Choices and discussions

After nearly two weeks away from the daily grind, I find myself rediscovering my morning routine. For instance, why do I drink so much tea on days that my daughter has school but have no desire for tea when she doesn’t?

Answer: It’s cold out there. By the time I get home from walking the neighborhood kids to school my legs burn with cold and my nose runs making tea warm and very delightful. Today it is 32 ounces of Traditional Medicinal Organic Rose Hips. 

The Northeast is anticipating a snow storm. I wouldn’t be surprised if my region gets a foot of snow tonight. Of course, storms being what they are I also wouldn’t be surprised if we get four inches. My neighbor has already informed his son that school will be canceled tomorrow. That’s a tad premature.

So, I have several options for the two hours before I head to work. Not including the obvious. I will need to eat a meal. As I enjoy my tea, I ponder… Do I reply to a recent email from my high school peer JM Cooper who is progressing with her MFA in YA? That is the most compelling option, but the email would require the answers to various “how are you” and “what are you writing?” questions. Not sure I know the proper response.

Do I continue reading Robert Root’s memoir Happenstance? I have a review of it due on January 20 for Hippocampus Magazine. I feel like I should remember this guy from my undergraduate career as an English major. The book has yet to excite or bore me. I’m in the vicinity of page 50. Thus far, he has approached his life as one might expect of a literary scholar. He examines family photos and interprets poems and letters written by family members. This technique leads me to believe he is looking for answers, or perhaps even order, to his life more so than setting out to tell a story.

In my little side foray as a book reviewer, I have discovered that I only enjoy memoirs that have some sort of larger message. Sheridan Vorsey’s Resurrection Year gave insight into the intersecting and conflicting emotions that come when Christians face infertility. Kylie Jones’ Lies My Mother Never Told Me resonated with me because 1. I’m a francophile 2. I’m an English major and her father is a famous novelist and 3. It addresses alcoholism and growing up as a child of an alcoholic (something I share). My all time favorite memoir is by Ted Morgan, a journalist conscripted by the French during the Algerian War. He combines the horror of war, the skills of a journalist and the everyday realities of love and sex. 

The final option for this morning is to work on my new novel. It’s connected to my Fashion and Fiends universe but features new characters. It occurs after my first manuscript in the series and overlaps the second, bridging the time gap to the third. I have chosen the youngest sister of Basilie Saint-Ebène d’Amille as my protagonist. Basilie is a main character in all of my Fashion and Fiends novels. The third manuscript is “her” book. 

But for now I turn to Jacqueline Saint-Ebène. Born in spring of 1968, eleven years after her eldest sister, Jacqueline became a doctor. An Ob/gyn to be exact. While she appreciates the complexity of the female reproductive system, especially as she has seen several of her older sisters struggle with pregnancy and fertility issues, Jacqueline quickly discovers that she doesn’t want to spend the next twenty or so years with her hands inside other women’s vaginas. Out of boredom and perhaps as an act of rebellion, she joined the Army Health Service. After an initial tour in Djibouti, she re-enlists for eight years. My story picks up with her when she’s serving a deployment in/near Algeria during the Algerian Civil War. She mysteriously receives transfer orders to Paris, where she will examine a pregnant veteran who served in the health corps in 1978. The orders seem strange and yet logical when her boyfriend, a health corps psychiatrist, joins the team and they are asked to investigate other veterans connected to a certain mission in 1978. One of them is Jacqueline’s brother-in-law, Étienne d’Amille. 

Which will I select?

Those little wow moments

I think I had a revelation this morning.

The last few months, heck maybe even the last year, have been full of excitement and challenges. These events leave me minimal time for anything. I've forgotten my hobbies. I have no idea how to do anything fun. I also have lost the art of deeper introspection.

Now that I have graduated, I still have excitement and changes, but my daughter is home from school for summer vacation so this forces me to slow down and do the housework I've neglected for eons. This also gives me time to think.

Today's nugget:
My husband and I have discussed for about 9 months now the possibility of me returning to full-time professional work. The ends haven't met in a long time, and the finances have reached the point now where the car payment comes out of the grocery budget every month. Or, shall I say, the car payment consumes the whole grocery budget. Earning this new degree was to facilitate potential career change and give me a chance to recover from life as it used to be.

