This whole "writing" thing...

The part that seems to be missing from my decision to put more time and energy into my writing is ... putting more time and energy into my writing. I keep finding reasons not to spend the time at the computer--or even with a pen and paper in hand--until I can get to the part of the day when I say, "Well, it's too late to start doing anything now."

Sum total of today's writing: revising my annual holiday letter (which I flung together yesterday), answering an email, and a couple of FB posts.

I actually did intend to do some further personal writing, but instead I ended up shoveling snow (a.m.) and chipping ice out of the driveway (p.m.), in between which times I read, thinking I might maybe get a nap (nope).

And suddenly, it's time for me to start thinking about what to do for dinner and winding down for the evening.

So, again, I channel my inner Scarlett and say that, after all, tomorrow is another day--which is a good thing, all told, witness the movie Groundhog Day. I'm glad I don't have to live the same day over and over, even though sometimes it does look pretty much like that's what I'm doing.

I also have gotten a little freelance editing job which needs to be tended too soon, so I may put the writing on hold until I clear that off my docket. It does seem that there may be moments--more of them in 2020 than have been the case in 2019--when I have to put writing on hold in order to do things that will actually make some money. But that's a good thing in a lot of ways. It certainly alleviates one area of anxiety to earn a little income.

In any event, this blog post--relatively brief as it is--will be the only other writing I do today (other than, of course, possibly more FB posts and a text or two). We'll see what the morrow brings.

Just rattling it off

Didn't spend much time writing today, as the early part of the day was consumed with life maintenance. Tomorrow will probably also be a day with little writing done; instead I will receive two crowns--not, alas as Empress of the Universe and Queen of Commas but just as necessary dental work.

What writing I did was mostly on the fantasy thingy I've started playing with again. I made a few minor adjustments on what I wrote the other day and then let my fingers on the keyboard take me wherever they would. It's an interesting process to simply allow a story to happen, like taking a walk in a strange house: one walks through a room, noticing all that's there, then, having no idea what to expect opens another door and sees what's behind it. There is no sense of what is to come next, and the glimpses of the place that is being explored happen only a bit at a time and, as yet, don't come together in a shape that indicates what the whole will be. I open a door, and there's this scene. I explore it, looking around, describing what's there and what's happening, and then ... open another door.

I don't know if that's what other writers do, but for me, if I think I know too much about the size and shape and organization of the rooms before I get into them and walk around, the whole thing starts feeling stiff and stilted and dull. I have to walk into unknowns over and over again.

That's true even of the historical piece I've been noodling with for, oh, probably decades now. With that piece, I do have more sense of what some of the rooms will be and a vague idea of in what order they need to be encountered, but I still need to just open a door and see what's there. And invariably, things end up in there that I had no idea to expect.

I don't write the story, it feels like. The story uses me to get written. If I try to push it, the story will refuse to go forward--or will be so obviously misshapen that I have to back up and try again--and that means listening to the story and where it wants to go.

Very mystical and arcane, this process. But I do know that, if I don't have at least some sense of where I'm trying to go, I won't get very far. Short stories are obviously easier for that reason: I don't really have to have a "there" to get to. A character steps into my mind and says, "OK, let's talk about me," and I do. But I don't have to get the character from point A to point Q, just show this little nugget, this corner of the house.

Ach, I'm babbling. And I'm still playing at "being a writer." I have to remind myself, "Oh, yeah: I was going to stop frittering away my days and actually do something with words." But I'm no more forcing myself to "be a writer" than I am forcing my writing to go in this direction or that. It's all just experimentation, and play right now. And as for what this might all turn into, if anything, well, I'll trot out the phrase I used so often when I was still in the classroom: we'll see.

What's behind this door? We'll see. Is Prof P that thing called "a writer" or just a person who occasionally writes? We'll see.

More personal

Yesterday, I didn't write anything except maybe a few FB posts.

Today, again, I spent the day writing personal stuff. What I find interesting in my process of purely personal writing is that I have to apply many of the same skills that I use for any other form of writing--unless I'm writing in my journal, in which case there are no rules (not even necessarily sense, certainly not legibility). But if I'm writing something that I'm going to share with even one other person--often even a relatively insignificant email, but certainly anything of substance--then I want it to have a logical progression, and have a hell of a hard time not running away with the text (something that could be two pages turning into four).

