a creative life. 

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Like most teachers who survive in the field long enough to be called veterans, I did eventually learn to set some boundaries and work on that ephemeral dream we call a "work-life-balance." 

That required being strict with myself, some compartmentalizing, and fighting off the guilt goblins barnacled to my soul. Not easy for a someone with an empathetic soul with a strong drive to help--you know, the kind of people who becomes teachers. 

But, creative life aside, it's essential to avoid burnout and make teaching a sustainable career choice. 

Failure to do so is how you win teacher of the year, but it's also how you end up quitting the career after only a few years. 

Even after I'd established some boundaries and limited how many hours a day my teaching life got, my writing life still came in fourth most of the time, after teaching, family, and community. 

Writing, after all, is solitary, just for me, and that seemed selfish. There are healthy forms of selfishness, but I was raised a lower middle class American woman in a blue collar family AND became a teacher, so finding a healthy level of selfishness and accepting the idea that self-care is not immoral . . .well, that took some time. 

Until I was in my mid-thirties or so, writing was something reserved for moments of passion or crisis--a way of processing and coping, or expressing feelings so strong they could not simply be sublimated into other kinds of work. 

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Then, after my second marriage when my second child was born, I had a bout of post-partum depression. I'd never dealt with the more clinical, longer-lasting side of depression, and honestly, I wasn't doing very well. I didn't understand why I wasn't happy when I "ought to be." 

Sweetman, ever observant and kind, had noticed in our courtship and marriage what a solace writing was for me. He pushed me to make regular space for it in my life, even helping me find a local critique group so I'd have a schedule. (It's like he *knows* me :P).  

It worked, at least in terms of the post-partum. As it had always been, writing was a solace and I felt so much more balanced when I gave time to my voice and my heart's truths in this way. 

And I started writing more regularly--still in fits and starts in the corners of my life, but SO much more often than I had ever done before. And my new writing community made my writing better than it had ever been before. 

I might have stayed there--a happy hobbyist--the rest of my life if not for the next moment of crisis. 

I turned 42. 

Now, as all readers of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy know, 42 is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Even though turning 30 and 40 had not phased me, turning 42 did. 

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So far as midlife crises go, mine was mild. A haircut, some new clothes, lots of fantasizing about exotic travels. I didn't run off and join the circus, adopt up any new addictions, or take up with a younger man. 

I did, however, wallow in a feeling of dissatisfaction and low-key restless anger (mostly directed at myself) for a bit. 

That's when I decided to make a commitment to my writing life. To give it a *real* go. So, what did that mean? 

1. I stopped teaching English and become solely a Spanish teacher. Most of my jobs up to that point had been some combination of the two. The feedback load and external scrutiny for English teachers is crushing AND the literature and writing work pulls from the same energy as my writing life, so doing both was more than I could handle. 

Spanish is an elective, and at the beginning levels, where I teach, feedback on writing amounts to reading a few sentences and assessing whether the kid said what they meant to say. MUCH simpler. 

2. I laid claim to more time. We had a family meeting. By this time, my kids were older: 14 and 7, so they didn't need me at the same levels they had when they were younger. They were able to take on a little more independence, and it turned out they were willing to do so, because a happy mommy who is sometimes unavailable was preferable to a grumpy mommy, even if she was there all the time. 

Since it was hard for me to get enough separation and focus at home, I went elsewhere to write. Coffee shops, the library, the park, even just sitting in my car. When my own discipline got better, I started being able to work at home, even without an office. I shot for 250 words a day at first. 

It worked! I began to finish things, polish them, submit me, and see them accepted and published! I collected external validations like books contracts and royalties . . .even an award!  Over the next few years, I noticed the shift. 

I was now a writer-who-teaches, instead of a teacher-who-writes. 

My core identity centered around writing instead of teaching. When I met new people, I mentioned writing first. I've now written every single day for more than seven years. 

I still love teaching, and I still invest in my students and their success, but I no longer base my own feelings of success and worth on it. Too much of it is beyond my control, and making it the center of my identity was eating me. Teaching has always been both a calling and a job, but I've decided it should not also be my identity. 

