Category: observations/thoughts (Page 9 of 12)

Confessions, Part 2

February 27, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I know I’ve mentioned on this blog my dream of working from home, but as I’ve been thinking about that dream more and more, I realize I need to refine it. It’s not that I want to work from home, it’s that I want to work from home as a writer. I want writing to be my work.

(Readers are now thinking, “Yeah sure, you and about ten million other people. Quit yer dreaming, lady!” And I would echo their sentiments. My working-class, Midwestern upbringing has instilled in me a kind of ultra-realism that considers it highly irresponsible and borderline insane to pursue a career in the arts. I have spent many years trying to shake these sentiments, but they return to me time and again. Like, it’s hard to lose the values of your childhood.)

Anyway, the reason why I want to write for a living is because I like it. It’s fun. That’s as simple as it gets, really. I mean, I could blather on about feeling “called” to write, or thinking I’ve got a bit of a knack for it, but those are secondary to the fact that I really enjoy writing and think it would be awesome to spend my days doing it (and getting paid to do so).  To tell tales and string sentences together sounds like just about the best kind of work there is.

Now, I’m ultra-realistic enough to know that making a living as a writer is a HUGE long-shot. So I’m not banking on it. But since Covid (and perhaps even a bit before), I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should stick with teaching or start working from home as a freelancer of some sort. The idea being that if I worked from home, I would have more free time to get my writing done. For awhile — when schools went remote last March — I got a taste of what it would be like to work from home, and not gonna lie, I loved it. I started craving it, even when my school returned to in-person learning in the fall.

But the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I realize what I loved about being home last spring wasn’t the working from home part, it was the fact that I had more time to do my writing. What I was craving wasn’t necessarily a remote job; what I was craving was time. Covid allowed me and many others to suddenly have more time on our hands. I filled that time with my writing (and reading and going on walks with my daughter and playing in the backyard). And ever since school started back up in the fall, I’ve been trying to recover that feeling of having time on my hands to do my writing. For awhile, I thought that this writing time could be recovered if I worked from home as a freelance editor or something. But I’m starting to see that a change in job isn’t the answer. The answer is a change in myself.

I recently read Atomic Habits by James Clear and have been implementing some of his strategies in my life. One such strategy was to write everyday. I “habit-stacked” and made sure that as soon as I put the kids to bed, I would go down to my desk and start writing. I started this habit toward the end of December and I’ve been consistently doing it since then. Which means that I’ve finished a short story, begun another one, written two chapters of my novella, and blogged nearly everyday in January and ten days in February.

Recently I started challenging myself to write 1,000 words per day. By my calculations, that could get me 306,000 words written by the end of this calendar year. In years past, I would have said 1,000 words EVERY DAY wasn’t doable because I just didn’t have enough time in my days. I work almost-full-time and have three children ages six and under. “No time!” I would say.

But the funny thing is, once I started organizing my day around small habits, I found that I stopped running out of time. The hectic, wasteful days that seemed to plague me were suddenly gone. I could pray everyday, write in my writer’s notebook everyday, read a book everyday, grade papers everyday, exercise everyday, and write fiction everyday. And I could do all this without skimping on my other responsibilities, like taking care of my kids, spending time with husband, and looking after the house.

So I started thinking: Do I really need to abandon teaching and start up a freelancer career in order to have more time to write? Or can I continue teaching AND have more time to write?

I don’t want to get all mushy and start slobbering all over the Atomic Habits book, but honestly, it’s helped me realize that I can do the things I want to do without having to rearrange my whole life or making sweeping and dramatic career changes.

And look, I would still love to work from home because I’m an introverted homebody who enjoys hanging out in sweatpants, but I want to work from home as a writer, and that might never happen (that old ultra-realistic Midwestern upbringing dies hard). And even if it does happen, it won’t be until I have several books written and published, and that won’t happen if I don’t write several books. So the “writing books” part has to be at the center of what I do and how I spend my time. Whether it’s Covidtide and I have time on my hands, or it’s now and I’m working outside the home. Either way, I need to write.

The insight I had recently is that I HAVE been writing: my new habit-filled days have allowed me the freedom to do just that. I want writing to be my work, but I don’t have to wait for some far-off future for it to be a reality. It’s a reality right now.

Creative = Make

February 22, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m rereading Tom Hodgkinson’s How to Be Free. I find this book, and its companion, How to Be Idle, eminently re-readable. Both Hodgkinson’s style and his philosophies are so buoyant, so carefree and merry, that I always feel emboldened and inspired when I read his books.

So I’m rereading How to Be Free, and this afternoon I read the chapter entitled, “Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises.” This chapter is relevant for me because I’m thinking about just such a thing (i.e.: chucking my career).

