Going Back to School

TL;DR - nerves about grad school, work, life, grief, illness, and writing

Tomorrow I start back to Grad School with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign online LEEP program working towards a Masters of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree after taking a year off. I'm only taking one class called, "Community Engagement" and I'm really looking forward to it.

But I'm also nervous. Not nervous like I was when I started since I'd been out of school for several years and it was my first time doing any Graduate classes. But nervous that my concentration / focus isn't what it was due to my grief about Joy being killed, my two cats dying, and other life concerns like Kess having cancer and Bek breaking her humorous, though not her humor, making me feel more fragile than I know myself to be. I've also found, with the help of therapy, that I am mourning my mom since when she died, the family was consumed with making sure Joy was taken care of and I never really mourned her at that time.

This mourning, grief, and worry has stolen my focus, my sleep, given me nightmares, and taken my occasional migraines into the realm of chronic migraines. Don't get me wrong, I am ever so grateful and delighted that my bestie and my sister have both recovered. I am blessed that my job and my school have been so understanding of my circumstances. And I feel ever so loved by family and friends. But I still am grieving and I feel guilty for it going so long since I am just a bystander in all of this - it was not my body being crushed, having cancer, breaking, dying... Then, on top of that, I feel bad for feeling guilty because there is no timeline on grief. It's a vicious cycle of grief and guilt. (And yes, I'm in therapy. My therapist is awesome and helping me through this.) My other concern is that I know I need to make time to write even with work and animal care and grad school. My writing has been vital for me staying above the waters of deepest depression that I nearly died in a few years after Joy's rafting accident. I cannot and will not slide into those waters.

I had hoped to get my room rearranged and cleaned before my class started. But I have been sick and the migraines have kicked up a notch (which happens when all three of my main triggers - stress, hormones, and weather shift - hit me at the same time, especially when I'm sick) so my free time, including the weekend I had off, has been spent in bed. I'm trying to be okay with that. SELF-CARE is my mantra. I also keep reminding myself that yes, I am more than halfway through the MLIS program, I have all 'A's, and, when I started, I was working 2 jobs and taking double the course load, so I can do this.

I CAN DO THIS

I WILL DO THIS

*breathe*

A Look Back on Writing in 2019 & 2020 Goals for Writing

Even though 2019 was a rough year, one thing I did really well was making sure I had time to write and I wrote. I did not write every day, but I definitely wrote several times every week. I had been trying that "treat it as a job" approach for over a year, but it wasn't working for me. It sucked all the passion out of writing and I felt guilty if I didn't write during the times I had set aside due to a migraine or whatever. So I decided to try the "I Will Write Every Week" approach. Basically, writing became my place to relax and unwind. I was still writing down times to write in my planner, but it wasn't a, "YOU MUST DO THIS OR YOU FAIL AS A WRITER" type mentality. It was more, "hey, look at all this time you have to write! I know there's a lot going on, but once you get done with the stuff you HAVE to do, look at this fun thing you GET to do." Just a shift in perception and it made all the difference. It also helped that I had/have my writing groups and open mics as deadlines keeping me accountable. This is what I succeeded at this past year:

• Wrote every week
• Wrote every day for November & surpassed the 50,000 word mark for NaNoWriMo
• Sent out one Short Story (It got rejected, but with some pointers on how to fix the story so I'm seeing that as a win)
• Set up and started a Grief Journaling Workshop at the Library
• Continued with the Writers' Word Feast
• Visited an open mic I wasn't running
• Ran The No Shush Salon open mic
• Finished my memoir & gathered readers

Here are my writing goals for 2020:

• Send my memoir to my readers (Edit: DONE)
• Continue writing every week
• Send out writing for publication at least once a month
• Visit other (not run by me) writing groups
• Visit other (not run by me) open mics
• After getting back feedback from readers about my memoir (March 1), Edit it
• Figure out what direction I want to go with my memoir & go there

Nanowrimo 2017

Long time no write!

I have been consumed by work and school and not writing enough.  BUT I did have a story published in August called, "The Photo Essay On the Human Race" through thewifiles.com

This short story is the basis of the novel I'm working on for Nanowrimo. I started at midnight and wrote for half an hour - 296 words so far & I'm writing with my Writers' Word Feast group to keep this writing going.

