Four Months, One Week

According to google maps, a straight shot from the town where I live now to Seattle, WA is 2,752 miles, and if it were to be driven nonstop, it could be done in just under two days.  We will not be driving nonstop.  We will also not be making a straight shot.

We will first go south a little, to revisit the campus where I went to college, and see a couple friends and family members who will be staying on the East Coast as we move to the West.  Adding those destinations gives us a total of 3,359 miles and a total driving time of two days and six hours.

We could, in theory, alter the route again and stop through Missouri to visit family.  That would put us at a total of 3,454 miles and a total driving time of two days and eight hours.  We could also, in theory, go north from there and visit family in Montana while we’re at it.  This would give us a total mileage of 3,504 and a total driving time of two days and nine hours.

Gas will probably average 5 dollars a gallon in August.  We can get about 350 highway miles out of my car on a tank of gas (about ten gallons), and if we round the mileage down to 3,500 that makes ten tanks of gas, which makes a hundred gallons of gas, which means $500 in gas money alone.

Now, if we drive on two tanks of gas per day, it will take us five days to cross the country.  That’s 700 miles and 10-12 hours of just driving every day.  Keeping in mind that we will be stopping occasionally to visit with people and eat food and stretch our legs, I don’t think 10-12 hours of just driving is reasonable.  So, let’s say we average 8 hours of just driving every day, and let’s say we average 60 miles an hour for the entire trip (at some points, we’ll be doing 70 and at other points, we’ll be doing 25).  3,500 miles divided by 60 miles an hour equals a little less than 59 total driving hours.  59 total driving hours divided by 8 hours a day gives us about 7 and a half days of driving.  That means we’d need seven nights of hotels.  Let’s say we book in advance and find some nice, cheap places for $60 a night.  $60 a night times seven nights is $420.

So, given the longest possible route with all the possible stops, we’re looking at a road trip that could potentially take us over a week to complete, would cost about $500 in gas money, and $420 for hotels.  Not including food and tolls, we’re already looking at $920 total to drive across the country.  (This is without renting a trailer or a moving truck or anything like that.)

If we go back to that initial minimum stoppage trip, with just the one side trip at the beginning that I refuse to compromise, where it’s only 3,359 miles, here’s what we’re looking at:  350 miles costs about $50, so 3,359 miles costs about $480.  Two days and six hours of driving time divided by eight hours a day makes six days and three quarters of a day.  That means, we’d only need six hotels, which, at $60 a night, would cost $360.  So, the total for the shorter drive would be $840.

So, the shorter trip, with fewer stops to visit family along the way saves us a day of travel and about a hundred dollars.  I’m not sure that a hundred dollars makes so much of a difference in this case, since we’re still pretty close to a thousand (plus it’s worth it if we get to visit with people we haven’t seen in forever), but I like the idea of being done within a week.  We could also spend more time driving in a day, and that would cut the trip down.

I’ll have to think about this some more…

Four Months, Two Weeks

This week, I thought I would start by setting up a timeline of when I’m going to get what done in preparation for this cross-country move.  I have several distinct advantages about this move:  I know it’s coming, I know when it’s going to happen, and there are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it – it’s happening.

So, four months before moving day, I’m not too worried about logistical details, but I am going to research potential driving routes and see what kinds of places there are to stop along the way (because I will go crazy if I have to spend more than five hours straight inside a car, and if I go crazy, I will take my husband with me).  I am also not worried about job applications, because I’m not even going to be available for face to face interviews for four months, but I have already done research into job openings and what types of business there is out there, and I’ve been stretching myself mentally and trying to imagine myself doing various types of jobs outside those I’ve always considered myself good at.  The idea is that by the time I am applying for things, there will be so many things to apply to that the rules of statistics will require that someone hire me.

Three months from moving day, the goodbye party will be planned, and the final route to the West Coast will be decided on.

Two months from moving day, the intensive job hunt will begin.  Also, the cleaning stage of the packing will begin and we’ll get rid of all the extra stuff that is definitely not coming with us, and then we’ll pack up all the things we won’t need for a while but are still taking with us (winter clothes, etc.).