Anyway, the thing that struck me was how Hodgkinson implored his readers to do more manual work — not for money, necessarily, but simply for its own sake. For instance, there’s something quite wonderful about gardening or whittling a piece of wood or knitting or whatever. Not all of our work needs to be “mental work,” and not all of our time needs to be spent focusing on our narrow and restricting “careers.”

This whole thing got me thinking about creativity.

In one of the classes I teach, we spend some time trying to define creativity. Most often, my students come up with some variation of this: “Creativity is figuring out a new way of doing something or an original way to solve a problem.” It’s all about “thinking outside the box” (a most unoriginal expression if there ever was one).

I’ve always rebelled against this definition, though I don’t often say so to my students. I might prod them a little bit with Socratic questions, but I never outright dismiss their ideas. But what annoys me about “originality” and “newness” as central pillars of creativity is that it elevates novelty above all else, AND it ignores the root word of creativity itself: CREATE. Not that newness and originality aren’t aspects of creativity, but they aren’t the center of the thing. Creativity means creating.

To create. To make. To bring something into being.

When looked at this way, creativity is less about ideas and much more about THINGS. When we are creating we are making. And if creativity is making, then anyone can do it. It’s not something that only the rarefied among us is any good at. It’s open to all. Anyone can make something. And thus, everyone is creative.

Being creative, i.e.: CREATE-ive, could mean baking a cake, or drawing a picture, or throwing a party. After all, what does throwing a party really mean? It means creating a party. You gather people and food and drinks, you decorate the place, you make up a list of games and activities for everyone to play. Where once there was no party, you have MADE a party. Brought it into being.

Same thing for knitting, or gardening, or dancing. Or making music, or tinkering, or writing, or building something (or making a baby!). Anyone who does these things is being creative: where once there was nothing, something has been made.

I often hear students remark that they “aren’t very creative,” as if it’s a special skill or something. But it’s not a special skill. It’s simply the act of making. A creative person is one who creates.

And everyone is capable of creating. Everyone can make something.

Leave out whether it’s good or bad; that’s not important. The creating is what’s important. The making.

If I could implore my students to consider one thing, it would be to realize they are, in fact, creative. And that they should spend a good chunk of their time making things, whether it’s a cake or a song or a fabulous party. When we are making things, we are imitating our own Creator. I can’t think of a better way to live.

Here Be Dungeons

February 9, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I have been trying for quite some time to articulate my love of old school D&D, but every time I sit down to write about it, I can’t quite get a handle on what makes it special to me. On one hand, it’s 100% nostalgia. . . but not in the way you’d think. See, I was never actually allowed to play D&D when I was a kid. My parents believed in the “satanic panic” stuff, so D&D was forbidden, even though they let me play other role-playing games like Pendragon and MERP. But D&D still influenced me as a young kid, from the Endless Quest books to the Dragonlance novels to board games like HeroQuest. I studied the covers of all the D&D rule books, soaked up the Larry Elmore artwork, dreamed of what it would be like to play the game.

So yeah, nostalgia is part of it.

It’s the nostalgia for a certain aesthetic, for a certain vibe that had attached itself to all fantasy-related stuff at the time. That vibe was one part danger (the somewhat forbidden nature of fantasy that borrowed tropes and shared shelf space with D&D products) and one part belonging (here were works of art and entertainment that seemed made almost especially for me: for the shy, bookish, imaginative kid who loved dragons, knights, and high adventure).

This is where my ability to articulate the feeling breaks down. Because why should an aesthetic matter that much? Why does the cover of an Endless Quest book make my heart skip a beat? (I have not read one of these books in nearly thirty years, and I cannot imagine they’re any good.) Is it just because these were the things of my childhood and therefore they give me the warm fuzzies?

I mean, yeah, that’s what nostalgia is, right? But I suppose I’m interested in why nostalgia itself — particularly nostalgia related to literature and art — is such a strong force, and how my nostalgia for old school D&D is not driven by the game itself (of which I never actually played as a kid), but by all the things surrounding and influenced by the game.

See, here’s the thing: I really like playing old school D&D and the OSR-style games that have been come along in recent years. But it’s not because these rule-systems and games remind me of how I used to play back in the day. I didn’t play D&D back in the day! I barely even played MERP and Pendragon.

Nevertheless, these old school games intrigue me. Maybe I’m excited by the fact that I can finally play D&D without any parental chastisement. Or maybe I’m just responding to the nostalgia for the old-school aesthetic. (Truthfully, this IS a big part of it. I really like that DIY, grungy, punk-rock style artwork that accompanies both the old D&D books and the OSR-related new stuff.) But I think that even if D&D 5e came decked out in an “old-school” art edition, I’d still prefer playing the older games (or retro-clones).

Why???

I do, in fact, prefer rules-lite games in general (less headaches trying to figure things out), but I don’t think it’s JUST a matter of rules-lite. Lasers and Feelings is a fantastic game, and as rules-lite as one can get, but it doesn’t stir my heart the way old school D&D does.