Any reader of this blog knows that I tend to verbosity, to put it mildly. Put a keyboard under my fingers and watch the verbal avalanche. And perhaps the most difficult task I face as a writer of anything at all is trimming down my precious and wonderful words, saying more with less.

And it's important to do that because, although I love following every jot and tittle of my thinking, it can be overwhelming to others: there is the risk of my reader getting so bogged down that my actual point is lost in minutiae.

I also can blather just fine on a computer screen, but when I get down to the real dirty work of forcing myself into tighter focus and clarity, I absolutely must do at least some of that on paper. There have been studies done: when we read a long scroll of something, it's hard to remember what went where, and the same is true of what we write ourselves. Note to self: when tutoring (assuming I start getting clients at some point), if a student worries about being repetitious or wandering off topic, point out that neurological fact. I know it's a challenge to eschew (gesundheit) the ease of working on the screen, and even when I've edited something by hand, further changes invariably happen when I go back to the keyboard. But that stage of paper and pen (or pencil) is necessary.

I don't yet know what I'll do tomorrow. I hope I can get myself to focus on the website for a chunk of the day. That's not sustained writing, but it's a part of the writing process, as I have to think carefully about what to say, what goes where, and so on. All kinda fascinating. (And full confession: I tend to get lost in the weeds, looking for the perfect free image to download, size as needed, and add to each page I create.) But we'll see. The siren call of that personal communique may prove irresistible. I know it's best to let it simmer on the back burners for as long as I can stand; I just don't know how long I can stand.

I wish I felt that way about my creative writing. Perhaps that will come in time.

Purely personal

Yesterday was a complete loss in terms of getting any writing, or even much reading done. And today, I started trying to come up with stuff for the website that's being build for the tutoring business--but very little of that was writing. Instead, I'm mostly looking for images--and trying to wrap my head around what it means to market the business, which requires that I develop an entirely different way of looking at things and get rid of some of my instinctive resistance to ideas. For instance, having a Twitter account. I created an Instagram account, but the problem with that is--even though I've figured out how to post just text, not images--I have zero clue what to post, as long as I have no one to actually tutor. We have a Facebook page: same problem. Add a Twitter account? That's then three platforms on which I have no earthly clue what to say at this stage in the game.

It's the classic thing: I need clients in order to have the stuff I need to get clients.

But I'm now going to turn my attention to purely personal writing. My journal calls.

Beats revising...

Today did not turn out at all as planned. My date with my sister did not happen, which was just as well, as I was having a day of mysterious fatigue (which happen from time to time). I ended up lying around until mid-afternoon, and then wasn't sure I was going to write at all--but to my surprise, a whole new story thread started talking to me, so in the spirit of "what the hell; why not?" I embarked on it.

It actually isn't a new idea; it's one that's been kicking around in my head probably since I was in my 20s. I've started on it a few times, too, and never got very far--in part because I was trying to force it to go in a specific direction, one where it very obviously didn't want to go. This time, I thought I'd just start with the first two sentences and see what happened.

What happened was nine pages of a fantasy-type something-or-other, which may or may not turn into something of substance. In the past, I had it figured for a novel, but I honestly don't know whether I've got a novel in me anywhere (not even the historical novel I've chipped at periodically for eons). Maybe it will end up being a long short-story (oxymoronic as that is). Or maybe it will end up as many of my ideas do, begun and then abandoned in a fit of self-distaste.

I know the received wisdom, and I know that it is, in fact wise: one must simply keep writing, and damn the torpedoes. But sometimes I re-read something I've written and my gorge rises to the extent that I simply cannot go on with it. I'm starting to learn to approach from a different angle instead of abandoning the project entirely. I've done that at least five times with the historical novel--even to the extent of completely recasting one of the two main characters and creating a whole new back-story for her. And generally speaking, that works.

