Yesterday was the first day of classes in my 28th year as a college professor (and my 48th first day of school). I had coffee with a colleague (Thanks, Amy!) My students kept me busy during office hours. My first class was lively, and my second class had the post-lunch sleepies, and then that first day went in the books.

I didn’t write when I got home; I was exhausted. I’d like to say the first day of classes didn’t exhaust me when I was younger, but I know better. It’s universally exhausting.

I’m still tired, and today’s my workday at home. Of course I have been working at home and haven’t had time for writing. Until now, so I’m taking this moment to blog, and hopefully will have time to write rather than just collapse into a nap. (I’ve done this already, too.)

If I were doing this right, I’d go to Starbucks for a coffee and some writing time. But then I’d have to get out of my sweats and put on a bra. (TMI?) What a dilemma.

Ahh, what to do. Time to make stuff happen… or not.

(Strange things are happening to my font and typeface size here. I’ll try to work with it.)

I just returned from a road trip from far Northwest Missouri to Oriskany, New York (near Utica) and back. My husband and I, five youngsters (college age), and two fellow faculty members, piled into a 15-person university van and drove cross-country to arrive at New York Hope, a disaster training exercise. (I have written earlier about my responsibilities for the exercise, making people look like disaster victims.)

And it was a trip. Highlights of the trip included:

• The buddy show in the front seat. The retired Brigadier General and the younger modern historian bond over a couple thousand miles in close quarters. Hilarity ensues.
• The first night’s stopover. We arrive at a church camp after some twenty miles of gravel in the middle of the dark to this rustic modern-in-the-80’s main office, the place where one registers. Only nobody is there. After 20 minutes, someone comes in to inform us we were not on the register. As we had registered (or so we thought), much tense discussion ensued. We produce an email trail that proves that we had started the process but that it had not been completed. The camp gives in and assigns us to the Retreat House.
• Ah, yes. The Retreat House. A fine example of a shingled 1920s home renovated in the 1970s and painfully neglected since then. The place smelled of disuse and wood rot. I was not expecting ornate, and in fact have spent enough time in church camps that I expected primitive. I did not expect a miasma of trapped wood rot. Bonus: The odd accumulation of kitchen appliances which included an avocado range next to an old commercial oven.
• Moulage duty. Four of our role-players were high schooler/middle schoolers who were an absolute riot to work with. We got to give them various bruises, bumps, lacerations, broken bones, and gunshot wounds. The adults were fun, too, but we bonded with the younger ones over cat pictures and stories.
• Stewarts’ ice cream. We wanted dessert, and I introduced the crowd to Stewarts’, a New York gas station chain with ice cream. I’ve never seen people as mad about ice cream as New Yorkers. I won bonus points for that suggestion.
• The flat tire pulling into Cleveland. Luckily, it was a slow flat, so we didn’t get stranded in the middle of the interstate. We ate lunch, got the tire fixed, and went on our merry way back to the Retreat House.
• Arriving back home, finally. Blissfully, incredibly. Only to get a message from one of our younger passengers that he had a positive COVID test. Yay. So far I’m negative.

What did you do over your summer vacation?

Now that I want to write again

The desire to write is returning. I’m not sure I’m ready to pick up the problems with Avatar of the Maker yet; I may actually go toward Walk through Green Fire, a romantic fantasy of the quest variety and an older woman’s love story. Or I can write something new, although I haven’t had that inspiration yet.

My perverse mind (No, not that kind of perverse!)

What is leading me to write? Not an awakening inspiration, as I am still struggling with the muse in my life. No, it’s something that happens to me whenever important work comes my way — I want to write again. If I have all the time in the world, my brain goes torpid and luxuriates in bed. If I have deadlines or appointments, my brain suddenly explodes with the desire to write.

I think it has to be the type of work where I’m involved with my 9-5. When I spent the first couple of weeks this summer working in the garden, I didn’t feel compelled to write. But now that I have internship visits this week, now I want to write.

How this works

There’s a lot of pressure to write when one’s a writer. If one’s a self-published and self-paced writer like myself, there seems like there would be less pressure to write, but the desire to soar is always there, and it plays against the rejections and setbacks of being a writer.

When all one has is the drive to write, unchecked by the rest of reality, the setbacks can loom big, and failure taunts in the silence. As part of a more complete, even a more pressured life, I think about writing the way others think about vacations. I daydream, and then I write.

Off to write.

This morning, I said to my husband, “I think I liked it better when grocery stores looked a little bit beat up.” Richard didn’t know what I was talking about, not unusual when talking to me. But I explained.

When I was young, grocery stores weren’t shiny. They had been renovated in the optimistic late 50s, weathered bravely through the Bay of Pigs invasion and Kennedy’s assassination, and visited by mothers with Green Stamp books at hand…

I stop here, and realize I’ve gotten old enough to reminisce.