Here is the title:

Title: On the Preservation and Development of Relations between Earthanoid Inhabitants and Incognito Visiting Intergalactic Students Living Amongst Them, an Academic Perspective

Subtitle: How We Never Arrived to Earth

Synopsis: After the disaster at the Intergalactic Photographers’ Convention, Henrietta, Ga, Peeve, and Ted travel to Earth in Ga's incredibly, and somewhat eerily, comfortable spaceship. They don't get there. But on the way, they find asteroids that eat stars, spaceships from a thousand years ago, and the happiest dragon in the universe. They also stumble into a war between robot guilds and inadvertently destroy a couple of planets. Plus, they go to Space Court.

Thinking Writerly Thoughts

Check out this article: Gettin by with a little help from our writer friends

Also, I need to post more... but today, I've got nothin'.

Writing Woes & NaNoWriMo

I have three novels and lots of short stories to work on, but my head and my heart hasn't really been in my writing these last several months. I know part of it is because I have a lot going on - a promotion, two jobs, working on two HUGE events along with my regular ones, housemates moving out, a pretty steady flow of foster kittens, getting ready to launch cemeteryguardians.com for it's second year, and just the regular business of living. But also, I've been feeling a draw to work on my nonfiction... to tell the story of my life... to write about my sisters... a memoir about my family... to write about Joy's brain injury... to write about how that one event completely changed my family. This is something I have been trying to write for twenty years, ever since her accident first happened. But almost three years ago my mother died and she has always been my best fact checker whenever I've written about our lives. Also, writing about something so true and personal is really hard and draining. I fear using what my family has gone through for my writing. I worry about not being true to what happened. Memory is faulty, and I have a brain that likes to embellish and fictionalize. I know that writing is cathartic, but I fear that sharing my life with strangers will not be fair to the people who share my life.

About seven months after my mom died, H is for Hawk came out. This memoir by Helen Macdonald was about her father dying suddenly, something I related to on a very personal level. But it was also about how she threw herself into training her hawk and secluded herself from the rest of the world. This experience is very different from mine, though I do tend to throw myself into whatever I'm doing, I've never had the luxury of time or money to step away from my life. But the emotion, or attempts to side-step emotion, in the story were very familiar. It helped me. It also made me think that if my writing could possibly help someone else, I should write my story.

So my plan is that in November, I will work on my memoir for NaNoWriMo. Over the first week of November, I am visiting one of my dearest friends in Rode Island and since she is an amazing author, I'm certain we will have time to write. I don't know if it will stay a memoir, and that's okay. All I know is that I need to write my life.

February 2015 - Writing Check-in & a New Motto

Writing this month has gone much slower than I had hoped. It's all due to adjusting to the new job, a dog/housesitting gig and getting sick. But I have two stories and a poem pending acceptance and I've made a bit of headway on the Peculiar Predicament of Poppets novel. It's heading in a strange direction and might end up with a poem attached to it after all. (Since it began its life as a poem, this delights me.)

I've also decided to treat my writing time as if I'm on a date with Writing, a very alluring lover. This is different than my treat-it-as-a-job approach which I'm also still doing. But it is interesting. One major difference: If I look something up then get distracted by something else that might relate to what I'm working on, I feel guilty about wandering away from Writing whereas when it was more of a job thing, I felt defensive about NEEDING to do whatever it was for my job. It's all about perspective, right?

Maybe my new writing motto should be, 

"schedule writing like a job, honor Writing like a lover."

My 2015 Writing Goals

I'm starting strong with a new job at a second library.
Hey j9, let's keep this trend of goal achieving going into this New Year!

• Polish the 10 Short Stories I already finished and send them off.
• It's just January & I've already sent off four stories!!! Yay!
• One was rejected, but it's already out to another publication.
• TWO have homes!!! (Details TBA)

• Edit the 10 stories that need major rewrites & send them off.

• Finish & send out the rest of my Yultide stories / doodles (This is what I did for gifties this year. I got my immediate family and a few friend's done, but so many left to do. Should I change the name to Springtime Stories if it takes me too long?)