But the historical piece has an overall arc already in my head: I know the high points from beginning to end, and I know how it ends. How I get from one high point to the next is still a mystery to me, but it has had the general shape intact from first word on the page. This one, not so much--largely because its genesis is a dream I had when I was perhaps in my teens. The dream may be recorded in one of my journals somewhere (I have them going back to the summer when I was 18), but I won't dig through them to find it. I'll just work with the two images I have: a child's hand reaching into a bar of light in an otherwise dark cellar-like space, and a woman turning a fog into brilliant light. I know it's the same person in both images, and there's a little more to the image of the fog (armored warriors on horseback, trees and fen, a prince or king), but otherwise, I've got nothing to work with other than what my imagination turns up on the spot.

Which is kinda fun, of course. "Huh! Who knew that was going to happen next? And who's that person over there; turns out to be an important character. I had no idea."

And then there's the fun of naming. I did a whole chapter on naming in my dissertation, and its an idea Le Guin wrote about in several essays. The right names matter, as she fiercely states. If you get the name wrong, you get the character wrong, no two ways about it. And fantasy names are a challenge. They can't be too ridiculous (Lord Barf of Smorgola) and although sometimes a very common name being used in a fantastic setting is lovely, in the kind of story I'm working on, the names need to be just other enough without being off-putting. I love the challenge of it.

The other challenge, of course, is remembering the names once one has come up with them, but I struggle with that in my "realistic" novel as well. I'm crap at names, even of actual human beings I meet. (Who are you again?)

In any event, it was a fun few hours. Tomorrow, I have to take my car to the shop and may be there for some time. I may take the computer with me so I can write, though honestly, I'm more likely to sit and read or knit. And then the postponed coffee date with my sister. So again, there may not be a blog post tomorrow. I may not write anything tomorrow (other than the occasional FB post). But so far, I'm liking this whole "What do you do?" "I write" thing. (I won't like the inevitable follow-up question, "Have you published anything I'd have heard of?" but eventually I'll come up with a response that amuses me instead of making me feel somewhat defensive.)

And for now, I'm drawing a line under this and calling it good enough for today. Let the mindless noodling commence.

Writing: easy. Revising, on the other hand....

I'm calling a halt to the writing earlier than I planned today. I worked on two essays, and I got both to the place where I need to let them simmer unattended for a while before I go back to revise.

And revision is a bitch.

One of the things that's great about this blog is that I stopped revising my posts eons ago, so I can simply blather unchecked, fling the result up online, and saunter off into the night. Anything I intend to publish, however--even "self" publishing on Medium, which is my, ahem, medium of choice for my essays these days--needs more careful consideration and reworking.

Both the essays I'm working on are tending to wander off focus (one more than the other). I know what I want to say, but I'm not sure what I want to say about it, if that makes sense. In other words, I suppose, topic: clear; thesis: not.

The one that wanders off focus was prompted by the suggested readings in the digest I get from Medium each week. It's been a long while since I've found an article that I think is worth reading, in part because so many of the articles are profound insights and worldly wisdom proffered by kids in diapers, metaphorically speaking. I'm sorry, Toots, but if you're only 40, you still don't know enough for me to feel like you've got wisdom worth my time to read.

I grant (and I say in the draft of my essay) that some young people are inordinately wise, and some older people are noticeably lacking in anything that could be called "wisdom": age is not the clear defining attribute of a person capable of wisdom or insight. But when someone has been in a relationship for five years and writes about how to keep a relationship going for "the long term," or has been working as a counselor for ten years and professes to know all about the human condition, I snort in derision. Talk to me when you've been in your relationship for 40 years, or you've been a therapist for 30--and when you  yourself have a few more miles on your internal odometer.

It's a strange corollary to our youth-oriented culture. We simultaneously get offered pearls of wisdom from youngsters who just haven't been slapped around enough by the world to know much and we're told that "age is just a number"--which on the surface means "you don't have to stop doing awesome and amazing things just because of the number of years you've been on the planet" but which really means "Isn't it astonishing that old people still do things?"

And of course, the people who are lauded for doing things that prove that "age is just a number" are doing things that would be rather remarkable at almost any age--or who simply keep their bodies in good enough shape that they can perform like younger bodies.

What I really want to write about is the fact that just by existing and being alert and open to the world for more decades, we actually acquire something worth acquiring. It may not be wisdom, but it's a kind of perspective that has merit. I'd like those young whippersnappers to acknowledge that fact.