No, I think it goes beyond the rules themselves and taps into something deeper within me.

Here’s the deal: When I was a kid, I loved to play pretend. I ran around the woods near my grandparents’ house and pretended to be a warrior fighting goblins and trolls and dragons. I went on epic quests in the backyard. I read fantasy novels and watched fantasy movies, and all the time I wanted to be Bastion or Lucy Pevensie or Dorothy Gale. I wanted to GO to Middle-Earth, even as I knew that was impossible. When I discovered role-playing games, I discovered that there was a way to travel into these realms of magic, even if it was only with pen, and paper, and twenty-sided dice.

And I think THAT is what keeps attracting me to old school D&D. Back in the day, I wanted to play pretend — I wanted to be a sword-fighter or a half-elf or a chivalrous knight — but I wanted to be me as the sword-fighter or the half-elf or the chivalrous knight. I wasn’t pretending to be an entirely different person; I was just myself, but myself as I wished I could be.

As I experienced it, on the periphery, old school D&D wasn’t just about pretending to be someone else. It wasn’t theater or acting class. It was about going into a magical, uncanny world and exploring it through the eyes of a character. The character was the vehicle through which the player could explore this strange and wondrous world. When the runic doorway to the musty dungeon opens and the stench of long-forgotten curses wafts through the forbidding tunnels, it’s ME standing there smelling it and peering into the darkness. But it’s me AS a warrior, or a wizard, or a crafty rogue. To put it another way, it’s both Me and Not-Me at the same time.

That’s the genius of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, or Endless Quest, or Lone Wolf. It’s the second person pronoun: “You.” You are the one on the adventure, not a character who is totally separate from yourself.

Me: I’m the one standing upon that threshold. The character/PC is just the avatar. I want to see how I’ll handle the dangers of the dungeon, how I’ll face down the orcs and the traps and the lich-king. THAT is what I’m nostalgic for. For that feeling of being able to imagine myself in the fantasy world.

Being the game master or dungeon master or referee is about acting out all these different characters. But being a player is about being myself, of seeing how I would stack up in a world filled with peril and wonders to behold.

Saturday Things

February 6, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I got my first dose of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine today. So far: soreness in arm, moderately bad headache, and fatigue. Otherwise, feeling okay.

My current project is a short story called, tentatively, “Things.” (Yes, I know. The title is completely un-evocative. It basically means nothing. However, there is a story-related reason why it’s called “Things,” but I realize that as titles go, it doesn’t grab anyone’s attention. So it’s a working title that will probably change once I’m done.)

I wanted to read a few hard-boiled short stories and watch a couple of films noir to get in the mood, but honestly, it’s been hard to find the time for any of that. I can watch certain old movies when my kids are around — musicals are usually safe, as are silent and screwball comedies — but film noir is one of those genres that is not appropriate for the under-six set.

Anyway, I watched so many films noir in my twenties and early thirties that I could recite many of them line-by-line, so it’s not like I don’t know the style and mood of these kinds of stories. But just for fun, I wanted to dive back in and reacquaint myself with these old friends. Maybe there’s still time. . . I’m only half-way finished with the story.  “Things” is one of those stories where I pretty much know the ending already, but I’m not sure yet how I’m going to get there or what it’s going to look like when I do. It’s a bit like knowing there’s going to be a car wreck, but not knowing how the bodies are going to end up. (Sorry, that was a morbid analogy!)

Today was also a great day because I made it through a week of using my new “habit schedule,” and so far, it’s been successful. Each day this week I’ve managed to carve out time to pray in the morning and before bed, read something spiritual (current books are the Pope’s new one and The Imitation of Christ), write in my writer’s notebook, read a book at lunchtime, enter grades/provide feedback to students, work on freelance editing stuff, exercise, stretch, and write something creative (either fiction or this blog). My not-every-day-but-a-few-times-a-week habits — doing some light cleaning, paying bills, and filing papers — were also a success.

I will say the methods outlined in James Clear’s Atomic Habits have been very helpful in this regard, particularly his advice to “make it easy” and “make it satisfying.” I use a habit tracker app on my phone (that’s the “make it satisfying” part), and I’ve rearranged a few things to make the habits easier.

For instance, before I go to bed at night, I make sure my writer’s notebook is sitting on the dining room table so that in the morning it’s ready for me to write in as I eat my breakfast. Another example of making it “easy” is that I put Swiffer dusters in various rooms around the house so I can just pick one up and start dusting if I have a spare moment. And finally, I set a daily alarm on my phone to ring when it’s time to enter grades and do freelance work. I’ve also tried to “habit stack,” where I tie a new habit to an existing one (like the habit of writing in my notebook while I’m eating my breakfast, or reading a book while I eat my lunch).