One month from moving day, hotel reservations will be made for the trip based on the route we decided on before, packing will commence in full, and we will spend no small time making minor touch-ups and repairs to the apartment we’ve been renting in Northern Virginia.  Also, there will be the National Latin Convention.

And then we’ll move.  And I will get to see the United States of America from one coast to the other through the window of my car.

I Punched a Deer in the Face

Anyone who’s read the Twilight series is familiar with the line “I punched a werewolf in the face.”  Well, I punched a 2,000 lb deer in the face.  With the side view mirror of my car.  (Deer:  1, Side view mirror:  0)

I had just left home to go to work and was driving on this fairly busy main road (of course, at 4:50 in the morning, there is no such thing as a busy any kind of road, but there are NEVER deer on this road), about two miles from home.  All of a sudden, out of the darkness, less than six inches away from my face, there’s a deer looking down at me through the driver side window with an extremely peeved expression.  (He was big enough to be at eye level with or taller than me when I was sitting in my car and I think I saw 4 or 5 points on the one antler.)  I was in the right lane and the deer was standing or walking through the left lane.  His antlers got caught in my side view mirror and ripped the mirror away from the car.

I’d like to say that I played it totally cool, pulled over and hauled the deer’s carcass off the road for the carrion birds to eat, because my car is that awesome and no 2,000 lb deer is going to do damage without taking damage.  But I would by lying.

I screamed, swerved, pulled over, and called my husband in hysterics.  I did not get out of the car until he got there.  When he did get there, we looked around, but the deer was nowhere to be seen.  A police officer saw our cars with our hazard lights on, and pulled over to make sure everyone was okay.  He gave me a case number for the insurance company so if it’s super expensive to fix they’ll pay for it.

Did I go home then?  Did I decide that this traumatic experience was enough to send me packing?  I mean, if the timing of this had been different by milliseconds, his antlers would have gone through my window, or my car would have smacked him full on and who knows what the repercussions could have been.

I did not go home.  I thought about it, but I had already planned to be off the next day, Friday, for a doctor’s appointment and to drive my husband to the airport for a week long vacation visiting his family on the other side of the continent.  I hadn’t prepared any of my sub plans for Friday, and I didn’t have any back up plans for Thursday.  So, I switched cars with my husband and went to work.

And almost hit a second deer about ten minutes later.  This was on a road where I knew there were deer occasionally, so I was looking for it.  She was a doe, and she was standing on the side of the road and looking both ways before she crossed – just like any sensible woman would do.

The rest of my day followed suit.  I won’t waste your time with details, but I will say this:  in a perfect world, I would have a full planning period that is never taken up with travel between schools or dealing with nit-wits, and in the afternoon, my classroom would become my sanctuary where I would never be disturbed until all the work I needed to get done was complete.  Oh, and I would actually leave work before 6:30pm.  Did I mention that I got to work at 5:45am?  Yeah.  That was almost a 13-hour work day, not counting the commute, never mind the deer.

Somehow, at the end of all this, I haven’t felt the need for an emotional breakdown, which is what I would have expected of myself.  I did the hysterics thing when the deer accident happened, but I was fine the rest of the day.  I kept telling everyone I had punched a 2,000 lb deer in the face and I think that helped a lot (consider “I was nearly impaled by a 2,000 lb deer” versus “I punched a 2,000 lb deer in the face”).  My students loved hearing the story about the encounter.  It was terrifying in the moment, and I keep thinking about how much worse it could have been and feeling so endlessly grateful that it was what it was and nothing more.  But that’s what life is all about – being grateful for what you have and moving forward with whatever that may be.

So, when life throws you a metaphorical 2,000 lb deer, don’t let it knock you down.  Punch it in the face, be grateful, and move on.  It works for me.

Patience is an Author’s Best Friend

Writing is not a profession of instant-gratification or even monthly-gratification or even yearly-gratification.  Writing is a profession of patience.  You have to be willing to wait, to work every day with little or nothing to show for it.  You don’t get to see your fans screaming at you from the mosh pit while you perform on stage.  If they’re anywhere out there in the darkness beyond the spotlight, they’re curled up on the floor with your book in their laps, reading.  You, author, don’t get to see your fans at all, unless you spend some time on twitter, Facebook, MySpace, the blogging arena, and everywhere else on the internet.  Even then, you don’t have time to catch up with fans.  You’re an author.  You have to spend every moment you can spare working on that manuscript.