Writing, on the other hand, is mine. And whether anyone ever accepts another piece of work for publication or not, I will still be a writer and I will still have all my creations, and what they have meant to me.

So, as I move into summer and shift gears into my yearly couple of months of being *just* a writer while I'm on summer hiatus from teaching, I feel a joy akin to coming home after a long journey. 

IWSG: Jumping into Revision When You're Not Quite Ready

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking.

If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

June 2 question - For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?

The awesome co-hosts for the June 2 posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Sarah Foster, Natalie Aguirre, Lee Lowery, and Rachna Chhabria! Be sure to check out what they have to say, and visit other writers in the blog hop!

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Taking time to step away from your work can be a valuable part of the writing process--giving you a little distance and space from the work you just completed and letting you come to it with fresh eyes and a little more objectivity. 

Given my druthers, I would always step away for at least a month, maybe longer if the writing the piece took a lot out of me emotionally. 

But, that's not always possible. 

If you work with publishers, editors, or even with a critique group, your schedule might not always be completely your own. I know I've had some tight turnarounds in my writing life, where I finished the first draft only to find that  the submission deadline was looming large, forcing me to jump back into editing and revision sooner than I prefer.

So, if I can't take a big break, I still try to get a little space, even just a day or two. I take a day to work on something else. Then, if I'm time-crunched and HAVE to jump right back in I have a few tricks to make it feel fresh to me. 

1. Change format:  if you've been working on screen up till now, consider printing out a paper copy to work with, or at least changing the font choice and size. 

2. Go somewhere else: work on it somewhere different than you usually do. Go to a park, a coffeeshop, the library, a different room in your home or even just a different chair. 

3. Outline what's there:  I'm a pantser, so I don't generally work from an outline for my novels, but sometimes I find it helps to do a post-production outline, creating a list of scenes as if I'm going to have to write a report or pass a test over the book. I LOVE the scene cards technique from the DIY-MFA book by Gabriela Pereira which asks you to list for each scene:

• a title for the scene
• the major players
• the action
• the purpose (structurally)

This has saved my bacon more than once, helping me spot continuity errors (like the same character is in two places at the same time!) and identify scenes that aren't moving the story forward as much as they could be. 

So, if I can't have the breathing space I'd like between drafts, that's what I do to try and freshen my perspective. 

I also find the feedback of valued writing friends useful at this stage and will ask other writers to brainstorm with me, or just give me a reaction to a section I'm stuck on.  A lot of times, it isn't that the other writer solves my problem for me, but that they say something that sparks my own realization. I feel like I get there faster in discussion with writer-friends than I would on my own. 

How about you, writing and creative friends? How do you find fresh eyes when it's time to revise or revisit your work? 

May Reading

 

I felt as though I had no time for reading in May, but I did manage to finish six books. Now to be fair, three of them were quite short, as in one-hour-or-less time investment. But sometimes short and sweet (or short and kickass, the in the case of Carol Danvers) is just what I need. 

I started with The Iceman Always Comes on Tuesday by James Masse. It was suggested to me by a friend who is also an audiobook enthusiast and I welcomed it. Quick, and heart-string pulling, with an old movie kind of feel about it, about a literally ice man (as in the guy who delivers ice to keep your icebox cold) and his quest for justice. Especially nice if you're a fan of underdog heroes. 

After that I dived into Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, the book my First Monday Classics Book Club will be discussing next Monday. At the beginning, I thought I was going to love it, but in the end, I was ambivalent. Some moments that shone and a lot that started to feel like a slog. The main character was, in the end, too passive for my liking. 

I picked up Rift by Nancy E. Dunne because she and I will be sharing a table at ConCarolinas here in a few days, and I like to know something about the work of authors I'm going to be working with. I really enjoyed her take on "what if the game is real" and will definitely be checking out more of her work in the future!