I suspect I was every bit as insufferable about things when I was younger, believing that I was the first person in the history of the species to discover love, or heartache, or humiliation, or what have you. But I remember watching a video of Jay Leno's "Fruitcake Lady" (a prickly woman of a certain age) being asked questions about sex, theoretically to hilarious results--because an old woman talking frankly about sex! How completely side-splittingly funny! And I was furious about her being held up as an object of fun. She's been through more than you young idiots laughing at her can imagine. And I bet you anything you like that sex isn't something from her dusty, ancient past but a present part of her life.

I also was furious with a friend who saw an older couple who clearly very much loved each other and referred to them as "cute." She said I wouldn't be angry if I knew what she meant by it, but the word "cute" has a specific meaning, dammit, and it is not respectful. It's entirely possible those two people were newly together, too: theirs may not have been a relationship that began in their youth. But either way--fiftieth anniversary or first--the fact that they love each other when they are old and grey and wrinkled is not "cute."

Growf, rowr, bazz-fazz.

But you see, I can riff and rant about it here because here I can just riff and rant: I don't have to make a point, or come to a conclusion, or even say anything clearly or persuasively. That blather above is not publishable as anything other than a blog rant. And turning the rant into a shaped, formed, focused, compelling essay is a whole different ball of wax.

Shifting gears.

I have also once again dipped my toes into the water of trying to get some of my stories published. My mother, god love her, shares with me all sorts of things that are more interesting to her than they are to me, but she inadvertently includes the occasional gem, and recently she let me know about a seasonal story contest held by The Masters Review, and in looking into that, I saw that they also have rolling, open submissions. (The contests have an entry fee; the rolling submissions do not.) They're based in Portland, Oregon, and are a self-described "platform for emerging writers"--which (despite my age) I am, as I've published so little. (That applies to my scholarship too, relatively speaking, but I'm talking specifically about my creative works: so far, one poem and one short story. Bring on the confetti canons.) I essentially threw a dart and sent one story to their fall contest, one to their open submissions, and now I get to wait until February or so to hear their decision.

But I also have a list of other literary journals (which I raided from one of my former colleagues), and one of my plans for the forthcoming days/weeks is to select another story or two, and a journal or two (randomly selected) to which I will submit them.

I've decided I won't predetermine what writing I'll do each day; I think it's sufficient that I'm going to do something each day (with the possible exception of the weekends, but who knows: when I was working on the student guide over my sabbatical, I often found myself working on the weekends as well as during the week--just because something would be on my mind and needed to be externalized in written language somewhere).

So, that's today's news. Tomorrow I have a late afternoon date with my sister, so I may not get a moment in which to post to the blog, but I'll do my dangdest. If I write nothing else, at least I can squeeze words out onto this platform.

A different kind of creative writing

I decided to sit down and write something today, though I wasn't sure exactly what that something might be. Turned out, it was text to go on the website that's being constructed for the tutoring business I'm trying to get going: Five Degrees Tutoring. We have a Facebook page, which is hard to find (not enough posts, so we're way down the listings of things that start with "Five"), and even an Instagram account (ditto: I really don't "get" Instagram much, but the young'uns will be more likely to use that than FB), and the website is or soon will be up and accessible: fivedegreestutoring.com. My dear William made snarky comments on the "five degrees" part--rather understandably, actually, as the reason for the name is not self-evident. But it's because--at least in theory--I am in business with my sister, and between us, we have five academic degrees (two bachelors, one M.S., one M.Phil., and one Ph.D.)

Constructing the site has been an interesting and periodically frustrating experience. I started with a "do-it-yourself" template and shelled out far more money than I needed to for the privilege. Fortunately, my sister's boyfriend is a professional at building websites and doing web marketing, and when she ran it past him, he showed me not only why the DIY template was kinda useless but also why I didn't need to shell out the bucks for it. The frustrating part was that the marketing mind works very, very differently from the language and literature mind. I could grasp the concepts as he explained them (god love him, he is tremendously patient about explaining things to people who are little lambs lost in the woods), but boiling what I have in my head down to what the website needed was challenging. It was also interesting trying to get him to understand what I know about how students approach writing. We had to do a sort of Vulcan mind-meld of approaches to come up with something workable, but I think we've got it. Or got it well enough to start with anyway. Tweaking can happen as we roll along.