There are things like writing conferences where you can go and meet other authors and people who love to read and who love books.  If you make it to mid-list, you might be invited to speak at a local school or something…but that’s about it.

No career is for the faint of heart, and writing is no exception.  You may love writing, but you won’t love what you’re writing every day you write it.  You work at it every day anyway, not knowing for sure how your readers are going to react.  Maybe you find a writing group of people you trust to share your work with, and that gives you some companionship and criticism to work with.  You do this for a year, and then your agent tells to fix it.  You work on it with the agent for a few months, and then your agent find a publisher and the publisher’s editor tells you to fix it.  You work on it with the editor for a few months, and then the publisher begins the sluggish process of putting it in print.  You won’t hear anything else about it after that.  The world has it.  The world is reading it.  Reading is a silent activity, most of the time.

There will be no screaming mosh pits for you, author.  Just another day in front of your laptop, typing patiently on the next silent concert while your fans gather in the darkness beyond your spotlight and read.

Writing As a Career – the First Steps

This week is my first week back teaching and you’d think that the reason they have the teachers come back a week earlier than the students is so that we can prepare for the students, but really it’s so that they can take up all our time with meetings and not give us any time to prepare anything.  At least, that’s what it feels like this close to “zero hour”.

Anyway, I decided to make this week’s post simple.  Here is a list of things I did when I decided that I wanted to make writing my next career:

1. Decide to treat writing like a career (if I was willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on my bachelors degree in classics, I should also be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on conferences, books, etc. to further my career in writing)
2. Read books about how to write (do the suggested writing exercises, and practice)
3. Read books that are similar to your manuscript (don’t steal, be creative, come up with new twists/ideas)
4. Join a writer’s association (it’s expensive, but it’s worth it, even if all you get out of it is the ability to say you belong to one)
5. Go to a writer conference (it’s expensive, but it’s worth it, especially if you meet an agent)
6. Join a writing circle (and attend!  Get feedback.  Give feedback.  Be brutally honest and learn how to gracefully accept the brutal honesty of others.)
7. WRITE! (start typing.  Now.)

Writing Update

Writing?  What about it?  Oh!  That’s right.  I started this blog partly to post updates about my writing to the world at large.  I remember!  Huh.  Funny how tangents can sneak in sideways like that.

Anyhoo, I have several pieces of very exciting writing news, which I will now list for your viewing pleasure:

1. I now have a regular column called “Educational Resource Review” (obviously, I’m reviewing books and other tools for educational purposes) in a bi-monthly newspaper called “Unification News”.  My first regular article was published in the issue that came out this month.  (and they want two more 700-1000 word articles in two weeks and I have not yet started either one, not for lack of advance notice-procrastination and I are having a good time getting caught up.  It’s been a while.)
2. I have bought myself a place at the American Independent Writers Annual Writing Conference, which will be all day Saturday June 12.  (http://www.amerindywriters.org/home/events/)  I also paid the extra fee for the agent breakfast and am crossing my fingers that I will get lucky.
3. I am working relatively diligently on my latest story project (once called Angel Savior now called Lumen) which is a supernatural realism story about a college student who finds out that she is the last remaining heir to this magic sword that turns carnufex (demon things) into praesides (angel things) and deals with questions about God and Faith/Religion, and all kinds of fun stuff like that.  (I am also relatively diligently working up a really thick skin in anticipation of various reactions.)
4. Assuming my outline for Lumen does not change (again), and assuming I can keep up the pace of writing an average of one chapter (about 2,000 words) a day, then I will be able to finish the first draft in time for the writer’s conference and bring a digital copy or two with me just in case.  I am also planning on bringing some digital copies of my first masterpiece, Through The Curtain, which is an epic fantasy adventure for teens and could theoretically involve sequels and prequels if I ever felt so inclined.  Come to think of it, I’ll probably just pile a bunch of finished pieces onto a few “portfolio discs” and bring those.
5. I have about a hundred business cards with the wrong phone number on them and am debating the idea of writing in the new phone number versus just getting new ones with the right phone number, but I have a month to think about it so we’ll see where it goes and if procrastination continues to get the better of me.

