In answer to a question: Balancing work and art

I just plagiarized an email to a full-time teacher who is contemplating taking the plunge into an MFA. In my defense, I told the recipient I was doing it. Here's the meat of it:

So, balance? Well, I'll be honest and say I think I did a rather poor job of it, but everything that needed to be done got done. I didn't try too many new things on the job, and I got lucky my last semester a had a wonderful, capable student teacher. But basically, I made the MFA my life. Went to bed ridiculously early so I could get up at 4am and write before work (found that after work, I was too spent to do anything but read.) Weekends were totally dedicated. I am fortunate that I have nobody to take care of or cater to except my dogs, but if you have a family, and they support you in this, it can still be done. I can hook you up with a couple of married high school English teachers, both with children, who also got through the program.

The bottom line: most of the time, the sacrifices stopped feeling like sacrifices. I finally had what felt like the perfect excuse to decline invitations-- I didn't just want to write, I had to write. It got me into a practice that I now no longer feel I have to make excuses for. It felt like an amazing gift I'd been waiting all my life to give myself. Bad sentence, but you get my meaning. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Humpday

I am not fit for company, and apologize for my long delinquency. Overwhelmed, etc, and I feel bad bitching about needing a day off when I know far too many people who have too many days off. I'm sort of sick and tired of waking up worrying about other people's kids, but it's somehow not triggering my compassionate nature. No, quite the opposite. I'm feeling particularly Melvillian and want to knock hats off heads (and suckers out of mouths and smirks off faces and you get the drift. Danger to others.) I'd really like to take to the sea today. Or the desert, forest, prairie, recliner, anywhere else really.

OK, to cheer us on our way, Neil Gaiman has linked to his Nano peptalk from 2 years ago. Thank you, Mr Gaiman, and I hope it's going well for all. I am not as far as I hoped to be by today, but still ahead of what I could be.

More Linkage: NaNoWriMo

Here's a great post from Editor Unleashed on why to do it, comparing NaNo to running with the bulls. Makes me feel all brave and wild.

Also, Dr. Wicked is going to be rolling out a new version next week, promising even more helpful evil. (Who's hoping that Electric Shock Mode finally gets enabled?) Hit me with your best shot.

Finally, I uploaded or downloaded (which is it?) the free trial of Liquid Writer just to see what all the fuss is about, and I'll tell you one thing: she's hot. I don't know if it's something I'll use, but it's fun to play with in my very limited playtime.

I'm heading in early to get a jump on grading. Today my kiddies take their first semester final. English 2 begins Monday with Romeo and Juliet, for which I am stoked. Loves me some Romeo and Juliet.

My First Fling With Dr. Wicked

Go! Goal set--200 words, 15 minutes. I am taking my first real stab at using Dr. Wicked's Write or Die site, and because I have no idea how fast I can or should write (or type, for that matter,) I thought that would be a valid first outing.

I first heard about Dr. Wicked on the NaNoWriMo site (yes, I'm obsessed, aren't you?) and thought I'd give him a go. The site allows you to set a timer and a writing goal, which my inner Luddite snottily smirks at. Did Isak Dinesen require a website with a timer? NO! And the only outside help Balzac had was the copious consumption of coffee, which I understand he drank all day and into the night, up to and past the point of madness. I can no longer avail myself of such chemical extremes, preferring to pop an extra vitamin B and swig some fish oil from the bottle instead. I like to sleep when I'm in bed, thank you very much. But anyway, I'm jabbering now not only to avoid punishment (I'll tell you about that in a minute) but also to drown out the annoying anti-nerd nerd in my head. No, Dinesen and Balzac and Asimov--

ooh, the celebratory horns just blew with 7 minutes, 47 seconds left to go. The horns are good, they mean to say I hit my word count. So that means I am capable of writing 100 words in 7 minutes. So that means if I can, wait, let me hit the calculator. So, if I'm doing my math right, that means I SHOULD be able to write that 50,000 word "novel" in 3500 minutes. which works out to be 58.33333333333333 hours. In a month. Piece of cake.

All of these calculations assume I can keep up the pace. My plan is just to freewrite for 58.33 hours spread carefully over a month. 1000 words every weekday morning before school. 3000 on Saturdays and 5000 on Sundays, taking off Thanksgiving and the day before.

But back to Dr. Wicked. If I had paused to think for a bit too long, the background on my screen would have turned pink (which it did at one point,) then red, and then a presumably obnoxious song would have started playing and continued until I began typing again. My setting right now is 'average', but if I went with the kamikaze setting, the punishment is much more severe-- the words would begin unwriting themselves until I resumed. How evil is that?

So, after one roll with Dr Wicked, I think I love him. And I'm sorry DH Lawrence didn't have a spell check, and Henry James could not avail himself of word count, but I live now and if I have to breath modern air, and be a weak ol' modern woman who will never know the joy of trimming her own quills or killing her own goose, I might as well enjoy my gadgets.

October Anxiety

So much for posting twice a week. Time has really gotten away from me-- papers to grade have piled up and up while I prepare to teach new content, read the new material not much ahead of my students and try to prepare meaningful instruction that is actually meaningful while also staying true to the "spirit" (really wrong word) of Standards Based Instruction or whatever the hell we're calling it these days.

I'm behind on every kind of correspondence I have, behind on every kind of reading, my home looks like a hobbit's version of Grey Gardens, and if I keep up this catalog I'll have an anxiety attack so let's just drop it.

All this to say I just can't wait for November. Which pretty much confirms insanity. I am afraid of looking at the NaNoWriMo website because the last time I was involved with so many people (15,363 worldwide participants have signed up as of yesterday) it was working on Obama's campaign. The site has so many message boards that I can't begin to know which might be helpful, inspiring, etc, and which will just be another way for me to lose time. So I'm avoiding.

What I'm caught up on: TV. There, I said it. I won't apologize for loving Mad Men, and am blissfully enraptured with both Glee and Bored to Death. So, while I shouldn't be too smug about deciding to cancel Netflix for the month of November, I will not be quitting my telly shows. I say I'm studying dramatic structure and don't care to hear any argument about that, thanks.

National Novel Writing Month

I worried for a long time about what I’d do once my MFA was done. Gone is the structure of regular deadlines—writing quotas, specifically. One of the strategies I’m using is writing groups. I belong to three, each one very different from the others. One is a small poetry group that has let me join them for the past few years, though I’m not a poet. We meet only seasonally, but it’s always good. Another meets weekly, and my newest group meets monthly. What I forgot to worry about was what I’d write.

Since I finished my book and started on the Seeking of Representation, I’ve had the nagging feeling that I’ve become purposeless as well as projectless. I’d told myself when I finally finished the book I spent a decade on, I’d leave memoir behind and move on to a less personal genre, try my hand at some fiction again. But it’s like I’m working with wet wood and can’t buy a spark. And look at all those ‘I’s—maybe I’m too self-obsessed to write about anything but myself, yet oh how bored I am with that topic.

So, with no nonfiction topic setting me on fire, and really very few ideas about anything else, I decided to try something completely insane. NaNoWriMo is going to force me to write 50,000 words in a month. I’m sure I can’t do it, can’t wait to get started, and feel a little sick whenever I think about it.

It will be a month long freewrite. The good thing about such a task is that I won’t have time to think about how bad an idea is—the goal is not quality, it’s quantity. I know from experience that when I quit judging the quality of my output and just write, that sometimes good stuff sneaks itself in. I’m counting on that being true again.

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