The one habit I might need to modify is the exercise one, because I used to exercise before I took my shower, but that made mornings too hectic, so I switched exercise to the afternoon, when I get home from work. However, that get-home-from-work time is quite busy too — the kids are excited to see me, I’ve got to change out of my work clothes and clean my lunch containers, start to prepare dinner, etc. — so my exercise time has been shorter than usual everyday this week (I’ve been breaking the “make it easy” rule). Maybe I need to move the exercise back to the morning and do it before my shower. . . (I hesitate to do this, though, because that means getting up earlier, and I’m already struggling to get up at 7:00 a.m.; 6:45 a.m. might be a bridge too far.)

Despite these few hiccups, I’m utterly pleased with how much I was able to get done this week, and with how much less stress I’ve had. I’m not particularly strict about my habit schedule as far as doing things at a very specific time, but I’ve found that having an outline for the day has given my life a pleasant rhythm. I know that I want to accomplish these various “little things,” and by doing them each day in small chunks, and at generally the same time each day, I’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit, even in just a week’s time.

Symbols for Me

January 31, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Last week, a student did a presentation about symbolism, and she had a couple of activities for the class to help them practice using symbols in their writing. One of her exercises was to think of a symbol (or symbols) that represented who we are. I tried my hand at it, since I like to write alongside my students, and started coming up with symbols for myself.

One was a 1970s Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback with a wild, psychedelic cover.

Even though I was born in the 1980s, I’ve always been a bit of a throwback. I love old black and white movies, swing jazz, Beat writers, 60s psychedelic rock, and old-school fantasy. I don’t try to be strange or outlandish, but sometimes I can’t help it. I’m a weird person. And I often find myself outside the mainstream. I think the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series fits all of these qualities: old and dog-eared but still kinda interesting, weird and psychedelic, and outside the mainstream.

The other symbol I came up with was a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival.

This one symbolizes me because it’s essentially a toy sword, but way cooler than something you’d find in a Toys ‘R Us, and I’m not the kind of person who wants to wield an actual weapon or be a real knight, but I like to pretend, I like to play, I like to imagine. The wooden sword is a tool for the imagination.

And because the Renaissance Festival only happens once a year (and I didn’t always get a chance to go when I was a kid), the wooden sword holds a special kind of allure: rare and precious, something long sought-for but rarely achieved.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying that I’m “rare and precious” or “something long sought-for but rarely achieved.” Instead, I mean that my desire to get one of these swords symbolizes so much of my life: wanting things that are hard to find, desiring something that seems just out of reach. The Renaissance Festival sword is every longing of my heart, every wish I wished as a kid.

My last symbol symbol for myself is this:

A cup of black coffee.

Why? I’m bitter and make people jittery.

Another Lost Weekend

January 30, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Once again I’ve failed to use my Saturday wisely. Many worthy and important things could have gotten done; instead, it was T.V. time. An episode of Jim Henson’s Storyteller Greek Myths (much more tragic and somber than its fairy tale counterpart); an episode of The Crown (which led me down the rabbit hole of Googling all the stuff from the episode to see if it was real; sadly, some of it was); and then Ken Burns’s Jazz ended up being on PBS when I turned off Netflix, and I watched that for half an hour.

Yikes.

I am so bad at getting my work done when I have *actual time to do it.*

Instead, I waste such time, and when the eleventh hour arises, I scramble like mad to do all the work I’ve been putting off for too long. It’s bonkers and unhealthy, and I wish I was better at being disciplined.

Having just read James Clear’s Atomic Habits recently, you’d think I’d know how to develop small habits that will make my life run more smoothly. Alas, I feel like most of my days are filled with too much to do and not enough time to do it, and then when a weekend like today rolls around, I’m so burned out that all I want to do is veg.

I wish I knew how to make my normal weekdays not so stuffed with things to do. I’m sure this is a common feeling for many people. The question I have is why are we all so busy all the time? Is it modern life that’s made things busy? Is it our jobs? I don’t work a high-powered corporate job or anything; I’m a high school English teacher. Is it having to work and raise children that makes things so busy? I know others who work and have kids and they don’t *seem* particularly stressed or overburdened (maybe they just hide it really well…). Or at the very least, I don’t see any of them turning a perfectly good Saturday into a wasted “lost weekend” of vegging and avoiding work.

Why do I do this to myself? What kind of small “atomic” habits can I develop to avoid this cycle of over-work/giving-in-to-acedia? I think it’s interesting that I’m self-diagnosing my problem as acedia, because that implies this is a spiritual malady and not necessarily something I can “life hack” away. With all things spiritual, prayer is often the first priority, so maybe my problem is lack of prayer. Maybe I need to work on my habits of prayer and see what else will fall into place after that. Small habits of prayer might lead to more small habits elsewhere.

Maybe next Saturday can be a little less lost.

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