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.