Do They Make Academic Rehab Clinics?

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‘Tis the season to be writing papers, cramming for finals, and generally stressing out — or so says about 80% of my Facebook newsfeed. I’m insanely jealous.

I think I have an addiction to academia. I surmise that it started when I was two or three and started harassing my parents relentlessly about how long it would be until I got to go to school. I didn’t even really know what it was; I just wanted to go there. I heard there were books. Faced with having to wait, which is something I don’t believe I have ever been good at in my entire life, I resorted to scribbling on a chalkboard in the basement of our old house while my stuffed animals listened quietly and attentively.

If only my students, during my actual teaching career, had been so quiet and attentive.

Scene in my classroom, May 2008

(As fate would have it, though, I wasn’t done teaching stuffed animals) Continue reading →

Writing My Way Out of the Black Hole of Death

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I get cabin fever. I get cabin fever so badly sometimes that I think I will legitimately go absolutely crazy sitting in Central PA, bored out of my mind. Because of that, I try to get out of here as often as possible, but it doesn’t always work that way. I went for four months without leaving and I almost didn’t make it.

Okay, I’m being a little bit dramatic.

But seriously, I’m bored.

This past weekend, I spent a very long weekend out of town for my birthday. I got to see most of my friends and some of my family all in one place. I had people to talk to and things to do. It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun.

And then I had to come home.

I have this problem: every time I leave home, no matter where I go, I get into one hell of a wretched mood when I come back. I get depressed because I miss my friends. I get frustrated that I live so far away from pretty much all of them. Then I get discouraged because I can’t find a job. It’s totally worth getting out of here any time I can, but dear Lord does it suck for about a week after I get back.

In my last post, I said that I hoped I’d be able to maintain my writing momentum while I was out of town, and I did. I actually added over 7000 words, so I was quite pleased with my … discipline? Well, anyway, I was happy about it. My NaNoWriMo word count stayed above the suggested word count every day, but as I wasn’t writing quite as much as I would have been at home (mostly because I was actually doing stuff for a change), I was only up by about a thousand words when I got home on Tuesday. Continue reading →

Case of the Week Twos? Nah.

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Now that I’ve made it past Wednesday of NaNoWriMo Week 2, I think it’s safe to blog about it.

All of the “pep talk” emails I’ve received from NaNoWriMo this week have been about overcoming “The Week Twos” as though it’s some kind of a rash, and if you just keep rubbing some kind of ointment (don’t you just hate that word?) all over it, it’ll clear up in five-to-seven days.

I say this as though I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I do. Last year, Week Two was an uphill battle for me. I got to the middle and I started to struggle with my characters, the story, and my abilities as a writer. That’s when I started having a crisis of faith. I know that people struggle through that “mid-point” (it’s not the true middle, but it has that feeling). Last year, I struggled in the middle of NaNoWriMo. I struggled through the actual middle of the novel, I struggled through the middle when I was editing the paper copy, and now I’m struggling through the middle of the second revision. I totally understand the concept of “Week Twos.” Continue reading →

More to Hug

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I haven’t been good about updating frequently lately. I’m almost through week one of NaNoWriMo and I’m working on the new novel, so my time for blogging isn’t quite as abundant as it has been.

Today on Twitter, #tweetyour16yearoldself has been a trending topic. I was procrastinating earlier and decided to browse through some of them. Some of them were serious, some sarcastic, and some entertaining (my favorite was Lord Voldemort encouraging himself to choose Neville Longbottom instead). Earlier this week, something was really bothering me. Somehow, thinking about when I was sixteen made me think about it. It bothered me then. It bothered me when I was six. It bothered me when I was twenty-six. It’s bothered me for most of my life. It’s also something I don’t typically talk about with people because it makes me feel …. embarrassed? I don’t know if that’s the right word. It makes me feel something unfavorable. But right now I feel like talking about it. There’s no colorful ribbon you can wear for it. There’s no magnet to put on your car. But people need to be aware…….to think about what they say.

When I was in second grade, I remember standing on the playground and watching the kids play. It wasn’t that I couldn’t join them, it was that I was too shy to ask. I’d observed that some kind of weird second grade trend seemed to be for the girls to take the kickballs at recess and sit on them on the playground. One day, lucky enough to snag a kickball before we went outside, I, too, put my ball down on the ground and then sat on it.
“Hey, don’t do that!” yelled a boy in my class, snickering. “You’re too fat to sit on the ball.”
“Yeah,” his sidekick chimed in. “You’ll pop it.”
They laughed and pointed at me while other kids started to look on. Continue reading →

Editing Woes and the Run-Up To NaNoWriMo ’10

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At first I didn’t care about it. It was to be a one-and-done deal.

Then I cared a little more. Two. That’s it.

Now I’m seriously considering a third round of edits to my NaNoWriMo ’09 novel, not because I feel like this book is moving anywhere toward a publishable realm, but because as I’m working my way through writing the second draft (which I expect to grow nearly 50 pages from the first draft), I keep telling myself there are things that I will focus on next time through. I’m finding that, at least for me, focusing on one or two specific trouble areas (showing vs. telling, say) is what I’m going to need to do. I’ve been able to fix some of the show vs. tell problem spots, but certainly not all of them. This round of edits has been about organizing and clarifying. It’s about getting things where I want them to be (and moving things around, which I talked about in a recent post) and then working on more fine-tuning.

My pacing was pretty good. The past few weeks, however, have slowed me down considerably as I’ve had a number of engagements and obligations and other things to keep me abnormally busy. My goal since January has been to have the first/second edits (in my mind they’re different, but to some people they’d be the same) completed by the end of October – ideally well before the end of October – so that I could put it aside and move on to my next NaNo project.