So, all in all, I am bouncing up and down on the inside and daydreaming almost constantly about the “perfect encounter” with the “perfect agent” who thinks I’m completely brilliant and wants to represent all of my work for the rest of time and consequently helps me make billions of dollars, most of which I would give away to charity and then live a quiet, humble life while raising my future children into beautiful human beings who do things with their lives to make the world a better place.  And then I give myself a good strong pinch and drag myself at least halfway down to reality and remind myself that first I have to finish the manuscript.

Getting Lost in Writing and Vice Versa

I was talking with a friend the other day about philosophy and the meaning of life and explained that the reason I decided not to major in philosophy (and the reason that I do not allow myself to study it at all) is that I am afraid I would get lost in it and never come back and never be able to fully function in reality.  I’m the same way about art as well.  Latin, on the other hand, is something I enjoy and I can get lost in, but I can always come back whenever I need/want to.  Reading is harder to come back from, but the book always ends eventually anyway, which means that I will have to come back no matter what, so I don’t mind that pleasure either.

When I considered my relationship with Writing, I came to a conundrum:  I’m not sure whether it’s me who’s lost in my writing or if it’s my writing that’s lost in me.  I can sit down with a computer, or with pen and paper, or with the notepad feature on my cell phone, or even just the inside of my own head and compose any amount of writing and be completely lost in it.  When the inspiration passes, I come back to reality and am no longer lost in my writing.  However, I also often notice myself narrating my life and the lives of those around me without really thinking about it – as if I suddenly realized the pattern of my own breathing or the sound of my own heartbeat.  It’s constantly in the background, rasping and drumming as the bass-line of my existence.

So far, I have come up with two possible answers.  One is that I am already so overly consumed with writing (and always have been since I first understood the concept of storytelling) that I am already completely lost in it and will never come back (though, clearly, I can still function in reality quite well).  The second possible answer is that while I can get myself lost in my writing sometimes, my writing can also get itself lost in me.

That idea makes me wonder about existence in general and what would it be like to be just a character in someone’s book, at the mercy of some anonymous god I had never met but who controlled every aspect of my life?  How much free will do we as authors really give our characters and how much of that free will do those characters really accept and exercise (if they are truly capable of it at all)?  I am a big believer in developing your characters and allowing them to drive the plot and the story along as much as possible, and refraining from “divine intervention” whenever you can, but I wonder sometimes how much of that is illusion and how much of it isn’t.

Rejection, Writing, and Breathing

The hardest thing about what we do, be it writing or working or dealing with family, is continuing forward through defeat and rejection.  I received two more rejection notices this week, one of which was printed on pink paper and came to me with my query letter returned in the SASE I had sent.  It told me two things:  (one) this agency rejects a lot of queries, and (two) these people are traditional as well as professional.  For whatever reason, I find it easier to absorb emailed rejections that are addressed personally to me, even if it’s the same three sentences they email to every other rejected author.  To me, personalizing the rejection makes it less about me and more about the manuscript, but the photocopied pink slip made it about me.  I always knew I was weird.  This is just one new weirdness to add to the list.

Because of this and because I lost my cell phone on Tuesday and because the high school students I teach can sometimes be jerks, this has been a low week.  When I feel low I don’t feel like writing, so I don’t often write when I feel low.  However, if I don’t write for a while I eventually find myself composing prose while sitting at a stop light on my way into work, or freestyling some mental poetry as I head toward the bathroom.  I find that for me, to write is to breathe, and to breathe is to write.  I have never been satisfied with my attempts to express what it’s like to be this way.  Every thought I have is a word or a phrase or a sentence in my mind.  Sometimes I rethink the same idea several times over, rewording it in as many ways as possible, just for fun.

Even if I remain forever a rejected would-be published author, I will always have things to write.  For now, I’ll sit back and relax on the literary agent thing.  There are still a number of them that I have not heard from yet, so it’s possible that someone somewhere will want to publish the manuscript I’m currently querying.  If nobody wants this manuscript, then I will officially back-burner it and work on something else.