That's simply put.

My daughter is older now. She was four when I returned to school. I needed a flexible work schedule when she was home, in half-day kindergarten and in the early days of her academic career.

I spent four years as a college student, while serving on boards and working part-time. I thought, when my daughter was young, that I would use that time to promote my writing to publishers, editors and agents. But I didn't. I did earn a bachelor's degree. Why did I spend so much time on a bachelor's degree? If I spent the same amount of effort on promoting myself, I probably would have built some sort of fledgling career by now.

Do I not want it? And the answer is...

I don't know. My behavior suggests that I have no interest in a career as a creative writer. I think that's because I don't like the uncertainty. I have spent too much time being poor. I don't like the life of a freelancer, especially tracking everything for my taxes. I don't like not knowing how much money will come in or when it will arrive.

Writing has always given me solace and comfort. Maybe by trying to sell it, I'm sacrificing the element of my writing that provided me with escape and comfort and replacing it with the stress of using something I love with so very much of my soul as the means of my survival. That's ALWAYS why I resist the life of being a writer first.

Part of me also needs to be more than a writer. What makes writing so fun and interesting to me is that I can use what I learn and share it with other people. I can learn about haute couture or dance moves or even political circumstances and pull other people into that universe.

I want a master's degree some day and I know I could get into several MFA programs without an issue, but I resist. Instead I dream of a master's in international journalism, or international development, or foreign service... But then when I contemplate my Ph.D. I dream of history and Johns Hopkins because of my interest in post colonial Algeria-France relations.

And the MFA is on the list. It's just not the top of the list. Weird for a writer, isn't it?

Right now, I want to feed the family. I want to grow as a person. I want to do good. I want to help make a better world.

Fiction will remain my stress relief.

I need to see what I can do in this world, before I can help my fictional people make their mark.

The Question

For writers, and people with anxiety, ideas tend to swirl in their minds. I'm used to ideas floating about in my mind and getting mashed and formed. I'm used to scenarios and what if questions.

I finished a cold reread of my manuscript, Manipulations, last week. I even transferred it to iBooks so my husband can read it and make comments.

I have to recommit to the writing game. Either pitching my fiction to agents or pursuing some nonfiction opportunities or both.

When I interviewed for Cedar Crest College's Pan European MFA in Creative Writing, we talked about portfolio building and the administrator said something very succinctly that hit home: what kind of writing do you want to do?

The fiction answer is easy. But I realized in an instant that I have not found a sustainable voice for nonfiction. Sure, with 15 years in journalism under my belt, I can write anything at any time. But it has no soul, no enduring message. It's a glimpse of a moment that I may or may not have witnessed.

I still don't know if I'll apply to the program. I want to, because it's time I took my words as seriously as I take my history or my economics.

But the next few months, barring the necessities of school and life, I will write something every day. And explore my voice and the different things I can do.

Last night, I finally started a non-fiction piece on my recent travels to Tunisia and I edited my Jimi Hendrix bio review. I had a paragraph in my head that I thought would open the Tunisia piece but something else came out.

In about an hour, I wrote 2,000 words.

Renewal

I can't technically say that I haven't written, because in the last five weeks I have written two academic book reviews and two oral presentations-- one of the status of revolutions in the Middle East and another on the future monetary policy and goals of Her Majesty's Treasury in the United Kingdom.

But my enthusiasm for my fiction has withered. (it happens)

And I never got around to organizing my notes from my recent voyage into a travel essay on France/Tunisia.

I blame dental surgery. I lost five weeks of my life to an implant that got infected and had to be un-implanted.

And now I'm dreaming of my fiction, of creative non-fiction, and a potential MFA.

Last night something happened. A friend who is part of the Hippocampus Magazine community asked for reviewers of juicy non-fiction. I suggested Ted Morgan's My Battle of Algiers and the new book on Steve Jobs (which is not juicy in my opinion). She encouraged me.

Then I studied the publication and noticed they have a rock and roll issue coming up. I went to the library and found a biography of Jimi Hendrix.

And despite homework about the long term effect of monetary policy on the money market and the exchange rate, I found myself typing about Ted Morgan.

I loved his book and I think a lot of other people will too. And I suddenly remembered how much I should be writing-- that I love writing-- that I am a writer and it makes me happy.