But alas.

Continue reading →

My Novel: A 100,000 Word Jig-Saw Puzzle

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I’m just about halfway through editing the manuscript of the first draft of my novel. I’ve written more extensively about my editing process before, but the long and short of it (for new readers or those who missed it before) is that I printed off the first draft and went through it for months with a pen and wrote myself notes, made corrections, crossed things out, drew arrows, and things of that nature. That was also my first true reading of the novel.

Now I’m taking that manuscript and reading it a second time, only now I’m doing it while writing the second draft. I went back to square one. I’m not editing in the document, I’m straight up re-typing everything. I’m glad I’m doing this because it’s helping me catch errors and I’m seeing where plot lines need to be developed. It’s tiresome at times, but I don’t let myself copy and paste anything from the original document. I don’t even open it up. Sometimes I’ll go through material that I didn’t mark in the manuscript, but as I’m retyping, I’ll think to myself that it still needs work and I’ll end up making changes. This is why I continue to love my editing process (which is good, since I’m the one using it). I’m always “getting it” just a little bit more. And by “it”, I mean that je ne sais quoi that comes with writing, which is so multi-faceted. Continue reading →

Me and My Sham Education

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For my senior colloquium course in college, I had to read this book, The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez by (you guessed it!) Richard Rodriguez. In it, Rodriguez talks about being a “scholarship boy” and the opportunities it provided him for a life amongst the gringos. He was given opportunities that his parents (who suffered because of a language barrier, in particular) just didn’t have. He was always concerned, however, that he was just pleasing people and going through the motions, that he wasn’t really as smart as everyone led him to believe. Much of this book examines the concept of duality. For a plethora of reasons, I hated it. Something about the language or his opinion of himself. I couldn’t necessarily put my finger on it, but I just hated it.

Then, a few years later, when I was in grad school, I had to read it again. Twice.

The more I read this book, the more I continued to dislike it. But as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my education lately and where it’s gotten me, I keep coming back to this book. Curses! Something about that idea of duality and binary oppositions, that his entire education was something of a sham started to resonate with me.

Continue reading →

Girls Like Me

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I’ve had a blog post stewing in my head all weekend. This is not that blog post (that one will be better organized and thought-out). This one hit me like a Mack truck on a dark road, and I’ve barely thought it out at all. I had an idea, I wanted to explore, I’m taking you along for the ride (if you keep reading, but I’ll know if you don’t, and it’s cool).

I mentioned in a post earlier this summer that I’m a person who works hard to maintain friendships and, because I don’t like losing friends, I have a few friends that I’ve known since I started pre-school when I was three years old. One of those friends is Kim. It occurs to me tonight that we’ve known each other for about 24 years now, which seems insane to me, but I can’t really remember life without Kim. I don’t remember meeting her. I’ve just always known her. We aren’t as close as we used to be back in our school days, but we still keep up with each other and our moms are really good friends, too, so that helps. As I was working on editing my novel the other night, I was reading over some description and realized that the friendship that I’d described between my main character and her best friend was loosely based on Kim’s and my friendship in junior high. So when I found out tonight that she got engaged, I was really excited for her. For about a half hour we traded texts that included a lot of exclamation points (something that is very uncharacteristic of me), a picture of the ring, lots of questions, lots of answers, and lots of capital letters. While I was and am very genuinely excited for her, it didn’t take me very long to realize that part of my happiness was as a result of simply connecting with someone. I feel like that doesn’t happen much for me as often, especially because I’m away from everyone I would consider my closest friends.

A lot of people would say that I’m an open book. I freely yammer on to close friends about the mundane details of my life, and I never miss the fact that most other people aren’t quite so giving with details. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that my facial expressions give me away, but I still maintain that I just naturally look pissed off. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve said “that’s just the way my face looks.” But the thing is that I tell people what I want them to know. Truthfully, I feel a little scared when I come across someone who sees right through me, calls me out,  and has me figured out, sometimes even better than I have myself figured out, because, well, not many people get that far. It’s both scary and comforting when it happens, and it doesn’t happen often. Continue reading →

Getting My Editing Groove On

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Being that I never really took my writing all that seriously before (at least, not when I was old enough to *actually* take it seriously. Sixth grade doesn’t count), I didn’t really have a method in place for editing. In college, my idea of editing creative writing was to take all the copies of my work that were given back to me in workshops, go through, and make a few changes. I really didn’t put a lot of time and effort into it. I attribute this to many things, and as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of it had to do with losing that spark (on account of being a busy college student and also coming to despise the egomaniac who was teaching the majority of my fiction classes). I never went back through and took a good look at what I’d written because I never cared much about most of it. I only really remember a handful of pieces.

The whole time I was writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I didn’t think about editing. My goal was just to get to 50,000 words. Once I made it there, my goal became to actually finish writing it. I was a little unsure for a while, but when it became clear that I was going to finish writing it, I started thinking about editing. I guess my pattern of decision-making has been kind of linear in that respect. I ended up leading myself right into a process of editing that I hadn’t considered, but it’s working out really well for me. It’s forcing me to not only go back through my work, but to interact with it, as well. Continue reading →

Fall 2001: A Retrospective

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As the oldest of three children whose parents were both working commuters during their college days, I didn’t get much in the way of advice when it came time to pack up and set off for life on campus. Now that it’s been five years since I graduated and nine since I began college, the Person I’ve Become often wishes I could go back and smack some sense into the Person I Was…or at least impart some wisdom. Continue reading →