The short works helped keep me going during a tough month, with ENDLESS end-of-grade testing in the day job (we have to give each test 3 times this year because of restrictions in place for the pandemic).  The Sprite and the Gardener and The Reluctant Dragon both pleased me for their kindhearted sweetness. 

I revisted Carol Danvers, AKA Captain Marvel recently for a panel discussion about the character, and re-reading Higher, Further, Faster, More put me in the mood for more of this character as written by DeConnick, so I bought myself volume 2: Stay Fly.  Really delighted me. Perfect for my mood. 

How about you? What did you read and love this month? I'd love to hear about it in the comments! 

Fifteen Years and We're Just Getting Started

 

A month or two ago, on the beach

So, it's been fifteen years since I married this guy. That seems at the same time, very reasonable and completely implausible. Time is a slippery beast, and I swear it feels like only a few days ago that we skipped down the stairs together at Duke Gardens. At the same time, they've been some very full years, and sometimes I can't believe it's only been fifteen years. 

15 years ago--look at those cute kids!

We got married in the middle of May, at a ceremony we invited fewer than twenty people to. The day was overcast and intermittently rainy, which could have been bad news for an outdoor event involving a white dress, but we were lucky and the sun came right right when we needed it to, bathing us in gorgeous light and keeping our friends and family dry. 

We've always been proof that timing is everything. 

When I met Sweetman, I was already engaged to someone else. He says he had an unrequited crush on me in the intervening years, but I suspect him of flattery and revisionist memory. What we did have though, was an ongoing friendship, the kind where we always made a point of seeing one another whenever we were in the same town. Over those years, I married and had a child and he dated, but had never settled down. 

Twelve years later, I got divorced, probably about four years later than I should have . . .we hadn't been right together in quite some time. I sent out that big group email like you do, letting anyone who might care know about the changes and where I would be living and all that *fun* (sarcasm) stuff. Sweetman was one of the friends I told. 

As luck would have it, he was also free. Timing is everything. 

I worried that I was going to ruin a friendship by jumping into a romance too soon. I didn't want my good friend to become my rebound guy.  He worried that he was taking advantage of me in an emotionally fragile moment. In the end, it worked out, and we still worry about each other to this day, but now we have a little more power to do something about it. 

So Happy Anniversary to me and Sweetman. We celebrated by taking a garden tour and having Thai for lunch, since our first official date included Thai food and flowers. I wore my Bride sneakers, the ones I commissioned for our wedding. He wore a pale blue Havana style shirt and a Panama hat, because he know I love how he looks in them. 

So, there we are fifteen years into this marriage. If the next fifteen go as fast, I'll be back tomorrow to tell you how dapper he looks with that new walking stick.

Return to the Public Part of My Writing Life

Welcome to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy, ideas, and networking.

If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek behind the curtain of a writing life.

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the May 5 posting of the IWSG are Erika Beebe, PJ Colando, Tonja Drecker, Sadira Stone, and Cathrina Constantine! Be sure to check out what they have to say, and visit other writers in the blog hop!

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I'm heading to a convention the first weekend in June. That used to be something I did six to eight times a year, but 2020 and 2021 has seen event after event cancelled or altered to become a digital event. Undoubtedly, it was the right thing to do. Stuffing hundreds of geeky folk into meeting rooms in hotels for music, merriment, performance, and discussion during the pandemic would have been foolhardy and irresponsible. 

But I'm headed to a scaled-back ConCarolinas and I'm *so* excited to be easing back into the public part of a writing life. Participation in conventions has been one of the poles holding up this rickety circus tent I call a writing career. 

At conventions, I have readings, participated in panel discussions, hand-sold books, networked with publishers and other writers, and interacted with readers. All this sharing, helped build my name as an author, sold some books, built relationships, and kept me motivated when things were hard. 

Not having conventions has left a hole in my writing life. 

During the past year, I sought out some video and online activities, and some of them were great! A panel held over zoom takes away some of the limits on geography and let me work with people three time zones over from me, or even in other countries all together. People I might never have gotten to work with otherwise. (You can check out a lot of that work on ConTinual's YouTube channel or on my own). 