The stores of my childhood seem foreign even to me now. The genteel and struggling drug store with its soda fountain, sitting across the street from a corporate store that would itself later struggle to survive. The cluttered dime store, where my sister and I spent too much money on fragrances in child-friendly lemon and lilac. The department store we meandered through, its subdued light stealing the color from the merchandise.

I reminisce, and maybe I didn’t like the world of my childhood after all, the one reflected by those stores. It was as if my community had given up when the post-war bounty faded. Maybe we hadn’t learned our lessons in small towns, nor were we immune to the edict that rules the world: “Change or Die”. We did not open our eyes to the world or touch the hands of people who came from different places than we did. We stayed uninfluenced by new ideas. Our stores reflected us.

I will look at that shiny store differently now, as I try the cafeteria’s latest concept (which may fail, as new things sometimes do) and walk down the aisles where people say hello and not everyone comes from the same place I do.

Postscript — My home still has problems despite this metaphor. Although we have a university with an appreciable international student population, Black peoples still face discrimination and harassment here. Things are not shiny, but there is a glimmer of hope.

The advice about understanding one’s writing market seems to be what’s screwing up m y identity as a writer.

My identity crisis started when a developmental editor told me I was writing romance. ‘Ok,’ I thought, ‘I guess that’s what I’m writing.’ But I wasn’t writing the same type of storylines as the romance writers around me wrote. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but my writing wasn’t as outrageous as theirs. No ultra-rich bosses, no reverse-harems, no bad boys saved from a lonely, incorrigible future, and no alpha wolf shapeshifters redeemed by the love of the pack’s reject. No space aliens of exceptional prowess. I will not disparage these, as these genres make buckets of money, and I do not.

The thing, though, is that those topics don’t speak to me. I write fantasy grounded in the real world, with a few variables tweaked. Sometimes there is a romantic subtext; in one case (Gaia’s Hands) the main story line is a relationship framed by unusual happenings and a personal vendetta against the protagonists. There is one commonality in my writing: The fantasy world hides in plain sight among the familiar. I don’t write escapist fantasy or romance.

Today I heard the phrase ‘literary romance’ as a contrast to ‘escapist romance’, and suddenly I felt like I had found a home. Literary romance, literary fantasy. Something to hold on to, something to be, after feeling totally out of place in (escapist) romance.

I have a writing market, and I have to learn the rules of the market, once I figure out if I actually belong there. Literary romance, literary fantasy. Now there’s the problem — I don’t know if my work truly fits there. I’m not sure it matters as much to me as it does to the writing markets. At least I hope not.

I guess I haven’t resolved my identity issues yet.

The gentle breezes call me …

I am 5 hours away from summer. My office hours (which I’m sitting in right now) are deathly quiet as students are taking exams or packing to leave. Some will graduate this week and find new lives. Others will return, and I will have a small portion of them in my classes. The cycle of my life, organized around the school year, turns again.

Then again

It turns out that my calendar has filled in, at least for tomorrow morning. One interview with the local news channel about Biden’s student loan initiative and my annual review with my boss. I took a break from writing this to answer the phone, which shattered my glorious plans for doing nothing tomorrow. Oh well, maybe I can eat a peaceful lunch today.

At the end of Spring Break, I think it’s to rest.

Tomorrow is the last day of Spring Break, with six weeks left till Summer and the calmer time of my life. When I look at it that way, the best use of my time is to rest. I look at Monday and think, “I’m not ready for the grind again.”

I’ve rested this whole week except for the day I thought I lost 3/4 of a manuscript. Luckily I found a backup that even had the corrections I had made. But that day made me cry, and I have done little work since then. I’ve written a couple times in the blog and rejected one blog post because of TMI. (And if you’ve been following, you might have noticed that it takes a lot for something to be TMI.)

My cats beg to differ.

Chloe (otherwise known as Itty Bitty Bitty Bitty Baby Baby Girl) doesn’t want me to work. She wants to use me as a piece of furniture as she stares chirps at the double monitors in the office. Girly-Girl (known as Squirrely Girl) is arguing out in the hallway, probably because Itty Bitty Bitty etc. has taken over the office. Me-Me (otherwise known as Me-Merz) is sitting near Richard with that Overly Attached Girlfriend look on her face. I’m not in the bedroom; I just KNOW. 320pooooooooooo0222222llllllllllllllllll.kkk.kq (Chloe said hi)

Ideas on the next book.

I have a next book. It’s taking shape on the outline. It involves Luke Dunstan, a 6000-year-old immortal Archetype, who finds that The Maker has taken away the Archetypes’ sole reason for existence away from them. Leah, a seventeen-year-old woman, sees visions of the oncoming civil war, and feels called to stop it despite the odds of surviving are against her. Leah feels torn between Luke, who sees her as the Avatar of the Maker, and the father of her child, Baird, a Nephilim.

I guess I have been busy this week.