• Finish the background work for the e-zine I'm putting together by May, go live with it by August.

• Sort through my Yuletide stories, my Tiny Terrible Tales & my Drabble Dreams & pull the ones that I want to grow (This is a Summer goal.)

• Finish rewriting The Peculiar Predicament of Poppets  (PPP) as a novel. (This story has been a poem, switched POV countless times and just keeps growing.) 

• Self-publish PPP by November. 

• Work on the Innosphere (This is the new title of the novel I wrote & got feedback on. It's changed A LOT... for the better... I hope!)

• Pull together my short story collections. 

• Decide which ones need a publisher & which are to be self-published.

It's gonna be a lot of work, but I'm excited about this new year!

Scheduling Time to Write

A dear friend of mine advised that I should treat my writing like a job since that's what I want it to be. (Dress for the life you want? Something like that....) This is EXCELLENT advice! Unfortunately, I suck at taking it. Part of the problem is that one of my paying jobs doesn't have a set schedule so it's difficult to set aside time for my non-paying job. Difficult, but not impossible. Since I rarely have evening visits on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I'm setting aside those times for my writings. I am also taking Sunday off (what's this? An entire day off? Well... sort of.) as long as I don't have a house-sittings.

I'm running an Open Mic the last Thursday of the month (or second to last for Holiday Months) at the Clarendon Hills Library.

I started a new fiction blog which my fictional character Lyra updates weekly. (So far, I've stuck with that one faithfully!)
All About the Spine

Deadlines, Accountability & How Social Networking has Helped Me with My Writing

I tend to write better when up against a deadline. It's something I've been trying to fight (and failing) for several years now. Finally, with mounting evidence that I'd get stuff done for school 'cause I HAD to or for a project where others were counting on me, I gave in to this being a part of my nature as a writer.
I started giving myself arbitrary deadlines. I would even research deadline schedules of places where I wanted to submit my work and use that as my deadline. This helped... a little. But it didn't quite do the trick. If I was coming up to a self-imposed deadline and I wasn't done or didn't FEEL like working on the piece, I would simply move the deadline. After all, it was just me, right?

But that was the problem. By themselves, the deadlines were too malleable.

So I looked at the other factor that played into me getting collaborative projects or school work done. ACCOUNTABILITY... A small part of me crossed her arms, pushed out her bottom lip and stomped her wee foot. (It was a little part of me.) She screeched about how NOBODY should have to check in on her 'cause she's an adult, dammit! (Funny how the side of me that claims adulthood with such defiance, is the very side that throws a childish temper tantrum.) A quieter voice asked, but who would want the burden of being accountable for our deadlines? This was a conundrum...

I had / have no desire to be a burden on anyone. But then I thought about the ways I could spread the accountability. It isn't about someone hounding me, but about me believing that my failing to finish affects more than myself.

Here are the places where I am accountable along with a few that I'd like to use:

• A Writers Group would be good, but I'm between groups right now. (I have an open invitation to a newish one, but it meets at a really bad time for me.) I LOVED when I was part of the Chicago Writers' Coven!!! Perhaps I'll gather a faction of that and get it started again. 

•  Open Mics kick my booty into getting things to a sharable place! I attend two pretty regularly: 

• Top Shelf Books Open Mic - meets on the second Thursday of the month  
• The Tamale Hut Cafe Reading Series - meets the third Saturday of the month

Even though they each have their issues, Top Shelf is far and the Tamale Hut isn't at an optimal time work-wise for me, since they meet once a month it usually works out. (There are a few others that I'd like to attend, but they are far AND at not so great times for me. I can rarely do that combination. Oh well... I do what I can.)

• Then there's Facebook... I've found that it helps if I post my writing plans. I've been advised that a Twitter account can have a similar effect. (I'm holding off on getting one of those for when I'm less dependent on the hours of the Libraries and the availability of their computers.) When I post about my plans, I get lots of encouragement and friends who are eager to see how my writing is going. 

• This blog is to be another accountability tool. In my sidebar, I've listed the writing I'm currently working on and what my deadline is. I plan to keep this list current and to add where I'm submitting as well.

•  The final accountability for me is teaching. I've just recently started doing workshops again and I get so much out of them! I'm going to work on doing more.