But there's a serendipity factor in live events that is hard to recreate virtually. I never just wandered through the halls and ended up in a great conversation because I was attracted by the laughter at a virtual event. Zoom meetings don't give you the chance to peek into other rooms and see what's going on. Damn, but I've missed that. 

Now that I'm immunized, I feel a lot safer about venturing into communal grounds again and I'm so happy that I'll be starting with ConCarolinas, a con that has always treated me kindly and made me feel welcome. 

How about you? Are you easing back into the world yet? What kinds of public events have you been missing lo these many months? 

April Reads

 I only read three books this month, but they were all wonderful! I listened to all three as audiobooks, though I also went back and forth with Kindle for the Gaskell. 

I first found Tananarive Due through her work in The Apocalypse Triptych, an ambitious set of three anthologies where authors imagined life before, during, and after an apocalypse through three interlinked stories. I remembered her name and when I got a good deal on an audiobook of My Soul to Keep, I nabbed it. 

Great slow build horror that went in very different directions than I expected. I'm with Stephen King on this one. Fascinating!

Haven't watched the miniseries yet,
 but it's on my list now!

After that I turned my attention to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, the May selection for my First Monday Classics Book Club. I'd heard Gaskell's name many times, mostly as a writer whose influence could be seen on other writers, but I'd never read any of her work. 

In the first chapter, I thought I was going to hate it because it opened with a drawing room scene full of superficial chitchat about dresses and fabrics and such, but it quickly became clear that we'd been given that scene as contrast as we followed our heroine into a trying period of her life and into the most unexpected journey to a happy marriage. 

I'm so looking forward to the discussion next week! And will definitely make room for more Gaskell in my reading life. 

I finished my month with Becky Chambers. Chambers is one of my no-questions-asked authors, who works are on preorder as soon as I hear about them. I've read all four of her Wayfarer series books and loved all them. The Galaxy and the Ground Within returned to all the themes that draw me to Chambers's work: optimism, unexpected friendship, kindness and acceptance, found families. For a book ostensibly about aliens (only one human character active in this story, and she had a bit part), there's a lot to consider about humanity in these pages. 

So, that's my reading month. I began a few other books, and hope to finish them soon, so I'll tell you about them next month. 

How about you? What did you read this month? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

The Big Five-Oh: The Face I Deserve

I turned 50 today. 

It's very strange to consider. 

I mean, I don't feel fifty. 

Okay, well SOMETIMES I feel fifty, like when I squat to put away dishes and my hip doesn't want to let me get back up, or when I get winded climbing a big hill. I tell myself it's not the years, it's the mileage (and maybe a bit the baggage as well). It makes me feel more like Indiana Jones and less like Miss Marple. 

But mostly, I don't even feel like a real grownup yet…yet here we are. Fifty. 

Coco Chanel famously said that when we are fifty, we get the face we deserve. So, here's the face I deserve, picture taken first thing this morning when my hair was still shower-wet and I hadn't yet had any caffeine. 

So far as faces go, it's fine. Neither glamorous nor off-putting. Pleasant, and sometimes quite pretty, in the right light. 

The lines and creases don't bother me much, and any age spots just blend in with the freckles that were already there. I've started to get a little gray around the crown of my head which I confess I find a little startling when I notice, but otherwise, I still just look like me, a little rounder than I would maybe choose, given all the options, and way more like my Grandma Liz than I expected, given how much I always thought I looked more like my dad. 

So, do I deserve this face? 

When I look at this face, I see bright curiosity and a spark of adventure, a curve at the corner of the mouth that comes from laughing a lot and a squinty-ness about the eyes that comes from spending time smiling in the sun (and maybe from time behind a screen). The teeth are a little yellow from drinking lots of tea while reading and the jawline reveals a fondness for cookies. The woman in that picture looks like a lady who knows surprising things and has a kind heart. 

If I didn't know me, I think I'd be willing to talk to me, based on this face. 

It'll do.