Coming up with the appropriate text was an exercise in concision for me. Readers of this blog know that I am nothing if not verbose (some friends on FB complain about how much blather they need to wade through to find the kernels of information being conveyed). So it's good for me to have to work on simplicity: the fewer words the better.

So, that was writing for the revenue stream side of things. Heaven knows if the website will bear any fruit, but we'll give it a whirl. (And not only is the site as it now exists infinitely less expensive than what I did at first--for which, mercifully, I got a full refund--it is, nicely enough, a tax-deductible business expense.) And perhaps tomorrow I will embark on more creative endeavors. I've got a couple of essay ideas dinking around in my head, and a few story ideas. I might even--who knows--get back to that novel eventually.

More posts to come. Stay tuned!

Whew, long hiatus....

I may need to retitle this blog again and call it Prof. TLP's View from the Retirement Trenches. Since my last post, I have relocated to the Rocky Mountain West and am trying to figure out not just what to do with my time but in a sense who I am now. Working this past spring in the Writing Center allowed me to continue to hold on to my identity as Prof. P for a while beyond my technical retirement, but now I'm realizing how very much of my identity was tied up in my professorial persona, and it's an interesting and challenging process to allow "just me" to be enough of an identity. I have done a little writing--put a few more pieces up on Medium (which have garnered very little attention, but still, they're there) and noodled around with the novel once or twice--but I realize I've been hesitating to make writing my "job," the thing I do at a set time for a set number of days per week. That hesitation arises from two thoughts. One, often, if I "force" myself to write something, it's so unrelievedly awful that I can't bear to consider continuing. Two, if I "force" myself to write with the dedication one gives to a job, I am afraid I'll start to resist and resent it, and writing has always been a joy to me. (Witness the length of these blog posts.)

But today, I realize that I "need" to at least give it a try. I do hope to get some paying work soon--freelance editing and/or tutoring--but that's a whole different thing. Either can be a meaningful distraction for me: I get "lost" in the work and feel nicely mentally stretched after. But those are money gigs, and neither uses the deepest parts of me the way writing for my own purposes does.

I briefly toyed with the idea of even embarking on scholarship again, but I can't fool myself on that one; I don't have the drive to do the kind of reading I'd have to do without some external force "making" me do it. Writing creatively, however, is a different ball of wax. There are lots of directions I can go with that: more essays for Medium, revising works I've already done, writing new stories, continuing with the novel.

And I need to take to heart the advice given by every single writer who has had any kind of success. Across the board, they say, "Write anyway. Yes, some of it--even a lot of it--will be shit. Write it anyway. You can throw things out, or revise them, but only if you've written in the first place." It's like any skill: you have to use it, and do badly at it, over and over to come up with anything good. I love Margaret Atwood's little smirk when she says, "The wastebasket was created by God to be your friend." Amen sister. I have to just accept that I will write my fair share or more of utter dreck, and get on with writing it so the occasional nugget of something good will also appear.

And now, with all this new found determination, I'm going to embark on the process ... but maybe not today. This blog post may be my only foray into writing for now, but I hope it serves the purpose I intend for it. I doubt I have any readers anymore, after having been offline so very long, so this is for me: if I put it in writing, it becomes more real. So, writing that I intend to do more writing will, I confidently expect, in fact lead me to do more writing.

Meanwhile, adapting to the dark, grey and gloomy Northern Rockies winter will occupy a lot of my psychic energy, as will the ongoing struggle to get some income lined up--and the ongoing joy of being able to see my mother and sister frequently, without undue effort. I do wish the "boys" (my sisters adult sons) were closer, but they're also young men involved in their lives, so even if we lived closer, we'd probably not see each other all that often. Still, it's nice to know that visiting them is now a matter of a healthy drive, not a cross-country flight.

And I'll close by saying that the adjustment to retirement is harder than I anticipated--but when I hear about what's happening at NCC these days, I am overwhelmed with gratitude that I got the hell out when I did.